Today, while researching how Ron Howard made the decision to quote the myth and not the facts of "Houston, we've had a problem," I realized that more time has passed since the release of the movie Apollo 13 than had passed between the actual events and the movie. By several years, actually.

I distinctly remember thinking about how long ago the JFK assassination was when Oliver Stone made his movie about it while I was in high school. That was just 28 years since the event. It's been 34 years since the movie came out.

And don't even get me started on how I thought the year 1955 was the ancient past when I watched a particular movie released three decades later in 1985, itself now four decades in the rear view mirror.

Obviously, both the past and the future are much closer than I thought.

There's nothing I can do now about my younger self's misimpressions, but obviously I am past due in reevaluating how I interpret the effects of the passage of time on living memory. Maybe the events in that galaxy far, far away didn't happen quite so long ago as I once imagined.

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You might think I'm kidding, but I really did just take this off the refrigerator:

Yes, those are cowboy boots with little jets in the heels. And no, there never was a time in my life when I wasn't obsessed with comic book super heroes.

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You might think that I'd select U2's hit "One" to be among my one word wonders, but that's not my favorite one-word titled U2 song. This is:

Lemon

(Full disclaimer: I'm not particularly a fan of U2. I blame that fact mostly on The Joshua Tree, which just could not be escaped in the late '80s. I'm wired in such a way that if something is really, really popular, I knee-jerk hate it. Sometimes I can eventually overcome that impulse, but with U2, especially after the string of uninterrupted market dominance running The Joshua Tree - Rattle and Hum - Achtung Baby - Zooropa - Pop, not so much. Even today, Bono still irritates me. I think the reason that "Lemon" is my personal favorite of their songs is mostly because of the word itself in the sense of "something that is unsatisfactory or defective." My jam is irony.)

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When I left the neighborhood this morning at 8 AM to take Dad for cataract surgery, there was a fleet of Georgia Power trucks restricting traffic at the entrance to my neighborhood. When I passed back by the neighborhood with Dad in the car 30 minutes later, they were still there. When we came back by 4 hours later, they were still there. I made a mental note to come home by way of the neighborhood's other entrance (which is technically an entrance to the adjacent development, but we share a connecting street on the back side).

But then, on the final leg of this trip, while thinking about where I was going to turn, I drove past the dental office about a mile up the street and got to thinking about how the young hygienist I recently saw at a different dentist's office talked so much that maybe hygienist schools teach students to always be agreeable to clients and prattle to distract them from the scraping and what a funny word "prattle" is and what its etymology might be and how rarely we use the word "prattle" except in the context of hygienists who talk too much and the They Might Be Giants song "Lucky Ball & Chain" except the word repeated in the chorus of that song is actually "rattling"... and then I turned into my regular neighborhood entrance where I usually do and saw the muddy tire tracks on the road and belatedly realized that I had intended to turn elsewhere.

The good news is that the Georgia Power trucks had already left.

The bad news is that I probably shouldn't be allowed to drive a car.

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For the first time in about three decades, I saw a new dentist today.

To be clear, I have seen a dentist at least twice a year for decades; it was just always the same dentist. I started seeing him when I was going to Emory University in the 1990s, and whether I lived in Atlanta, Athens, or Newnan, I still drove to Decatur to pay cash to have Dr. Joe Looper tell me I had new cavities.

Unfortunately (for me, not Joe), he decided to retire this year. Good for him. Even though he's a Tennessee Volunteers alumnus, I hope he enjoys all the time he's going to have on his hands supporting the Vols. I'm personally disappointed, obviously, but my only regret is that he didn't give me a little more notice. He retired barely three weeks before my next scheduled appointment. With all due respect to whoever bought Joe's practice, if I have break in a new dentist, it might as well be someone I don't have to drive two hours to visit.

So today I went to the practice that my father and aunt use, and it was fine. The young hygienist (who graduated during the pandemic from a local high school [that didn't exist when I was in high school] and sort of fell into training for her mother's line of work because she couldn't attend any colleges in person but enjoys being a hygienist, especially the flossing) was friendly and gentle (even during the flossing). And the young dentist, who has a dental degree from a non-SEC school, used a newfangled dental camera to review my aging radiolucent composite fillings before encouraging me to be more attentive to my coffee-stained molars. No cavities were found, and all things considered, the price seemed reasonable enough with their in-network insurance plan.

I have another appointment scheduled for October, but I won't get too attached. After all, I'm only going to have to find a new dentist in about 2055.

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Captain D's is currently running an ad campaign that should be considered a war crime. When my television starts chanting "Fish D'Lish," I have to drive for the remote's mute button before the repetition drives me mad (or madder than I already am, anyway).

Once upon a time, I heard Stephen Colbert suggest that the best way to kill an earworm is to sing a shorter earworm that "cannot loop." His example was "by Mennen" as sung at the end of Speed Stick commercials. John Oliver suggested the "Ricola" yodel, and that's the one that usually works for me. I've been singing "Ricola" a lot lately.

On a marginally related note, I've recently been playing with the Talkback accessibility option on my phone. Theoretically, I could use it to control my phone hands free, but I've been using it to read Wikipedia articles out loud while I walk the dogs. Today I listened to the story of the Second Peloponnesian War. I found it amusing to hear my phone insist on calling the Persian king "Xerxes Eye."

That led me to wonder what Talkback's narrator would call this website, which has a made-up name I brainstormed on a napkin in my first apartment in Athens. Everyone seems to get it wrong on the first try. To my surprise, the phone handled "wriphe" perfectly. (For the record, it's pronounced like "rife," which was Merriam-Webster.com's Word of the Day on Sunday, and I'm going to have to steal their explanation to be another tagline for this site: "Rife Wriphe usually describes things that are very common and often—though not always—bad or unpleasant.")

So of course you know what I tested Talkback on next. Hint: It rhymes with "dish o'fish." What can I say? Advertising works.

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Breaking news! My 2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue, which cost me $1,728.86 in mechanic bills to keep running in 2024, has already cost me an additional $1,254.43 in the first six weeks of 2025 alone (for valve gasket covers, power window assembly switch, and wheel bearings). And it *still* needs that new set of tires. This is becoming a problem.

My first car, by which I mean the first car to which I held the title, was a 1985 Crown Victoria Country Squire station wagon. Mom gave it to me when I went to college. (She bought herself a Mazda Miata. Mid-life crisis much?) I drove it until the transmission broke. It wasn't the only thing on the car not working, and I made the decision to sell it rather than spend thousands I did not have to repair it. We all loved it, and in hindsight, I might have done things differently, but maybe not. I'm sure I really thought I was making the best decision I could at the time.

My second car was a used 1990 Honda Acura. It soon developed a leaky sun roof that was more expensive to repair than the Country Squire's transmission. I didn't fix it, either. Eventually the cabin smelled of mildew which I tried to hide with vanilla air fresheners. You can begin to understand why my fourth car was an open-top 1995 Jeep Wrangler.

(Honorable mention to my third car, a very '90s burgundy and beige pregnant egg, a 1992 Chevrolet Caprice Classic, which I inherited from my late grandmother. I didn't keep it long before selling it to my father after he wrecked whatever his latest car was. I borrowed it back from him for a 24-hour road-trip down to Jacksonville for a Jaguars/Dolphins Monday Night Football game on October 12, 1998. That trip is most memorable for B) the terrible headache I had on the entire 8-hour drive home because my poverty and anxiety kept me from stopping to get anything to eat, and A) my yelling "I'm going to kill him" at the highway patrolman who pulled us over for a broken taillight. The "him" in this case was Dad, who had assured me the car was in perfect condition for driving, but the cop certainly didn't know that. Thankfully, my companion on that trip, Matt, has always been a fast talker, and we're both white.)

The point here is that I really need to start thinking about throwing in the towel on the Oldsmobile. Is it time I draw a line in the sand? How much is too much? If I have to be spending so much money on a car, I'd rather be spending it on the Jeep.

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I received in the mail an envelope with an unexplained check from my bank. I hadn't been expecting a check, so I called the number on the stub to find out why I had received it. The lady who answered the phone, who I'll call Uma, seemed new at her job. She was polite and friendly but completely unable to identify why I had received the check. I should have called the policy department, she said, not the banking department. She kindly proposed to transfer me to the policy department.

However, I had a secondary reason for calling the bank, specifically that I could not use the bank's app to transfer funds into or out of my savings account. I was certain that this was definitely an issue for the banking department, but Uma couldn't identify the source of this problem, either. She proposed transferring me to the IT department for an investigation. Deciding that the mystery check was the bigger issue, I asked Uma to transfer me to the policy department, which she did after encouraging me to have the policy department connect me to IT after I was done there.

Pause for hold music.

The lady answering the phone in the policy department introduced herself — I'll call her Susan — and asked what she could do for me. But when I started to tell her, she warned me that my voice was much too hostile and I needed to calm down immediately. Now, I know I can be both loud and aggressive, but in this case I wasn't trying to be either; I was just curious about a mystery check. I tried to explain that I wasn't mad and if I sounded loud, maybe it was because I had been on a speaker phone during the hold music and now my mouth was too close to the speaker. Susan didn't sound satisfied with my explanation, but she also didn't waste any time tracking down the information that my check was a refund for overpayment of an insurance policy, which, she said, if I had read the letter that accompanied the check, I would have known. Except I didn't get a letter with my check, just a check. Susan blamed this on the banking department.

Mystery solved, I passed along Una's instructions that I should next be transferred to IT. "We don't have a plain IT department," Susan explained. Turns out the company has many different departments that deal with many different techologies, and Susan needed to know which one I wanted so that I didn't get "the runaround." I repeated my conversation with Uma for Susan's benefit, and she decided that I should talk to the website troubleshooting department. That sounded good enough to me. Away I went.

Pause for more of the same hold music.

The woman who answered in the website troubleshooting department, let's call her Alice, asked what my problem was, and I explained that I thought it might be a problem with my savings account not being configured for transfers. Alice must have been an experienced debugger, because she asked me to duplicate the problem on the app and tell her what the error message said exactly. So I did. "There has been a system error," it said. I relayed this information to Alice, and she said this message wasn't particularly helpful.

After poking around a bit more, Alice decided that there wasn't anything *technically* wrong with my account, certainly not my savings account, and that if anyone could solve the problem, it would be the banking department. Runaround averted. Transfer, please.

Pause for even more of the same hold music. It's not even a whole song, just a television jingle that repeats over and over and over. Amazing that Corporate America has found a way to make me miss Muzak.

A calm, deep male voice answered for the banking department, and I'll call this guy Albert. When I explained the problem to Albert, he immediately said, "oh, your savings account must be set as inactive in the system, let me fix that for you." And he did!

Three women to do the job of one man? Insert misogynistic joke of your choice here!

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Loser

When this song was first gaining widespread fame in late 1993, I was urged by my freshman college roommate to call in and request it from local radio. My memory was that I called 99X, because that was the Atlanta station that played this kind of music (as opposed to the heavier 96 Rock or the "classic" rock on Z93) but whoever answered the phone at whatever station I called was really quite dismissive and claimed no idea what the hell I was talking about. Maybe he wasn't just being a dick. (Maybe it was only being played on WREK at the time?) It would be a few more months before "Loser" really broke through to number 1 on the alt charts.

Does anyone even listen to terrestrial radio anymore?

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I type this at 1:28 AM with live weather coverage on WXIA TV telling me that Hurricane Helene is currently a category 2 storm as it passes over Valdosta headed north at about 20 miles per hour. There is minimal wind outside, but based on what I'm seeing, I expect it to pick up soon. That will no doubt bring trouble.

I've mentioned before that my neighborhood has power issues. Case in point, last night, after taking over 3 inches of rain totally unrelated to the hurricane, our power and cable went out. That's right, we were without power for 8 hours the day before a hurricane hit us. There's no telling what the state of our power grid will be by the time you read this.

I write this only to document a novel situation as I wait for the lights to go out again. I don't recall the last time a hurricane passed over Atlanta. I was certainly a Decatur resident when Opal moved through the city in 1995, but I don't remember that storm itself. That might have been the night that a limb fell through the windshield of my station wagon while I was at my girlfriend's apartment in Stone Mountain, but maybe not.

I have friends who remember being trapped in the Pink Pony, a "gentlemen's club," for 24 hours in what is now the city of Brookhaven. Their memories of Opal are much more vivid than mine. (I can only imagine the horrors. I met another friend of mine at The Pony for dinner one night, and a stripper rubbed herself all over my glasses, leaving me blind for the rest of the meal. I'm still irritated about that.)

Opal was 3 decades ago. In 2055, should I live that long, will I remember Helene? I sure hope not. That would mean that things go poorly. No one remembers mundanities. Just strippers.

UPDATE 1:50 PM: Nothing to see here. Helene wandered farther east than expected. Our biggest wind gust has been 11 MPH, and the power never even flickered.

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