My father-in-law looks into the mirror every day and says out loud: “I can’t wait until tomorrow, ’coz you’re lookin’ better every day!” I, however, try not to look in a mirror, but when I do I find myself saying, right out loud: “Hey doofus, what kind of stupid things are you going to do today?” Oh, and did I mention the father-in-law played more than 130 nine-hole rounds of golf last summer, parring the course several times and getting his fifth lifetime hole-in-one? I played five times, lost 14 golf balls and had to use a calculator to compute my score. Oh, and did I mention that my father-in-law is 86 years old? I’m not. Coincidence?
I certainly believe in the power of positive thinking, I just have a hard time pulling it off sometimes. Especially when many of my days these days are the very definition of a “Gong Show”.
For example, the other day I had a bit of a noggin thumper on account of spending too much time watching YouTube, so I downed an Advil, whipped open the fridge and put the Advil bottle on a shelf beside the milk. The Advil goes in the cupboard above the microwave. Heaven knows what I’ll find up there on of these days.
And last weekend, the Rotten Kid, the daughter one, flew home for a few days. The Better Half and I dragged ourselves out of the house at, like, 6:30 in the dark cold morning, drove two hours to the airport to pick her up and arrived just in time – just in time for her departure from Vancouver! We had both (honest, it wasn’t just me) read her flight itinerary wrong that was posted on the fridge. Yay! Two-and-a-half hours hanging around an airport!
And if that wasn’t moronic enough, just two weeks before that I crawled reluctantly out of bed and hit the road once again at the ungodly hour of 6:30 a.m. to finally arrive two hours later, all dishevelled and grumpy for a photo assignment in Calgary. “You’re early,” the guy there says, smiling. I glance at my watch ’coz I’m hardly ever early. “Really?” I say proudly. “Yep,” he says. “Twenty-four hours early.”
The Calgary photo shoot, clearly marked in my phone calendar, was for the next day.
But it certainly helps when the Better Half supports me by doing her own share of gong show things. Take the fact that she has a penchant for strolling accidentally into men’s public washrooms. (At least she says it’s accidental.) And I don’t mean just once or twice. The latest time was at the local movie theatre, where she simply followed my right into the men’s and stood there wondering why there were urinals on the wall. Also men in the room.
But the gong show capper happened last week. We had a nice dinner at a nice local restaurant and headed out into a chilly windy parking lot where the BH walked directly to a car, pulled open the door whereupon the lady who was sitting in the passenger seat let out a terrified yell. The BH just stood there, confused, holding the door open as the terrified lady engaged in a tug-of-war, pulling at the door until she managed to slam it shut and lock it. By this time, the BH and I were laughing uncontrollably, the lady and the man in the car, were not.
OK, so it was cold out and there were several black SUVs in the parking lot but my point is, there’s a real Gong Show going on at our house. And the worse part? It’s obviously contagious.
Harley Hay is a writer and filmmaker in Red Deer.