Smell Ya Later

March 18, 2025March 18, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

Although pant fit may be a reliable indicator that you’ve gained weight, I prefer a more holistic gauge of body mass, specifically snugness in the crawl space. I don’t go in the crawl space often, but when I do I nearly always leave with mixed feelings–I’m happy to make it out alive but I’m also depressed because the fit seems to be getting tighter with every passing year. If I ever go weeks without writing, check the crawl space–I may have gotten stuck. I wouldn’t be the first lifeform to come to a final resting place under our house. There is the dead possum skeleton near the northern most vent duct that is well on its way to being fossilized at this point. I encounter it every time I try to crawl to the territory under the far room, which is an effort in futility because the space underneath the far room tapers to a mere sliver.

Out of desperation, I sometimes attempt an exploratory crawl, in the hopes of finding an undiscovered passage to the hinterlands, to retrieve the carcass of whatever varmint has died there. We now have a brick underpinning that keeps most critters out but every few years a woodland creature will choose a plot under our far room as its final resting place. I can’t really blame them–I can’t imagine a more secluded spot–in the last 100 years, there has been less human activity under the far room than there has been on the surface of the moon.

Speaking of the moon, it would have been nice to have a space suit while I was crawling through the crawl space yesterday. Indeed, every few years, we have to go to war with the local skunk herd to reclaim our territory, and this was one of those years. Earlier in the spring, Natalie deployed moth balls, dish soap, and strange concoctions of essential oils and herbs–basically rudimentary witchcraft–to keep the skunks at bay until I could trap them and dispose of them. Unfortunately, one of the skunks breached our defenses, found a loose brick in our underpinning, and completed a suicide mission under our house, dying right beside the air handler for our heating and air unit. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

My only consolation is that it didn’t die under the far room, where I never would have been able to reach and extricate the carcass. As it stands now, I have gone back in time and am practicing social distancing again, although sometimes that is impossible like when I’m having a suspicious mole cut off my back at the dermatologist’s office.

DERMATOLGIST: [as he cuts the mole off my back] Smells like we might have some skunks coming around the office again.

ME: [as I’m laying on the table] Sorry, doc, it’s just me. A skunk died under our house. It’s been awful–we have barely slept at all for a week. I may just fall asleep while you’re cutting on my back, I’m so tired.

NURSE: [tightening her mask] I read on Facebook that this is when skunks are most active.

ME: This one was definitely not active. It was dead as a doornail. I’ve got a picture of it on my phone if you want to see it.

NURSE: [putting on a second mask] No, thanks.

Image gallery image — This died under our house.

The Conundrum of Ease

February 18, 2025February 18, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 12 Comments

Ah, yesterday I was searching for Paw Patrol on the TV, when I was momentarily swept up in nostalgia, remembering the good ole days when tasks contained a smattering of difficulty. For example, when I was a child, it was relatively difficult to change a channel on the TV. You had to get up and walk to the TV set, fiddle with knobs and switches, and realign the rabbit ears. And back then you never knew if changing the channel would be worth it because you were at the mercy of the weather and whatever the broadcasters were broadcasting. On a cloudy day, forget it. In the evening, if you were looking for cartoons, forget it–just the nightly news.

Now, with a la carte streaming, your four-year-old has endless choices at his fingertips. He knows nothing of the risk and sacrifice once involved in changing the channels–and, thus, he makes his dad’s life difficult, by constantly pleading with me to change the channel. Ease is creating a tiny monster.

And if I look in my email inbox for work, I again see the conundrum of ease–people shooting me emails till my brain is riddled with holes. Thirty years ago, people had to put pen to paper, put the paper in an envelope, take the envelope to the post office, and wait weeks for a reply. Correspondence was a big commitment–which is why my second-grade pen pal and I only exchanged a couple of letters before we realized our correspondence was too burdensome and hardly worth the effort. Now, people fire off emails with no commitment or consequences, which make my life hard. Right when I think my brain has recovered, it’s peppered with digital birdshot.

And fast food–well, it makes life easy until it causes you to croak. Truly, I respect vegetarians–not because they abstain from eating higher life forms, but because they abstain from eating fast food. In my rural county, there are no vegetarian restaurants, fast or otherwise.

Thus, people who can pass a Chick-Fil-A at breakfast and resist the tractor beam emanating from a chicken biscuit earn street cred in my book. Over the last few years, my cholesterol has crept up as has my pants size. Recently, I’ve been trying to pass Chick-Fil-A without stopping in the morning. I’m proud to say last week I successfully resisted putting on my turn signal, and this week I plan to work on not turning. But it is so easy to turn.

And I think we’d all be better off if we couldn’t buy stuff so easily. In the old days, people had to go to the bank and withdraw money (if they had any) to buy stuff or either remember where they buried their money and dig up a jar filled with coins. Would a Chick-Fil-A biscuit really be worth all the trouble it would take to dig up a jar full of coins? Alas, now all we have to do is swipe a little plastic card or click once online to buy anything we can possibly imagine, at least within the max limits of our credit cards.

So my new theory is that we should all pretend to live thirty years behind our technological means. Got a cell phone? Well, unless it is an emergency situation, stop using it as a computer, stop using it as a cell phone. Instead, use it as a phone thirty years ago: tie a string to it and tether it to the wall. Suddenly, you’ve got to sacrifice mobility for communication. You can’t talk on the go, you can’t text on the go. If you really want to talk to someone, you must talk to them in one spot. It makes you prioritize what’s important, walking or talking.

If you want to send an email, go ahead, but pretend you only get to send five emails per day on account of your slow dial up connection. Want a chicken biscuit, go ahead and get one if you’re willing to drive forty miles because most small towns didn’t have a Chic-Fil-A back then?

Sometimes it feels like technological progress makes tasks easier, but lives harder. Many so-called time-saving devices don’t really save time, but merely divide our attention–and it feels like my brain is a prime denominator that can’t be fractionalized anymore. I’m not ready to go full Amish yet, but thirty years back seems like a good starting point.

Man vs. Stump

February 10, 2025February 10, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

There comes a point in every man’s life when he undertakes burning a stump. Man versus stump–it is a rite of passage, a tale as old as time, and a prime business opportunity for makeup artists specializing in eyebrows. Many a man has tried to hasten the combustion of stump by squirting lighter fluid onto a pile of smoldering embers. Many a man has provided a blank canvas for artistic representations of coarse, tangled arches. Some makeup artists will offer special group rates and throw in an eyebrow for free, depending on how many men were standing around the stump at the time of the flare up.

Instead of using a petroleum-based accelerant, it is best to slowly and diligently build a bonfire over the stump with natural substances, like twigs and sticks, branches and logs, boards and dimensional lumber–anything larger than a 6 x 6 is hardly necessary, though it does provide a stable base for a long-lasting conflagration.

How large should your bonfire be to adequately burn the stump? In my opinion, you should trust your gut, which usually pipes up at about the same time you hear the sirens approaching. Most firemen are required, by their terms of employment, to discourage you from building mammoth bonfires over stumps. However, once off duty, they will likely join you to watch the stump burn, all while providing some scientific tips and tricks to spark up a little fiery whirlwind. If they are volunteer firefighters, they may even try to create a larger fiery tornado.

Much of the pleasure in burning a stump is staring at it. This probably has something to do with primal instincts and likely dates back to when cave men stared at stumps. Back then, men didn’t have TVs to stare at, so stumps were the most exciting thing around. Likely, cave women also stared at stumps, though they may have preferred watching different stumps. This could have caused bickering over who controlled the flint.

When we bought the old farmstead, I tried, over many months and years, to burn the stump of the giant oak tree that once stood behind our house. The stump won. It is still there. Maybe one day I will go back to burning it–my eyebrows still haven’t fully recovered from the first attempt, so I have little to lose.

Happy Allergy Season!

May 26, 2023May 26, 2023 ~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

I suppose there are advantages to living in a desert. For one, allergy season is probably pretty short. Without vegetation carpeting the landscape, the human immune system must have little to overreact to. Here, in the borderlands between the subtropic and temperate climes, my white blood cells are currently waging war against any trace of pollen trying to invade my pores and orifices. My body’s attempt to expel the invaders has mostly expelled lots of bodily fluids through my runny nose, watery eyes, and rapid-fire sneezes.

dessert sand dune — The only way to escape allergies

Still, I’m trying to find the silver lining in the pollen cloud–maybe there are advantages to having allergies, evolutionary speaking? For one, if I ever get lost in the middle of the night in a hayfield, I’d be more likely to survive since search and rescue would easily locate me because they’ll hear me sneezing from a mile away. Two, bad allergies provide a legitimate excuse for skipping events with in-laws without incurring the full-force of a spouse’s wrath. Yep, even for a trophy husband like me, my wife doesn’t mind if I miss a family function when I’m under the influence of allergies and can’t speak coherently without sneezing and sniffling.

The biggest advantage, however, to allergy season is that sales of our honey go through the roof. I feel a little bit guilty on this count. I’m not sure there is much truth to the theory that local honey actually helps with allergies. Case-in-point, as someone who ingests an inordinate amount of honey from my own farm, my allergies have only minimally improved, progressing from wretched to merely miserable.

That said, I know many good upstanding people who swear that local honey helps their allergies. According to my allergist, I’m mostly allergic to pollen from the grass family, and supposedly bees don’t pollinate grass species because they’re wind pollinated, so maybe I’m not the best case study (that said, I see a lot of bees pollinating my sweet corn, which is definitely a member of the grass family).

Sometimes I wonder how my ancestors from bygone days survived allergies without the use of Allegra and Zyrtec and Benadryl. If I lived back then, the month of May would have eventually taken me out, with my headstone memorializing the exact date in May that I finally lost my battle with hay fever.

Anyway, here’s hoping you survive allergy season this year!