My Life As A Hobby

  When I’m seeing a new doctor for the first time, which is occurring with increasing frequency nowadays, during the initial Q&A they always ask me if I smoke. And I always answer,”Not unless I’m on fire.”   Even though that’s a response you would expect from a certified smart alec like myself, it’s the truth.  However, if you were to press me further, I would admit that for a  period of time I was a smoker - even if it it was between the ages of 11 and 13.  Dennis, one of my running buddies at the time, decided that to be cool, we should be smoking. Of course, I had already been puffing on candy cigarettes for a several years, so this was an easy transition. And back in the mid sixties, real smokes were about as easy to get as the candy ones. Here how it worked: we walked into the lobby of a nearby cheap motel, put two quarters in a machine, used both hands to pull a lever, and walked out with a pack of Marlboros, or Winstons, or Lucky Strikes, or whatever we saw the older

It seems that I spend about half of my time on the computer deleting spam. Clearing spam is a lot like shaving. If you don’t do it every day, you are going to be overcome with a growth that is much more difficult to deal with.  I’ve noticed that as I’ve aged, the spam I get has changed. Several years ago, every piece of junk e mail I received seemed to be about a new miracle product for hair loss. Then a few years later, I was besieged with offers for cheap Viagra from Canada. Fast forward to today, and a lot of the spam is from some nice people who want to help me with my final burial expenses. Spam has always been with us in one form or another. If you read comic books like I did when I was a kid, you were exposed to a version of it. Back then, comics had pages of ads hawking all kind of ridiculous products. This was spam from another era. As I thought about this, curiosity got the best of me and I pulled a 60 year old Spider Man comic out of my closet, and begin flipping the p

  My wife gave recently gave me an unusual gift for our anniversary. A bag hammock.  Why she thought an old guy like me needed one of these, I’m not sure. I think it’s another one of her plans to keep me out of the house as much as possible.   Bag hammocks are quite popular with campers. It isn’t one of those giant numbers that fits on a metal frame; instead, it’s thin,strong material that is stuffed in a tiny bag along with two nylon ropes which attach to a couple of trees. This means that to use this device, I will need to be in the back yard, far away from our home. Now do you understand what she’s trying to do?  Of course, I had no intention of even trying to use this thing until it cooled off.  Look, fending off mosquitoes and the fear of being pelted by bird poop is bad enough - I didn’t need to add searing heat to my  hammock experience.  So last week, with the heat of Alabama summer beginning to give way to moderate autumn temperatures, I decided it was time to hang from

  I’ll tell you one thing I don’t see much of anymore - kids playing army. Wait - maybe I should change that statement to, “I don’t see kids playing army outside anymore.” If you want to see kids playing army now ,you’ll have to look in their bedroom where they are probably playing “Call Of Duty”, a very popular military video game. To be honest, I’ve seen the game, and it is quite realistic. From the explosions, the weapons, to the dead folks, to the bombed-out houses, it does make quite an impression.  But the sad thing is that the children’s interaction is limited to exercising their fingers and looking at a video screen - indoors. There are no toy plastic rifles, plastic helmets, canteens, or fake hand grenades like we used, because we played army outside.  Of course, the fact of the matter is that most of us began playing army indoors.  When I was about 5 years old, it involved hundreds of those little molded green army men. You could get a whole bag of them in Woolworth’s for

  A week or so ago I went to a local bar and ordered a shot of whiskey. Once the bartender sat it in front of me, I thoughtfully stared into the glass, swirled the brown liquid, raised my glass to the sky, and toasted a lost friend.   Predictably, my thoughts drifted back to a few weeks ago when I finally got the phone call that I knew was coming. I had been expecting it - but it still came like a thunderbolt. Frazier, a good friend of 45 years, finally succumbed to Parkinson’s disease after a long year fight.   In the course of my life, I have had very few people who were business associates that became personal friends. Frazier was one of them. I first met him in a grocery store. Both of us were kids not long out of college. He was in charge of stocking the non-food items in a number of grocery stores in the Birmingham area. My job back then was insure that my company’s products were in every grocery store in Alabama, so naturally someone like Frazier could be of help to me. Almo