Immediately after I say I'm running to the store to buy milk, Mom asks, "What are you going to bring back for dinner tonight?"

"I've made dinner for the past two weeks," I say. "So the question should be what do *you* want to make us for dinner?"

Mom didn't even pause before replying, "I guess we're going out to eat tonight."

By which, it has now been revealed, she meant that I was to order take-out. So now, in addition to my trip to the grocery store, I'm also making a detour to the local barbecue joint.

Me and my big mouth.

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A quick catch-up with my family:

In order to take over the accounting for our rental property, I needed to get the password to our accounting software from my mother. She pulled out a pen and wrote a twenty-five character string on a pink square Post-It. When I commented that it was a little long for a passphrase, she corrected that she hadn't given me the password itself but the mnemonic she uses to remember the password. She proceeded to explain to me what each element represented. However, when I tried to type in the password later, it was denied. Turns out that Mom had mis-remembered her own mnemonic.

My nearly octogenarian father, who suffers from arthritis and COPD so badly that he cannot easily walk to his own mailbox and back, has decided that he wants to take a trip to a beach so that he can watch girls in bikinis. But he won't go back to Panama City, where he used to live, because "they're all assholes," and he won't go to the closest beach, Tybee Island, because "it doesn't have an amusement park." So instead he's planning a trip to Nashville, TN, because "they've got plenty of bars."

My mother's sister's sister-in-law lives behind us, and my aunt frequently visits her to use her swimming pool. Which means my aunt frequently visits our house and uses it as her personal pool house. When I came home from the store the other day, I walked in from the garage to find her standing naked in my kitchen, she screamed, "I thought you would knock first!"

Not so long ago, partially in memory of my father's mother who always said "you have to write letters to get letters," I hand wrote a letter to my father's sister, who lives in Alabama. She eventually replied with an SMS text message and explained that she was much too busy to sit still long enough to write reply letters. But she strongly encouraged me to drive the four hours to her house for a visit when I had the time.

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I was eating lunch while reading the latest Consumer Reports magazine when I suddenly realized that I wasn't reading the Consumer Reports anymore. I was reading the same line over and over because the sentences had stopped making any sense. My first thought was that the article's author must have been having a terrible day because the words were all wrong for constructing a complete thought. But on closer inspection, the words weren't wrong, my ability to recognize them was.

Naturally, I assumed this sudden onset aphasia was a symptom that I was having a stroke. Mom, however, was pretty certain that it was just an oncoming migraine. Mom is usually right about such things, so I did not call 911.

My migraines usually start with tunnel vision and limb numbness, and sure enough, they both came along eventually. After a long rest in front of the TV (playing Olivia Newton-John's Xandau and the final round of a terrible U.S. Open), I awoke feeling, well, "better" isn't the right word, but maybe "relieved" at having moved firmly into the acute headache stage of migraine progression. (As if "relieved" and "acute headache" ever belong in the same sentence.)

The worst part of a migraine is the fact that when one strikes, I have no choice but to do literally nothing for many hours except lie still and wait for it to pass. Sometimes I can sleep through them. Sometimes not. In today's case, it has been 9 hours, and I'm still not 100% (nausea is always among the longest-lingering symptoms for me), but at least I'm mostly functional again. (I'm typing all this, so evidently my brain's Wernicke's area and other language centers are back online. Hooray! I mean, I am typing real words, right? You can read this? Please say you can read this.)

Just to be on the safe side, I'll wait until tomorrow to try reading any more Consumer Reports. That magazine is dangerous.

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Our house guests hadn't been gone for a whole 24 hours before Mom decided that she needed a vacation and headed to Florida, leaving me behind to take care of the dogs. For how long? She wouldn't say.

Which is fine. She needed it. I can't speak for anyone else, but getting our house ready for guests is hard work.

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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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A true story:

WALTER:
Give me a hug.

WALTER'S MOM:
(takes a step back)
Why?

End scene.

Working title: Unconditional Love Is a Myth.

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10/2442. Intruder in the Dust (1949)
Before there was To Kill a Mockingbird.... Actually, it's kind of surprising how much the two stories cover the same ground. Mockingbird does it with more style and grace, but Intruder, rough as it is around the edges, doesn't pull any punches. Good movie.

11/2443. Murder! (1930)
Does anyone ever talk about the worst Hitchcock films? Ok, so it's better than Marnie (and maybe The Trouble with Harry), and, yeah, sure, it's got some clever scenes, but overall I found it terribly, terribly boring with some of the worst written and delivered dialog. (How much of that is due to it being an early talkie?) Yawn.

12/2444. 3 Women (1977)
If there's anything worse than hearing someone describe their dream, it's watching a movie of it. In this case, the dreamer was Robert Altman, and he has filled it with enough "symbols" that he hopes your over-evolved monkey brain will have a field day trying to decipher as opposed to, you know, actually having a narrative or plot or meaning. For example, one of the women obsessed with superficial commercial things has a yellow car (and yes, the importance of the color is called out in the dialogue) and late in the film takes a delivery of Coca-Cola from this truck:

Is this somehow significant? You tell me. And then tell me how you feel about your mother.

13/2445. The Kid (1921)
Maybe I've been selling Charlie Chaplin short all these years. The Kid is actually pretty good cinema, even it if does jerk the tears a little too hard for my tastes in the third act that has a "comedy" dream sequence for no other apparent reason than the main story was just too short. (Obviously, I'm not willing to bury all my hatchets with the Little Tramp.)

14/2446. Appointment with Death (1988)
Watched with Mom. We had both read this Agatha Christie novel and remembered how the murder was committed (the movie certainly isn't shy about telegraphing it) but not the guilty party. It's not one of Christie's best, but any time spent watching Lauren Bacall is time well spent.

More to come.

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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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Note to future Walter: Mom has owned a Ford Escape for six years. At the end of the first three years, the battery died, and I replaced it. It was a total pain in the ass.

In their infinite wisdom, Ford decided to hide the battery deep under the cowling for the windshield wipers, which means that the wiper assembly has to be disassembled before the battery can be removed. Because of the amount of labor involved, my local Advance Auto Parts refused to do it.

I mention all that now only because it's been three years, and the battery died again, and I was wondering how long it had been since the last time I had this particular pain in my ass. Apparently I didn't mention it here on Wriphe.com at the time. I guess I thought I'd remember. (That was awfully careless of you, past Walter!) Therefore, I post this here so that when I look back from 2028, I can see when I last had this particular pain in my ass.

For the record, Mom's beaux changed the battery this time, and he did it by removing the air cleaner assembly in front of the battery instead of trying to take the wiper assembly apart. He says it was a total pain in the ass.

Maybe in 2028, we should just have it towed to a mechanic.

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Mom is participating in her annual college football bowl game pool, where she tries to correctly predict winners against the spread in every bowl game. I never participate myself, but I do always root for her picks.

The first game of the pool was last Saturday's IS4S Salute to Veterans Bowl (formerly the Camellia Bowl) and Mom picked South Alabama to cover 9.5 points. They very nearly did, if only Western Michigan (which has one of the country's worst bowl game winning percentages) hadn't kicked a late field goal to cut the difference to 7 points at game's end. Those dicks!

The question I was asking myself late in the game was whether gambling on the outcome actually made the game more fun. Yes, I cheered when S. Alabama kicked an extra point to go up by 10, but I found myself rooting against W. Michigan's kicker late.

This is exactly why I don't play fantasy football: cheering for or against individual players to compile stats is not nearly as satisfying as pulling for a team to win a game. I'm sure I would have been at least equally entertained by W. Michigan's attempt at a late comeback if I wasn't counting points and waving my fists in the air at the football gods.

Mom never does great with her picks, in large part because she never picks against a team she wants to see win. I think that's wise. And I still agree with picking against Western Michigan in a bowl game, especially since they are now 2-10 all time. Those dicks!

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