Random thoughts for a day in September

Kirk Ericson | Sep 05, 20240

I enjoy driving up to crowded four-way stops. It illustrates how Americans can still cooperate with one another.

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You know that feeling you get when a cop car is trailing your car and then turns off in another direction? I really, really enjoy that feeling.

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“The best apology is changed behavior.” — Abe Gardner, a volunteer for Overdose Awareness Day, quoted in the Aug. 22 edition of the Journal.

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I miss that time in my life when I’d walk around in public with my babies in my arms. When I’d meet strangers while carrying one of my infants, they always appeared to assume the best of me.

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How come when a white person commits an act of terrorism, pundits and politicians don’t apply pressure on the whites to denounce the behavior of the white community?

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A recent dream I had: I was at a concert on stage with Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler. He was singing a song called, “Soldier On.” After the song finished, I said to Tyler, “I always thought you were singing ‘solder on’ in that song.” He laughed. “Nope. It’s soldier.” I got off stage, sat down in the crowd, turned, and came face-to-face with the musician Jackson Browne. I asked him about what Tyler told me. He smiled. “He’s playing with you,” Browne told me. “He really is singing ‘solder on.’ ”

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We have 22 coffee cups in our kitchen cupboard. We’ve never had 22 people over for coffee at the same time, but if we do, we’re ready.

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An expression heard on a sunny day from Adi, a 21-year-old woman. She was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and told me, sarcastically, “Sun’s out, guns out.” It refers to men who like to show off their biceps on a sunny day. There’s a corollary saying for women: “Sun’s out, buns out.”

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Living room couches aim to seduce us into unhealthful inactivity, much like the Sirens in Greek mythology tried to entrap Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s “Odyssey.” Most of us cannot resist the siren call of the couch.

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A helpful household hint: Use dishwashing soap for your cleaning needs. Dilute it with water in a spray bottle and use it to clean counters, toilets, bathtubs and windows. It also kills carpenter and sugar ants in the house. You’ll have no need for Mr. Clean, Windex, Clorox, Lysol, OxiClean, Simple Green or Spic and Span. Or Raid.

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I was in a store recently when a little kid started bawling because he wasn’t getting what he wanted. It made me laugh out loud, maybe because of the absurd distance between the pain that kid was feeling and the magnitude of pain that adulthood has in store for us.

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July and August are the one-clothing-layer months. In September, we in Western Washington shift to two-layer season, then three, and the next thing we know, we’re entombed in four-layer season.

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We must concede to the damned demands of commerce.

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In medicine, there’s a term called “incision discomfort.” It describes the pain people get around the space where cuts were made.

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“Moreish” is an adjective that describes the sensation of eating a food that makes you want to eat more of it. Potato chips are a common example of that. It’s a real entry in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Here’s a line from The Guardian newspaper published in 2015: “All the moreish foods and drinks seem to be bad for us.”

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Do you ever get angry at your algorithm?

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Seeing someone reading a book in public cheers me up.

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I once asked one of my sons what he thought of something that was current in our culture. He replied, “Oh, will I be speaking for my entire generation?”