Well ladies and gentlemen, if there was ever a collection of days, weeks, and months to chronicle on a vast collection of servers and computers networked together for the purpose of sharing status updates, recipes, and pictures of nekid ladies, that frame of time residing between June 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018 as it applies to yours truly is one to consider.
Granted I write this piece as I consider one of my favorite quotes from Dennis Miller about social networking:
Perhaps that applies as I look back on the last year of my 40’s and consider what I’ve done over the last 10 years and what’s coming up next.
Rest assured I didn’t ponder my 30’s as I turned 40. In fact, if there was anything to mark the occasion of entering my 40’s, it was fixing the toilet in the front bathroom. The water supply was leaking, and I tasked myself with fixing it over going to a birthday party that I just didn’t want.
For the record, I don’t really like to celebrate my birthday with others. Regardless of how many times I’ve requested it, there’s still an ongoing effort to mark the occasion. In recent years, the annual get-together for Memorial Day inevitably turns into a celebration of my birthday. Memorial Day is a day for which those who have died in active military service are remembered. It’s not for celebrating my birthday.
Several months ago, I disseminated a ‘cease and desist’ order via text to the offending parties who were pondering a surprise party for my 50th. I admonished them I would not participate at all, and furthermore, I wanted the incorporation of my birthday into the Memorial Day celebrations to stop as well.
None the less, at one point while fixing the toilet on my 40th birthday, I put undue pressure of one of my ribs on the toilet seat as I reached to replace the stupid valve. That maneuver generated some major pain, followed by some very unpleasant profanity, followed by an eventual trip to the doctor and subsequent prescription of muscle relaxers so that I could quit my bitchin’. Additional unintended consequences included a working knowledge of how to change out all of the parts of a toilet tank, and what I would guess to be a non-code compliant use of “plug & play” plumbing gear (aka SharkBite) feeding the water supply. Certainly the authorities don’t like it, and I’ll eventually have to get a professional who didn’t learn their plumbing skills from YouTube in here to fix my slapdash tinker-toy construction into something more viable. At the same time, that little rig has been in place for 10 years and hasn’t given me a problem at all.
Granted, now that I say that, we all know what’s going to happen.
Since that day all those years ago where I laid down a porcelain assault on my ribs, I’ve busied myself with a variety of activities designed to pass the time a little faster. I’ve done some fence repair, replaced a few window units and ceiling fans, and participated in the construction of a slop trough for the dogs which conveniently doubled as a planter for Wifey.
I cleaned out the garage several times, and griped about needing to do it considerably more. I’ve travelled to several points in Texas, Colorado, Indiana, Virginia, New Jersey, and New York.
In the last decade, my two kids entered and exited adolescence in a manner consistent with all humanoids who experience this process. They have since left high school. One left college last year and has begun a career. The other one will finish college at the end of this year and will pursue graduate school.
At work, I began my role as a Bidness Analyst on my 40th birthday. Ten years later I’m still in that role, even though I’ve cycled through 5 different managers who have and continue to hold me accountable, and at least 7 different cubicles which don’t do a very good job of preserving my sensory deprivation.
I’ve seen four new Star Wars movies in which George Lucas has been refreshingly absent in their production.
**Editor’s note: Although the author indicates four new Star Wars movies during the last decade, the correct number as of this writing is only three. Whereas this particular dispatch to the internet will not be published until closer to June 1, 2018, it’s being composed prior to the May 25th release of Solo. Solo, of course, is the next stand-alone Star Wars movie in which based on the title alone defines itself as a stand-alone without being called a stand-alone. It’s kind of like describing a water heater as a hot water heater, which also includes SharkBite parts in the TharpSter household.
In addition, I’ve seen a whole buncha comic book heroes appear in movies ranging in quality from “Good Lord in Butter, why on God’s Green Earth did you make that piece of crap?” to “Thank you Hollywood from giving me this cinematic alternative to injuring my rib on a malignant piece of porcelain designed to take my crap!”
I’ll take this opportunity to mention the lovely and talented Scarlett Johansson in skin tight attire and loaded for bear (or bare).
I adopted some behaviors that needed to be adopted and altered some behaviors that needed to be altered.
I’ve also adopted some behaviors that needed to be altered, and altered some behaviors that needed to be adopted.
None of those behaviors involved sacred cows like nacho cheese and chocolate.
I launched this website.
Granted, all of that stuff is an amalgam of what happened in the years which were kicked off by that rib injury which have led up to my birthday last year when age 49 knocked on the door to advise me that 50 was just down the street and making its way to my porch to ignore my ‘No Solicitors’ sign.
For what it’s worth, I’m not going to outline every single thing I did this last year. Some of these events have been digitally preserved here in the hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar known as the good ole internet. If the doom and gloom of the net neutrality crowd persists and deregulation completely breaks the internet, there’s a back-up file containing the verbal brilliance which ensconces this website on a thumb drive which is hermetically sealed into a mayonnaise jar and buried in the aforementioned slop-trough just a few inches west of the cilantro.
Instead of giving you the full timeline of the last twelve months, I’m going to call out the unique events which traditionally don’t happen to me. These events have left either an indelible impression on me, or have completely changed the way I’ll do things going forward.
First of all, let’s talk medical.
Have you ever heard of the ailment known as Anal Glaucoma? For those of you who haven’t, allow me to enlighten you a bit.
Anal Glaucoma is a perceptual malady involving the inability of the afflicted individual to envision themselves participating in a given activity. The primary indicator that Anal Glaucoma is present is an audible queue, the most common of which is: “I can’t see my ass doing that.”
Ladies and gentlemen, if you had told me on my 49th birthday that the next 12 months would bring instances where my eyeballs and asshole would be probed within moments of receiving a sufficient dosage of Propofol to liberate me of my consciousness, I would have called ‘Bullshit’.
None the less, it happened.
It’s amazing what a colonoscopy followed up by cataract surgery can do for Anal Glaucoma.
Speaking of which, something else happened in the wide, wide world of sports this last year that I never really fathomed would happen in my lifetime.
There’s generally only three sports I follow with any regularity. This last year saw me sitting out the football season for reasons I’ve documented. I’m generally a fair weather NBA fan, and that’s only if the Spurs make it past the first round of the playoffs. For what it’s worth, my two teams in those sports have also enjoyed championship seasons in the years since that horrible accident on the toilet.
Baseball is the other sport I follow. My earliest memories of watching baseball involve watching the likes of Johnny Bench and Pete Rose play for the Reds in the 70’s. It seems like I was introduced to the Astros by Mom. Her favorite player at one point was Cesar Cedeño, however I don’t remember why. Regardless, I became an Astros fan around that time and have followed them ever since.
It was pretty gosh darned awesome to see them win the World Series this last season.
One other thing happened last October that introduced a need for me to adopt a new behavior regarding the TharpSter cash. A colleague at work uttered the name “Dave Ramsey” to me and made one passing remark about killing debt prior to investing in retirement. That particular remark prompted me to start listening to Uncle Dave on the radio (via podcast) on a daily basis. I also read one of his books, and Wifey and I subsequently took one of his classes. Implementing Ramsey’s methods for managing our money has completely changed our mindset about things to the point where we have to find other things to fight about. More to come on that subject in future posts.
And then there was that time last June when I found myself single-handedly trying to break up a fight between the dogs.
The fight was totally my fault. Hope was in her kennel with the door open, and I forgot to close it when I let Faith in from the back yard. It seemed to take forever to break those two up. Hope had this ability to lock down on the Faith’s neck skin and wouldn’t let go.
It wasn’t the first that had happened, but I swore then and there that it would be the last.
I considered putting Hope in a new home where she would be the only dog. Some additional research yielded a training program where I could take her to someone who would keep her for a few weeks and basically recondition her in order to rid her of her aggressions. I never really pursued it though.
In the end, that fight last June was the last one I would ever have to break up between those two. Ten months later, Hope would be diagnosed with bone cancer.
Today, when I walk Faith, Hope joins us.
Naturally, I could spend some time about the concerts I hit in the last 12 months. The five events I attended during that time were some of my favorite of all time. Regardless, I won’t do that here, because I did it a few weeks ago.
Don’t forget the night of May 17th though.
That was the night that Wifey and I travelled to the bustling metropolis of San Angelo to attend the high school graduation of one of our nieces. She attended a Christian academy, and was one of four in her class.
Cool, right?
What was really cool was that God was mentioned throughout the ceremony, and rightfully so. Afterwards at the reception, each of the graduates had a table set up where family members had decorated them with all types of pictures and mementos. The parents of the one gentleman in the class had placed his graduation gift under the table for him to find later in the evening. The gift, of course, was a rifle.
That’s not only ‘Merica, but that there is TEXAS, y’all.
Even still, that wasn’t the most memorable event of the evening.
That came later, shortly after we had gone to bed in the hotel we were staying at. A phone call came in from Juniorette who was staying with our nervous dog Faith back home at headquarters. It seems that she had flushed the toilet, and a deluge of water ensued. We generally had to walk her through the process of turning the water supply off to the toilet.
It should probably be mentioned that Juniorette was just short of being bombed out of her gourd on painkillers which had been prescribed days before in light of having her remaining wisdom teeth pulled. Sadly, there was no production crew from YouTube there to film the event.
Upon being advised that my half-assery may have caught up to me, I spent the next few hours wondering what I was going to have to do to fix the toilet. Why was it flooding? After 10 dedicated years of service, had my devil-may-care plumbing “skills” shit the bed?
The next day I found myself laying on the floor assessing the issue and avoiding putting any pressure on that floating rib which was prone to plumbing injuries.
It turns out the supply line just needed to be replaced. There would be no surprisingly creative profanity, excessive trips to the plumbing aisle at The Home Depot, or follow up muscle relaxers. Instead, a quick turn of the pliers, a little bit of righty-tighty, lefty-loosy, and we were back up and running.
If two points define a line and three points confirm it, I’ll look forward to another incident with that thing in May, 2028.
In the meantime, I’ll look at the times I had to fix that toilet as the two book ends of an amazing decade which I can only hope will be a harbinger of more to come. Whereas the last year is concerned, it’s definitely been a busy one which won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
