“Just as I begin to leave my zipper down more often, less people are bothering to tell me about it.” I recently wrote that in a comment on george RAYMOND’s trefology post “How to Read a Map.” He suggested I make that the first sentence in my next essay. I often violate Rule 67 in the Emily Post Etiquette for Blogging book which stipulates: “Bloggers should not post their own material (especially if lengthy) in the comments section of another person’s Blog.” But that is actually the perfect place to post anything controversial or in poor taste.

I have always chosen the Super Power of Invisibility when offered a hypothetical choice and only now realize that I have had that power all along. When I was younger I thought of myself as incredibly relevant. But on a planet of 8 billion people, I have been a speck. My first aftershock came when I retired from an internationally prominent company and my employer no longer permitted me back on the premises. Maybe they were more annoyed by my perpetually untucked shirts than I realized. My second shock arrived when I became the nominal patriarch in a very large clan. At family gatherings, my grand nephews and nieces think I am the disheveled pizza delivery guy with a broken zipper. [As an aside, I reluctantly agree that those who deliver pizza for a living should be more offended than me by the comparison.] I reached the visible pinnacle of importance on the day I was born and my parents and grandparents treated me as if I were the center of the universe. Mom and Dad were too busy having six more children to bother weaning me off the notion. They were obviously searching for something more than me. Dad always did refer to my youngest sister as “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

I have learned that my own body is best at telling me the truth. The dentist says that brushing and flossing my teeth once or twice a day is so important. But when I skip a day, nothing bad happens. Try not going to the bathroom for a whole day and your body will show you what is truly important. As I age, my body is now telling me that zipping up is no longer as important as staying prepared for a combination of more regular emergencies and declining small finger dexterity. My body is also telling me that untucked shirts can save me some embarrassment.

I spotted two fruit flies in the kitchen yesterday, so we cannot yet bring the fruit back from the laundry room and garage. I will continue explaining that my clothes are clean even though fruit flies are swirling around me. I used to keep the heat off to freeze fruit flies out until we had a pipe burst one year. We are like the people who track their steps, gas mileage, or lawn mowings except we record insect invasions. When we purchased our home 27 years ago, the previous owner gave us a hint when he said, “I don’t know what you think about pesticides but I like to use them around the perimeter of the house.” The next summer we learned why he sold his home. A bizarre variety of bugs concentrated their main invasion under a glass wall adjacent to the front door. They flew and crawled inside onto a stairway landing ledge. We hired gardeners to pull up all the foliage at the front of the house. But each August the pests terrorized us on schedule. We avoided vacationing or inviting people over during wartime. About a decade ago, the frightening core invasion suddenly ceased and we now exist with normal insect activity. My wife continues to take extraordinary preventive measures which will be more specifically identified on my death certificate.

My grandson Sebastian is 21 and is finishing a four year program for students with special needs. He has lived with us since fourth grade and is special in many ways but he did develop an insect phobia. He still assaults regular flies with swatters, brooms, vacuum cleaners, rags, or wads of paper towels. His movements are not subtle and he has killed more lamps than flies. He is inadvertently and randomly helping us downsize. His main strategy is to leave doors and windows open so a fly will exit but, of course, more flies enter than leave. I have tried to slow him down by suggesting he may be reincarnated as an insect. He finds the concept preposterous and yet he will tell a prospective employer that his ten year plan is to become Batman. I have suggested he aspire to be Robin because Batman does the driving and Sebastian does not have a license. He is capable enough to travel everywhere by bus and smart enough to know how not to get a job. But he can only be Batman if Mollie and I live forever, so we are contemplating liquidating my 401(k) to invest in Fountain of Youth Seltzer.

Sebastian’s 14 year old sister Zofia has big ears and asked me what a 401(k) is and if I am in debt. I gave her very humorous answers to help her grow up to be the funniest poor person in the room. She has been attending some parties in beautiful homes on the water and on big estates with horses. She mused, “Wouldn’t it be great to be rich?” I love answering rhetorical questions and informed Zofia that she is embarrassingly wealthy by any meaningful Earth standard. But all she knows is that she has never been to Disneyland like all her friends. I once blogged that I could jog to Bill Gates’ Xanadu 2.0 house in Medina, Washington, even though he lives in a different Universe. I was faking self deprecation to brag that I could still run. Zofia has a close friend whose father runs in 100 mile races around the world. So I can no longer boast about my running to him or anyone who is within five degrees of separation from him.

Everything is relative, so I am forced to revert to bragging about five relatives who are my grandchildren. I hope they do something impressive in November or you will be hearing about my screenplay Gilmore Guys where Mayor Harry Gilmore is an unreliable narrator who introduces us to the small town of Derivative where every week the brooding town sheriff (Perry Gilmore) solves a murder, the quirky town doctor (Barry Gilmore) cures a resident infected with Fruit Fly Ebola, and the town drunk (Harry Gilmore) charms us all. The head of the Chamber of Commerce is a former beauty queen (Mary Gilmore) who is being courted by all three men while her best friend (Terry Gilmore) is dating triplets (Cary, Larry, and Jerry Gilmore). Spoiler Alert: I am hoping the town’s serial killer (Gary Gilmore) murders all of them by Episode 3.

Where was Geoff when September happened? He spent the month on assignment in the third person. He only posted in the Comment sections of other people’s Blogs to avoid polluting his own site. He lost half his time when the doctor said he could no longer safely multi-task. Geoff used to shave with whipped cream while driving but all the cream and blood were ruining his dessert and making the steering wheel slippery and sticky. He was taking wrong turns and getting lost all the time. For the record, he is now growing a beard and still getting lost.

Geoff also squandered time escorting eighth grade girls to two movie sequels (I Know What You Did Last Summer and The Conjuring) because his granddaughter Zofia was the only one who could provide the adult needed for admission. It seemed creepy in enough ways to prompt the theater to initiate a review of their definition for “adult.” The girls squished into the backseat of Geoff’s car because the front passenger seat is worse than a bus depot toilet seat. The girls accused each other of manspreading. Geoff knew that must be bad because the word started with “man” like mansplaining, manslaughter, and manure. Trying to look up “manspreading” prompted Geoff to toss out all the print dictionaries in the house because they were published in years like 1989 and 1903. Geoff has always been surprised that Zofia and her friends speak so openly in his car as if he were deaf. But he may no longer be invisible because he noticed one girl whispering into Zofia’s ear. Uh oh. Hopefully the girl was only telling Zofia that her Grandpa ran a red light again. These excursions were cruel reminders that no girls were remotely interested in going to the movies with Geoff when he was an eighth grader even though he had his driver’s license by then. For the record, the light was pink and Geoff only hears praise and little else.

P and N married and begat five vowels who went out one day over the hills and far away. Pan came back as a fry cook at Penne For Your Thoughts. Pen returned after writing the great Armenian novel The Machine Gun is Mightier than the Sword. Pin dropped quietly by as a seamstress at a local Needle’s Haystack franchise. Pun wandered home as a professional comedian making amateur wages as a sit-down comic on the Worstpress site Penniless. Pon never actually went out and over the hills far away. He snuck home for lunch riding on a pony and earned the nickname Zero. But he married Y, stuck a feather in her cap, and called it macaroni. Pon and Y eventually made P’s parents so happy when they turned P and N into Papa and Nana.

Sometimes I have a great notion to claim I am a descendant of a logging clan from Wakonda on the Oregon coast. I often mention that my Dad publicly disinherited my brother Kevin and me when we supported McGovern in the 1972 Presidential race. Dad left his entire estate to our Mom 33 years later, so technically he did disinherit us. I have been in constant motion ever since, alternating between commotion and self-promotion. This post features several popular parts of me:

SKIN: I love lotion. I use it to block the sun at the ocean. I use it to lubricate my feet with devotion. I can only see my feet with binoculars so I pour lotion on a grease mat and step in it. I embrace any potion designed to free my wrinkles. But enough about me. How much do you like me!?

SHOULDERS: The fashion designer Donna Karan says: “the shoulder is the only place you never gain weight.” That explains trends like shoulder pads or popping one shoulder out of the garment. I am an outlier with a shoulder that does gain weight because I cannot shrug off a lipoma growth. And many of my other body parts do not gain weight because I have entered the Shriveling Up stage of life.

MOUTH: This year I purchased 1000 fortune cookies with twenty different messages (which I wrote) all mixed together randomly. I have been distributing them at reunions and birthday partys. A tow truck lot extorted $650 from my niece during my son’s July 3rd firework party. Her three sons each took a fortune cookie home. I have not heard from her since so hopefully no one in her family received the “Your car is being towed” message. I asked my 17 year old granddaughter Noemi what her fortune said and she replied: “You have bad breath.” I backed up and said I was going to retrieve my breath spray which I stock everywhere like reading glasses. I returned with a mouthful of chemicals, asked again, and received the same answer to the amusement of onlookers. My 13 year old granddaughter Zofia finally put an end to the Abbott and Costello routine by explaining “You have bad breath” was the message inside Noemi’s cookie. Technically the message I had written was: “You need a breath mint right now.”

EYES: Four years whizzed by and I was required to renew my driver’s license in person and take the eye test. I went online 33 days before my August birthday but the DMV office nearest me had no appointments available until October! I booked one in a city 16.8 miles northwest of me if I were a crow. I received many confirmations by text and email. I waited in a long check in line. The screener found no record of me. I proudly displayed a reminder text from that very morning but it made no difference to him. Finally I took a wrinkled walk-in number that someone before me had thrown back before stomping off. I remember when my youngest son waited over five hours with one of those. I planned to revisit when my scheduled 9:30am time came up. At 9:15am, I received a text from the DMV asking if I was on site and wanted to check-in online. The walk-in number barely beat the appointment number. I rattled off the 12 letters on the eye chart quickly to give the impression I could see them clearly. I resisted the urge to identify one as roundish and just chose D over O. Either I guessed right, did not need a perfect score, or the examiner thought I was cute. She asked if I wanted a six or eight year renewal! I chose eight, of course, because now the government has officially acknowledged that I will be alive at age 86. I do not even know how much my credit card was charged because I could not read what I was signing on the monitor. I may have agreed to donate my eyes as an organ donor.

A note on a scrap of paper prompted my last post. I surrounded the thought with crazy digressions to disguise any accidental plagiarizing of Mark Twain, Yogi Berra, or Pope Ourie. In the process, I forgot to include the reason for the post and am left with the distasteful task of writing more about socks. I do not even wear socks most days, partly because my gnarled toes have nails that snag on the threads of the socks. And despite my shrinking height, my arms are growing shorter and can no longer reach my feet. Ironically, I carry socks in my car and backpack in case I encounter instructions to remove my shoes. Once I forgot to replenish my emergency socks. I attended a party with my feet wrapped in old fast food bags secured with a rubber band and a hair scrunchie scrounged from the floor of my car. Sorry, once again that is not even the story referenced on the scrap paper.

I buy my socks in bulk so I can efficiently match them. When one dress sock disappears or wears out, I save the mate until it replaces the next sock that dies. Same with the white sports socks. So I usually have no more than two unmatched socks on my dresser. My wife Mollie gifted me with a specialty pair of socks from the REI Co-op and one disappeared after a snow shoeing excursion last winter. After four months of staring at the lonely survivor of the laundry process, I asked her if she had seen the match. She told me to check the unmatched socks in a shoebox on the top shelf of our bedroom closet. We have been married for almost 55 years and I did not know such a box existed. The good news: I found my missing sock. After glancing at the pile of about two dozen other socks, I noticed two sets of matched socks. Before searching further, I shared this astonishing discovery with Mollie. Apparently the tone of my cross examination offended her.

I can now enjoy the exhilaration of disposing of two other scraps of paper living on my desk because they do not deserve complete posts. One says, “Deodor Ant, a Super Hero Insect with an extraordinary sense of smell.” The other one reminds me to Blog about “driving past the order intercom at Starbucks” because Mollie and I were still arguing about unmatched socks. We had to unpatiently wait in line just to confirm at the pick-up window that I forgot to order. As a Starbucks addict, I parked and went inside and loudly blamed everything on my human navigator Mollie. Unfortunately, she was scrunched down in her seat and the car appeared empty to onlookers.

Lloyd looks down on hoarders and yet he is the biggest one ever. He has been so busy stocking up for the Apocalypse that he missed it. He claims he is a collector. He even collects doctor appointments which increase geometrically because one leads to two more. His unfinished paintings are legendary. My favorite has the working title “Ox” until he decides whether to complete it as Roxymoron or Toxicanna. Either way, Roxanna will be very upset. Lloyd has more inventory than Amazon because he has suppliers but no distribution strategy. As a recovering hoarder, I am one of Lloyd’s biggest vendors. I give him everything I cannot squeeze into our garbage and recycle bins. We rent the smallest carts because the large bins encourage the squatters living with us to manufacture garbage. Lloyd thinks he needs my old frocks and my father’s golf shoes even though they are not his size. I rarely used the golf shoes because they are missing several spikes and made me limp. I do not even golf, so I only wore them to church to justify parking in a handicapped spot. My wife thinks we are both crazy but she is the one we caught trying to change the television channels with her car fob. Normally I would not publicly rat her out but Lloyd already spread the story about everyone racing to the garage when the car alarm kept screeching on and off.

Lloyd is shocked because he thought my wife and I were so competent when he was growing up. We still are. We are not in dementia yet [citation needed] but our world no longer exists. My wife was a highly recruited special education teacher who simultaneously raised three sons, me, and any other family members desperate enough to live with us. I mastered the slide rule and Latin phrases and was constantly promoted for my corporate skills handling the rotary phone and rolodex on my desk. I used to be able to operate a car radio, change the channels on a television, and pay for parking with coins. I realized living in the past was impossible when my youngest granddaughter was in elementary school and discovered I was a lawyer. Her exact words were: “You once had a job?!” Of course, this is the same granddaughter who came home from middle school and asked, “Am I white?” I thought it was a trick question but discovered she thought she was Polish. I tried to teach her two things can be true at the same time but she is not open to learning anything from someone who tries to write her a check when she needs money deposited in her Venmo account, whatever that is (other than an anagram for Venom). I worry because she is the designated advocate in my plan to live to 100. She will be 36 by then and already accelerating down the obsolescence slide.

I thought Freud was a Hobbit but when I was researching “oyd-ox” rhymes, I discovered Lucian’s self-portrait where he is cuddling a fox. Lucian Freud’s father was apparently a Theban King and his paternal grandfather Sigmund was a psycho analist. I believe in therapists but have never consulted one because I also believe in deferred maintenance. I live in a neighborhood where houses built in the 1960’s regularly contained carports. Over the years, subsequent owners upgraded to garages. I am the one resident who has taken a two-car garage and downgraded to a carport rather than fix the garage door. Before doing anything, I calculate the odds of dying within 24 hours as a result of procrastination. I am still alive, so I consider this strategy a success. However, my legal team insisted on this disclaimer: Side effects of Deferred Maintenance may include flunking chemistry, bursting an appendix, or running a car engine out of oil.

For 15 years, my daughter-in-law Joanna and I have taken many long runs and walks where we trade impromptu counseling sessions for free. When she cannot stand the sight of me, we communicate on cell phones while walking on separate trails. She often screams that she cannot trust me. I usually respond by throwing my water bottle at a tree because I have an inflated view of my trustworthiness. No tree is ever harmed because I am uncoordinated. Last week I watched a television show where frenemies were being pressured to work together. One says, “I cannot trust you.” The dramatic rhetorical retort: “Do you think I could trust you?” Suddenly I realized a true therapist would have asked me, “Do you trust your daughter-in-law?” I would have lied to a licensed counselor rather than admit to my hypocritical double standard but I did apologize to Joanna by acknowledging I did not trust her either. She did not fully appreciate my epiphany and I did not identify my specific fears because I do not want to give her any ideas. I thought my late brother Jamie was crazy when he said people were talking to him through his television but now I will be paying closer attention to TV dialogue in case Jamie tries to send me more messages.

Sum Peeples knows I take time off from WordPress every other year to revise my important files, including Obituary, Resume, Will, and Murder Suspect List. Sum rudely advised me to remove Artist from my Obituary because Con Artist is supposedly not an acceptable Art. He says my Resume is worthless because I am not qualified for movie roles, food tasting jobs, or even telemarketing positions. Sum is too dim to understand an updated Will is unnecessary since I have decided to take everything with me into the Afterworld. My energy is focused on my Murder Suspect List. Perry Mason and Angela Lansbury popularized the notion that six is the perfect number of suspects because they could only rule out five in an hour, presuming they worked through the commercials. Ironically, my current list implicates me as a potential serial killer because the nominees have all predeceased me except for Sum who purchased twenty copies of my novel without reading it and then distributed them as Christmas presents to all his friends and family. He has been seething about my “no refund” policy ever since.

I did build in contingencies for suspects who predecease me. When the Road Rage guy passed away, Road Rage 2 was elevated to Prime Suspect. Same with rivals for girls. Love Rival 1 could not believe my wife chose me over him. I could not believe it either. It made him look bad as I was not considered marriage material. But he was in jail at the time. I do not think that was my fault but he always told a different story. Before I stopped dating to get married, many different Love Rivals bested me. Love Rival 2 is one that has always blamed me for his misery because I lost our competition. Property Rivals flourished with disputes over fences, trees, noises, poison sprays, water balloons, and a pet racoon that destroyed the inside of a rental house.

Money provides motives for murder but my mounting debts are making that moot. I may be able to develop more suspects if I can provoke some feuds on WordPress. I am planning on living forever, so be very suspicious if anyone says I died by my own hand or in an accident. If I allegedly die by DROIDS (Dry Rutted Old Indented Damaged Skin) Pox, the police will find plenty of suspects in the medical community. Motive will be difficult to prove, so help me by leaving no gall or kidney stone unturned. Get creative. I do not list my wife Mollie as a suspect because the police always investigate the spouse anyway. If she is the murderer, be careful because she can be vicious when accused of anything. If you get interviewed, please mention to detectives that Taylor Swift has been stalking me, that Elon Musk thinks I stole his DROIDS Pox vaccination formula, and that several relatives have been sending me death threats for enclosing doctored photos of them in my Christmas Newsletters. This will help us all get featured on a television reenactment.

Aristotle proposed moderation in all things. So whenever I become too happy, I begin making a list of the ten worst mistakes I ever made. I stop after five before I become excessively depressed. Living my life as a disciple of Aristotle is incredibly boring. I am always half drunk. My physical, mental, and spiritual development has been stunted by my halfhearted efforts. My ideas are half baked. I am only halfway through this amusing investigation of the word half because I half to leave some material for comments. The irony is that this Aristotle Onassis guy did not even practice what he preached. His life was full of excess.

This is another half-finished post from so long ago that I do not remember how I was going to connect it to Floyd’s socks. Perhaps I just felt Aristotle or Moderation were overused Titles. I know I would never click on them. I wish I could ask Floyd about those green socks but last time I saw him he was screaming accusations at a wedding reception that I was a thief. I do not steal possessions and even avoid research just to prevent myself from accidentally appropriating another person’s words. Besides, researching seems excessive when one has already searched. My own insight (which sticklers still attribute to Onassis): “There is no great genius without some touch of madness.” I acquired the touch of madness without much effort but genius continues to elude me as I wallow in moderation.