Celebrating My 85-Year Lifespan

I'm really glad I'm going to live another 24 years, having recently discovered that I won't die till I'm 85. It's better than I expected, frankly, since I've been somewhat lethargic, tired, and feeling dragged down. But this news has really perked me up, big time!

Of course my resolution is really to live it up and make the most of my remaining time. Especially now that I know it's so much; I've been worried for nothing, but that's all over. I've changed my attitudes completely. No more wishing it was yesterday or tomorrow or next week and unnecessarily worrying over the challenges of the day. What are they gonna do, kill me? Not if I'm guaranteed another 24 years! I actually should've lived smarter all along, since wishing your life away only spoils the now.

So from now on, I won't even celebrate holidays till they're here. Christmas tree up on Christmas. Like that. Even boring things I will enjoy -- although I won't allow them to go any longer than I can absolutely stomach. I will enjoy everything. If people are singing to me "Happy Birthday," I will look from person to person, making meaningful, soulful eye contact. And so on. I will not make a bucket list, because it wastes too much time. My bucket list will be everything cool I can get to, not rushing one thing for another.

I will only do good in life, because I don't want to be known for bad, and because if I did bad I would waste precious time regretting it. But as for the credit of doing good, I will allow some quiet savoring, but not too much. If people want to pat me on the back for something good, I will allow it until it seems like overkill. And I will be the judge on what constitutes overkill, and the judge's decision will be final. There's really no reason to dwell on the past to the point of overkill.

I guess you could say I'm going to live the next 24 years like a Zen Buddhist. Which I understand to be like this: Appreciating everything to such a mind-boggling appreciative extent that some would say goes from the sublime to the ridiculous. Picking up a handful of sand and arranging each tiny rock, or something ... I can do some of that. The key thing is to enjoy it, then not grasp as if to cling to it.

I think this really applies to flowers. All my previous 61 years, I've taken a glance at flowers and said, "Next!" But now will be different. In my remaining 24 years, each flower will be precious to me, like children of God. And grandchildren. Everything will be precious. I will even encourage people to catch and release fish. Or to not even catch them at all, just release them.

OK, I think you get the point. This is a "No Overkill Zone." I've no time to waste. I'm off to buy the prize turkey in the butcher's window. Then after a delicious meal I'll spend a little time seeking out newborn kittens.

The Valentine's Flower Racket Morticians Run

I'm getting the word out there early on something I suspect, way before Valentine's Day, because I'm hoping to get widespread attention on this matter. I'd call it something of a scam. At least that's my suspicion, and I've always had a pretty good success rate in these things. At the very least it should be investigated, and when found to be true, be exposed, shut down, and left dead in its tracks. Prosecute!

My suspicion -- and I'm pretty sure it's more than that, it's something factual -- is that there's a huge racket being run by unscrupulous morticians. The racket goes something like this: Starting around October or November, they start "syphoning off" flowers from their funerals, then keep them in cold storage till just before Valentine's Day. Then they are sold everywhere, like to florists looking for something cheap to help their profit margin.

The big problem as I see it is that those flowers were purchased by well-meaning families and aggrieved loved ones, meant solely to honor the dead. They weren't meant to go from hand to hand, then on some black market, only to end up, maybe purchased by the same people as tokens of love on Valentine's Day! Of course the flowers are the property of the original purchasers, whose intent was that they would make festive a memorial service, then the grave-site.

You know what I should do? I ought to go nosing around a funeral home. I could show up during a funeral, then slip into the back room and watch through the curtains. While everyone else's eyes are bleary from tears, I'm wide-eyed and alert. I can see the flowers, what all there is. Then as the mourners file out, I watch for the morticians to start skimming. Plus, I'm listening. "This flower looks great, this one will fetch a pretty penny, I might keep this one for myself," etc. The wife, normally upstairs doing bookkeeping, is the go-between, helping stash away the flowers before anyone notices.

Or, my other plan might be to show up at a funeral home -- have some business cards printed, "Floral Wholesaler" -- and present myself to the mortician. Naturally, I'm looking to cut a deal. The guy's nervous, he hasn't seen me before. But obviously I know more about the scam than the average guy. And I'm flipping a coin. His denials won't hold up, because I'll keep pressing him, telling him, "You either play ball or they'll be buying flowers for your funeral, and I mean full price!" I honestly can play hardball, especially if my sense of justice is riled up, as it is on this issue.

I love the above graphic. I think it really drives the point home. Look at the expression of professional grief on the schmuck's face. It's Valentine's Day, and he's portrayed handing out flowers to sexy women in their underwear, you'd think he could manage a smile. But no, he's a professional frowner, looking a lot like an underpaid, unappreciated butler, so even naked ladies don't move him. Then we have the women themselves. They're not the least bit suspicious why a frowning mortician would be handing them a flower. They're just gung ho for flowers, they don't care where they come from!

But I care. This is the honest to God truth: In the last year I have personally sent two big floral arrangements to people's funerals. You ever do that? It costs a fortune. I bet they were $60 apiece. The last thing I want is to have these damned morticians -- very unethical -- reselling them on Valentine's Day. To me, that's simply wrong.

I Want My Flowers Now!

There's a whole push -- a movement -- these days, much like the Tea Party movement that is roiling politics and transforming our politicians into Frankenstein monsters. But this new, powerful movement has little to do with politics, fiscal policy, and lapel pins, but with how we honor the dead, or rather the living.

I myself am a part of the "I Want My Flowers Now" movement. It's a push toward getting our flowers now, while we're still alive instead of waiting till we're dead and unable to enjoy them.

Everyone becomes very sentimental as soon as you die. They took you for granted, in most cases. You had your nose to the grindstone and struggled hard just to get by. Everyday was the same. Toil, plodding toil. Punch the clock. Feed the kids. Pay the bills. Fall exhausted into bed at the end of another hard day. Then you finally work yourself into an early grave -- or in some cases you live well and die at a ripe old age -- and everyone sheds a massive tear and gets sentimental. Then the flowers come out, but only then.

So there you are, laying stiff as a board, quiet as a mouse, in your casket. Your eyes are closed tight. Your hands are demurely set in their permanent place. Your skin has been made up. The back of your suit they had to split to get it on you. Every hair's in place for the first time ever. And all around you, it's always the same, heaps and gobs of flowers, flowers draping everywhere, and fancy red banners in place, "Beloved Friend," "Loving Father," "Dearest Mother," "Treasured Son," or "Beautiful Daughter."

Well, I and all the others who are part of the "I Want My Flowers Now" movement hope to change this scene. In other words, please spare us the flowers when we're flat on our back and motionless. We can't enjoy them then! Give us our flowers now! Then, of course, as long as we live, please keep replenishing them as an ongoing flowery tribute to all we mean to you. And we, in return, will also be sending you flowers, sending tributes all along the way, and replenishing them frequently. As much as we can afford.

The florists at first might kick against us. Because most of their business is in the service of the sentimentalized dead. You go to one of their stores and the whole place is geared toward death. They have those sentimental placards that say "If tears could build a stairway, And memories a lane, I'd walk right up to Heaven and bring you home again." It's a very morbid place, you halfway expect to see a zombie at the cash register. But it's always a sweet lady who speaks with a consoling voice, because a full 99% of their customers have just experienced a terrible loss. I was there the other day and everyone averts their glance, because their eyes are red and puffy.

But if the florists came to know our true intentions, which are not to reduce the sale of flowers but to increase them, we'd have them on board very quickly. Because florists, like all good business people, want more customers and more sales. They crave money just like the rest of us. To them it's all about the bottom line.

So, if you want to send me flowers, in honor of my life and not my death, I will give you thanks. I will enjoy them, set them around my room, put them in vases -- the whole bit. But if you wait till I'm dead, then it'll be too late. Much too late.

Mission Impossible -- Destroy The Rose Parade

I had this wild idea last night but I'm not going to do anything with it except just say it. It's that there's one guy who somehow becomes involved in destroying the Rose Parade.

The way this would happen is like the old story of how they make a suspension bridge, by taking a single string across the river, then pulling over a smaller piece of metal cable, then a bigger one, etc., until you have huge spans.

It starts off with a little thing. But then through the vast network of contractors and planners it takes to coordinate and do the Rose Parade, there's all these ripple effects. In the idea it starts with an email that comes in error to the guy involved. He's asked to sign off on some little detail of the Rose Parade, like contracting with a greenhouse somewhere for roses for one float.

Somehow he gets the idea that he holds the entire Rose Parade in his hands. And that with a few calls -- changing his voice and sounding official -- and a few emails, everything could be in place (or out of place) well enough that there are all these ripple effects.

When he screws up the order for flowers for that one float, it makes that crew and a crew at a different float start to panic. Then various crews are up in arms. Contractors are wondering what went wrong. Tempers flare, feelings are hurt, there's delays in shipments, etc.

Now, getting back to the original guy, he's not passive in all this. Because he has various numbers and email addresses that were in the body and headers of the first email. So he's calling around, ordering five times as many roses, let's say, and demanding their delivery in an unreasonable amount of time. But he's also postponing delivery from very trusted contractors for the Parade, maybe insinuating that they've been cheating the Parade all these years. With everything he says and does, he's completely enraging the contractors.

You can see where this all ends up. The float crews are in a total panic. They're busy contacting contractors on their own. Contracts are being breached, because they're also making independent calls to outside contractors, trying desperately to get their quota of roses. Now there's a complete meltdown in the industry. They've either stepped up rose production or slowed it down. Money is being lost either way.

Since there's all this brouhaha about the flowers, the builders of floats are delayed -- why build if you can't get the flowers? Of course that's against the builders' contracts, they think. So they protest. But there's some fine print they've overlooked, meaning they lose face when it's pointed out to them. Builders, though, are a proud bunch. So they walk off the job in spite of the fine print.

Now the Parade organizers have no choice but to bring in alternate builders, because they also don't want to lose face. The alternate builders throw up their hands when it soon becomes obvious the first builders burned all the blueprints and sabotaged the computers.

Around December 1, the first week of December, there's complete chaos in Pasadena. They know they can't make it. Roses have wilted, other flower workers have been laid off. The finances are ruined and people haven't been paid. It's a terrible, hideous mess.

January 1 rolls around and the Rose Parade struggles to put on a show. Farmers from the area bring in their tractors and hay wagons. They hastily find some guy from the parade line to be the Grand Marshall. They pick his wife to be the Parade Queen. And that's the parade.

Meanwhile, back home, wherever that guy lives, there's at least one person who's really enjoying the show!

The Hiatus Bloom Is Fading

Today I may sound a little wistful, as I feel that I could be lost in my own thoughts, with some regrets about the way my hiatus is going.

When I start comparing my hiatus with others, like I was doing yesterday, that's a thing of pride. Then when that takes hold, it's not long, obviously, before my self identification is wrapped up in a particular aspect of my day to day life, in this case my hiatus. Very dangerous.

Why do we pin our hopes on such fleeting nonsense, externals? I can't be known simply for my hiatus. Someday the newspaper will say, "Local Man On Hiatus Dies." That's ridiculous. So I shouldn't be comparing myself to others and feeling lifted up over them simply because I've taken time off and have made a big deal out of it. Need to get away from that.

Today I'm thinking rationally. Yesterday I was lost in the rarefied mist that encircles my citadel. I was up there looking down on the small, small world. And when you do that, everything up there seems a lot bigger. So much so that my pride got the best of me. When the fact of the matter is very clear, that this hiatus is actually consuming me. I'm going to have to try to break it off. But maybe its hold is already too great.

The bloom is definitely fading. That's flower language. That's language that florists, botanists, gardeners, and undertakers understand. A flower is nature's most fleeting child. That's why you never see a well rested bee. They know if they're not up 24/7 the flower's going to be gone. They have to suck the juice while it's there. Because tomorrow it'll be shriveled like a prune. (Maybe that's why flowers shrivel so fast. The bees are too anxious and are sucking the lives out of them unnecessarily, lest they shrivel. So if we could reeducate bees, maybe flowers would last longer.)

I've been amazed over the years about the lifespan of flowers. It could be, like me, that it has nothing to do with anxious bees. It could simply be the penalty for pride is universal. Who's more prideful than a flower? They've got their bright, gay colors, happy-go-lucky attitude, cock of the walk struttin', talking trash to the weeds to the left and right. They think they're really bad (meaning really good). But then the bees come swooping in, nature's pride police, looking for the proudest flowers, and those they suck dry first. That's why you never see a well rested bee, because there's so many proud flowers to kill.

Or another possibility, and this one could be the best, is that flowers know when to give up a good thing. Unlike me. I get something and I keep it till I'm dust and it'll still be on the shelf. Like my hiatus. I've got it, then it's got me. I tend to it, keep it well preserved, exalt it, parade it around, display it, brag about it, and dis other people who have a lesser hiatus simply to make myself look more important. But not the flowers. The flowers think, "We are beautiful, but we must not glory in our beauty. We must simply be a cog in the great machinery of nature. And if we become exalted, or are tempted toward the same, we must willingly fade and fall, the quicker the better."

If flowers give up their lives like that, to avoid pride, we're back to the anxious bee theory. The bees need that flower juice for their young. So they're sucking like their lives depend on it, because they do! Those would be the largest number of bees. Then there's a few bees -- almost like monk bees -- who have foregone families and providing for families. It is their task in life to suck flowers only to kill them off with mercy. For monk bees know the flowers' plight, being so beautiful, yet eschewing pride. They come swooping in, their monk habits, cowls, and whips trailing after them and making flight extremely difficult. And that's why you never see a well rested monk bee. (But they like it that way.)

Well, nature has its way -- and I have mine. I hope to live and learn, and to know when the bloom has faded and when to give it up. But right now I'm too much in the grasp of something ... my hiatus ... and I can't give up now, faded bloom or not.