First-World Loss and Grief

We'll always have the memories.
And the phone bills.

I lost my phone the other day.

At the time, I assumed I would eventually find the thing. After all, I've lost-then-found just about everything I own, including:

    •    Assorted remote control devices
    •    My prescription sunglasses
    •    My regular glasses
    •    Notebooks of various sizes
    •    A terrible incomplete draft of a terrible incomplete novel
    •    Cables to connect the cell phone to other devices
    •    Socks
    •    My wallet
    •    Belts
    •    Keys
    •    Pens
    •    Pants
    •    The same cellphone that I eventually lost forever

And as soon as I realized it was missing, I knew it was lost. Like, forever. I was at work and completing my afternoon visit to the bathroom — the one on the other side of the building near where the vice presidents and their minions sit because it’s a little more private and the extra walk is good exercise or at least that’s what I tell myself even though the real reason is that it kills more time than using the facility just around the corner from the prison cell where I toil — and I’d placed it next to the sink as I washed my hands.

Meanwhile, on One of My Other Blogs...

...I've made a couple of updates to my music blog, The A-Plus. I review (by "review" I mean "discuss the Robert Christgau review while offering my own uninformed observations about") the Randy Newman album 12 Songs, plus I describe some of the ways in which Christgau uses the word lubricious.

Scintillating stuff, I'm certain. Check it out!

The Time I Was Almost Possibly Horribly Assaulted by Frat Guys

His dying regret was being unable to personally
run over Hitler with his wheelchair.

Franklin Roosevelt once said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Considering FDR lived most of his adult life in a wheelchair while putting himself through four presidential elections and carrying on at least one affair while married to a cousin who also happened to be Eleanor Roosevelt, the guy clearly was one of the more fearless people who ever lived.

But I've had fear. Several kinds:

• The fear that the angry black cricket in my basement will locate me before I locate it. 
• The fear at Disney World during the Tower of Terror ride, which required special tools to pry my carpal-tunnel-locked grip on the so-called safety bar.
• The fear in bed, haunted with the visions of Nazi face-melting the night after I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The kind of fear I'm writing about today is a different kind of fear, a fear you experience right before something really really horrible is going to happen. That something hasn't happened yet, but it's the anticipation that ratchets up the horror.

Like Pulling Teeth, or, uh, Fixing Them

Right now, living alone, it's as if I'm not the father.

Last I blogged, a tooth that was bothering me for some time finally chipped on Sunday, my first full day living alone while the wife and kids relax (read: drive each other crazy) in Florida. On Monday I was able to secure an appointment with my dentist for the following day.

Unfortunately, the only time that I could snag was at 12:30pm, and smack-in-the-middle-of-the-day appointments usually mean I have to burn a personal day. But I was permitted the rare option of working at home, which meant I was kept company in the morning by Maury Povitch and his time-honored techniques of dispelling the ambiguity of disputed paternity. One of the episodes on this particular day was called, and I'm not kidding but I wish I was, "Your Baby Doesn't Have 12 Fingers...He Can't Be My Son!"

Spoiler alert: Mr. Dozenfingers was right.

This Is Why I Shouldn't Be Left Home Alone

Yes, they made a fourth one. With French
Stewart as a robber. French Stewart!

So. My kids are with the in-laws in Florida for a month, and the wife joined them in the Sunshine State for the next two weeks, meaning I've 10 days by myself.

Ten days. By myself.

For some guys, a week and a half without the wife and kids would be a blur of cigars, strip clubs, and shotguns. (All right, maybe not for you, specifically, but you get the idea.)

But for me, however, things haven't gone off to such a great start.

I should mention that the last time I was left alone, Mrs. The Anthony Show and her friend went backpacking through Europe — this was less than a year into our marriage, and we didn't have kids yet — and one night I lost track of how much angel-hair pasta I was inhaling while watching a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond and discovered I had overeaten so much that it felt as if the pasta was backing up from my stomach through my throat.

In other words, I can't go very long without adult supervision.

Light Fuse; Get Away

NOT what my neighborhood fireworks
shows were like.

The Fourth of July — or, as we sometimes call it, July Fourth — doesn't excite me the way it did when I was much younger. This year it means I'm off from work and I might go to the beach in the morning and a party in the afternoon and I will likely get drunk, so it's not that bad, but still, the fireworks shows don't exactly light my fuse.

During the typical summer vacation that I enjoyed between the ages of six and fifteen — the years after I was first allowed to roam the neighborhood sans grownup and before I started working — July 4 marked one of the few milestones in a season when every day seemed to blend into another.

The Time I Almost Got Fired From My Job in High School

This can get you in a lot of trouble.

Hi! It's been a while, yes? Well, let's get right to it.

When you're an adult and you work in a field where you're an "at-will" employee — meaning you can get canned for pretty much any reason, and you don't have the backing of a powerful tax-enhanced union that guarantees job security and mandated break times — you can never be very confident when it comes to job stability.

I've had three situations involving job loss or potential job loss: