I feel compelled to point out that the pistachio nut is not the only ‘animated’ food Bill has felt the need to save lately. I found him in the kitchen a couple weeks back scrutinizing Cheetos before eating them. Some he popped into his mouth. Others, he smiled at and laid ever-so-gently into a plastic Gladware container.

“Hey, Buhbee! Don’t throw these away or eat them, OK?”

“Um, OK.”

*beaming* “I’m making a Cheeto-Alphabet!! See, this one is a ‘J’…and here’s a ‘Q’…”

I’m questioning Bill’s sincerity in his decluttering effort. A Cheeto-Alphabet?!?! C’MON!!! And, there they sit atop our refrigerator like little stale orange donuts.

The belly button. I have no excuse for that except that I couldn’t see the surface of the shelf that it was on because it was up too high. (Hey, Jill! That probably means you haven’t dusted up there since Sam’s button fell off circa December 2007, huh? You are correct.)

I was out running errands the other day, and I realized that I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. I thought about it, but decided that was okay. I was just going to Jiffy Lube, and who gets into an accident just going to Jiffy Lube? I’ve never heard of anyone, and I’ve known dozens of people. None of the numerous accidents I was personally the cause of in my teenage years ever occurred while any of the litigants were enroute to Jiffy Lube. I wonder if there’s ever been a study on this phenomenon.

Still, putting on my belt is win-win. I should just do it. But then I’ll have to reach over and find it while driving, and is that really so safe? 

A few blocks after this inner debate, in the middle lane, I came up on one of those temporary road signs, the kind that has its own tires and tells you in words made up of yellow lightbulbs when lanes are closed ahead. Today, this one was flashing a message that read simply:

SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES

Huh. It blinked this message several times as I passed it, and I glanced at the back of it in my rearview, reflecting on the weird timing of the thing. If I got into an accident now, that sign would be a pretty colorful detail I could add to the story I’d tell people about the moments leading up to the wrecking of my truck. Unless of course I couldn’t tell the story, because of the injuries I’d sustained due to the fact that I wasn’t wearing a SEATBELT, therefore not allowing mine to SAVE my LIFE. Nobody would even know, just me and the blinking yellow bulbs, who had tried to warn me, and whose warning I’d chosen to ignore. So maybe I’d better belt up, after all.

Because it was also kind of weird that it was in the middle lane, just sitting there, out of place and kind of obstructing traffic, a little. And if you were trying to turn into Kinkos, kind of obstructing traffic, a lot.

Maybe it was a sign… and not just an actual sign, in the literal sense. What if it had been placed there specifically for me? Yeah. From someone in the future who knew that I was on my way to an accident, and this was their attempt to help me out? This flashing roadsign was his one shot to let me know that SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES, and that I should definitely be giving mine its chance to step up and do that. What if, for some murky time-traveling-related reasons, he couldn’t communicate with me directly, or ironically, he was pressed for time, and this rolling bank sign was the only means he had to communicate to me the danger I was heading toward?

What if this well-intentioned… ‘Futureboy’ was sitting in front of a viewscreen hundreds of years from now, watching me ignore his sign. What if he was thumping his balled fists onto some crazy future table that I could never understand, and yelling “C’mon! Idiot! Buckle uuuuuup!”, and maybe even spraying a little spittle onto his screen. And if that was happening, then it was okay, because maybe in the future, there are little spittle-cleaning nanobots that spring to life, push off against the side of the screen like a bloom of rolling pinpoints, and like scores of microscopic figure skaters, clean off the foreign saliva. Tiny single-minded scrubbing bubbles.

But he wouldn’t even notice them, because he’s so used to cool future stuff like that… stuff that would give you or me a heart attack if we saw it. Maybe he wasn’t even looking at a viewscreen at all, but instead, had an old yellowed newspaper spread out in front of him, and he was waiting to see if the headline would change from “Local Man T-Boned and Killed by Meat Delivery Truck” to “Meat Delivery Truck Overturns, T-Bones Everywhere”.

Actually, that’s not too logical. I mean, if Futureboy were truly trying to save my life, and the flashing road sign were his only means of communication, wouldn’t it make more sense to spell out something like:

BUCKLE UP BILL

It’s shorter, more personal, and impossible to ignore. If I’d seen something like that flashing in amber yellow, I can guarantee you there would have been no inner dialogue… no debate. I’d have been fumbling with that belt so fast it would have looked like I was trying to put a fire out on my shoulder. But it didn’t say that. It only said:

SEATBELTS SAVE LIVES

So. Future-Bill-Saving-Boy scenario is probably not a reasonable assumption to make. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maaaaaaybe…. maybe it was placed there by, I don’t know, the state highway commission. Or some seatbelt-use advocacy group… something like that. Maybe they were just trying to get the message across that seatbelts save lives. And this was their way to tell people that.

Once, my Basset Hound Gordon ate not a seatbelt, but an entire bag of Pepperidge Farms Cinnamon Swirl Bread. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999 - a year before Jill and I met. While everyone else in the world was preoccupied with the Y2K bug and was nervously eyeballing the sky for falling planes, I was nervously eyeballing my beloved hound attempting to digest plastic. He was lying down, sitting up, and lying down again, unable to get comfortable, and drooling like a broken spigot.

Gordon had followed his sniffing nose into the kitchen and bellied-up to the counter, then gulped down that loaf like a snake swallowing an egg. He’d left no evidence that bag full of tasty bread had ever existed - not a twist-tie; not a raisin - just some slobber next to the sink, pointing toward his escape route like a mutely accusing finger. And it wasn’t just a single bag that went down Gordon, Pepperidge Farms likes to double-wrap their Swirl, with both a bag, and a cellophane inner wrapping.

Over the course of several days, and during several trips to the vet’s office, it became anchored in his stomach and nothing seemed to be able to dislodge it. Not even two tubes of the stuff my vet normally prescribed to grease up the inside of cats that needed to pass particularly hairy balls. One tube of that stuff will last your average cat about eight years, and on the vet’s orders, I wrung two entire tubes of it down Gordon’s throat in a single night.

The shit was rolling out of poor Gordon like oiled smoke, but no bag.

For one perfectly awful moment, I had the irrational and horrifying thought that it would be semi-plausible for me to just reach down into his gullet, with the warm, wet curtains of his throat gripping my forearm like a blood pressure cuff, grab the end of the goddamn bag, and give it a good yank. If I did it fast enough and got out of there, maybe things would be okay. I shuddered and quickly pushed that image from my mind.

He eventually passed it, not through his puffy, laugh-inducingly large dog anus (seriously, it looked like a puckered ditch), but through a 6-inch opening in his abdomen. They had put Gordon under, scoped him, and made the determination that it wasn’t going to come out any other way. They were going to have to cut it out of him, or he was going to die. So, over the howling protests of my checking account, off Gordon went, to be indignantly shaved and cut into, yet again.

They took him about thirty miles away to a place called simply “The Farm”. He made it through the surgery fine, and was in hound recovery for three days. They had visiting hours, so I went down to see the old boy. I took Charlie, my other Basset, with me. We went inside, and found Gordon lying on his side in a large, roomy wall-kennel on several clean, folded blankets. They opened his wire door, and he rose on wobbly feet and came out to us. Whoever had been on dog-shaving duty the evening before had either been a little unsure, or a lot overzealous. The bald patch on G’s stomach was so far-reaching and grand that the sides of it almost touched and overlapped up over his back. His newly-exposed skin was baby-rat pink and he had black patches that didn’t quite follow the patterns of black fur he had when not shaved. But Gordon didn’t follow the rules, not even the rules of nature.

I crouched, and he stopped walking when his nose bumped into me, like a blind cow against a barbed-wire fence. I noticed that pitifully, he was hooked up to an IV, which trailed from one bald leg, across the smooth concrete floor, and back into his kennel. On his stomach was a clean, straight incision, pinched and folded a little at the ends, and bristling with stitches that looked a chorus line of spider legs.

At this point, it all became too much for Charlie, and she began to honk.

If you’ve never heard a honking Basset Hound, then you can’t really appreciate what I was dealing with. She was honking and trembling and honking, and even the normally stoic Gordon perked up his ears and began looking around curiously. Some of the other post-op animals were also starting to find their feet inside their cages, and one of the techs quickly came over. I asked him if he could watch Gordon for a minute while I took Charlie outside.

When we got outdoors, she started to unclench, and the honking ticked back down and settled on kind of a yipping whine.

I put her back into my car, at the time a sweet 1987 powder-blue Chrysler LeBaron. It being early January, I knew there would be no danger in leaving her there while I went back inside to pet Gordon for a few minutes and see him back into his cage.

Characteristically, Gordon was facing in the wrong direction when I went back in, and he had never looked so much like a half-bald, swayback donkey to me as he did in that moment. I grabbed handfuls of his loose, Bassety rolls of extra skin, said my goodbyes for the day, and went back out to the car. When I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was that Charlie was now in the backseat, and staring at me, wide-eyed. The second thing I noticed was that she had shit copiously all over both the driver’s side seat and its unspooled seatbelt.

That was a seatbelt that wasn’t doing anyone any good.

So… Futureboy. If you’re poring over old blog entries from 2008, and you happen to come across this one, how about forgetting about the unsolicited public-service safety announcement? Give me something I can actually use. Like:

PUSH THE BREAD BACK FURTHER ON THE COUNTER, ASS

Bill: “Do you hear that buzzing noise? I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”

Jill: “I’ll tell you where it’s coming from. It’s coming from that motherfucking toy phone on Sam’s saucer. The batteries are dying.”

Bill: “That’s annoying. How do you even change them?”

Jill: “I don’t know.”

I was watching television recently, and Peter Walsh, organizational guru of “Clean Sweep” and “Oprah” fame, was on, breaking down a woman’s disorganized life like a shotgun, then holding up the pieces for her to see and explaining all the underlying reasons behind her disorganization. Explaining why her inability to prove the existence of a couch in her living room was really just a symptom of a much larger problem. 

To the crying woman, sitting in a kitchen filled with boxes, he said, “you save things for one of two reasons - either a thing has sentimental value, and you keep it, or you think you’re going to need it someday, so you keep it”. He accentuated each point by jabbing the air with a potato masher. Or maybe it was a whisk. The specifics don’t really matter, because I’m paraphrasing anyway.

Preach it, Peter.

I silently appreciated his clear manner of illustrating each problem, and the insightful language he used to bring her to their solutions. He’s one-part closet organizer and two-parts psychologist. And he was peeling this woman like an onion. This silly, disorganized woman, who had so much crap in her house that she…

Suddenly, I had the feeling that I was not alone in the room; I had the feeling that someone was looking at me. This really shouldn’t have been that strange, as Jill was sitting on the couch directly to my left, and she was looking at me. I slowly turned towards her and met her gaze, which was unflinching, slightly accusatory, and firmly fixed upon me. It was one of those looks that could make you say at least three stupid things before she blinked. One of those looks that was saying that Peter was right, and that if he were here, she would totally tell him that I keep a can of egg nog in the basement that I’ve been saving since 1993. A look that said that the woman in the kitchen was actually the man on the couch, sitting next to her, blinking and trying not to say stupid things.

I had no defense, so I simply smiled at her.

There was no denying it, because I do have a can of egg nog in the basement that’s a teenager. In fact, even as correct and true as Peter’s assessment was as to why we save things, the nog doesn’t really fall into either of his two categories. I couldn’t tell you exactly when or where I got that can of egg nog. One day, I just noticed it, and its origins were no more than the faint memory of a dim recollection.

When I was a kid, I remember watching an interview with a guy who’d lost several hundred pounds on an ‘all liquid’ diet. For months, he’d eaten nothing solid, and instead drank only shakes or a thin broth.

“So for seven months, you ate absolutely nothing?” asked the incredulous interviewer.

“Well, there was one time, I realized that I had a salty taste in my mouth, so I think I might have eaten some crackers. But I don’t remember doing it,” the man had answered.

And that’s the nog: a salty taste in my memory that one day left me standing in my kitchen, wondering why I was holding a can of egg nog that was so far past its expiration date. Maybe I’d wanted to save it because it was so old when I first became aware of it. But in any case, it was unassociated with any good times or special memories, so sentimentality is out.

That leaves practicality. Will I ever need it… this antiquated nog? I don’t think so. If I ever did open it, I’m pretty sure it would softly hiss, then slide slowly out like white cranberry jelly, still holding the shape of the inside of the can even as it plopped out wetly onto the countertop.

Each time I find it again, I wonder what I’ll do with it. The last four or five times I’ve come across it, the best reason I can come up with to keep it is that one day, one of my great-grand children could take it onto whatever passes for the 2099 versions of Jay Leno or Regis, and produce it with a flourish to the amazement and delight of a post-apocalyptic audience, sitting attentively around their piles of burning tires. And as far as reasons to keep something go, that one shouldn’t really count.

But I save many, many things, and my reasons for doing so aren’t always valid. At least not to anyone who doesn’t have to wait for their dinner to get pushed into their cell at the end of a broomstick.

A small sampling of the things I’ve saved that defy convention, logic, decorum, and at least three laws regarding the disposal of hazardous biowaste are:

• My wisdom teeth.
• A tooth from my beloved Basset Hound Gordon, which through a series of zany, madcap misadventures, ended up in a batch of my father’s Thanksgiving Oyster Stew.
• Approximately 42 pounds of loose cassette tapes, featuring assorted K-Tel compilations, various individually-purchased cassette singles, and no fewer than 3 copies of Baltimora’s ‘Tarzan Boy’ album.
• Every Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve for the last 19 years.
• The world’s ugliest tie collection, truly.
• Magazines I have never, and will never read.
• Approximately 150 broken and empty frames.
• Every greeting card and letter I’ve ever received… ever.
• A cinderblock-sized stack of Ricky’s Rice Bowl receipts.
• The hot dog chair.

These are all posts for a different day… each of them, and more.

For years, I saved cups beneath my desk at work. My best reason for keeping them was that one day, I was going to make something… like a suit, maybe. A cup suit. I envisioned myself marching into some future Halloween party like the Michelin Man, if the Michelin Man were made of red soda cups. Everyone would turn towards the door, and I’d just be standing there - a giant pile of cups with eyeholes - my hands on my hips, not that you could tell. No one would say a word. Shocked, someone would drop a cup of something, and I’d pluck a new one from myself like some strange tree picking its own fruit, and say, “Need a new cup?”

And everyone would start clapping, and someone would shake my hand and pat me on the back of the cups and say, “It was so worth it, man, saving all those cups!”

But that never happened. Halloweens came, and Halloweens went, and the closest I ever came to using those cups for anything was that one year I went as a garbage bag filled with various things, and cups were among them. Oh, and I taped receipts to my face. And when that party was over, I gingerly removed all the cups, restacked them, and brought them back to my desk for further saving.

Until one day, I decided that I needed to lose even more weight than Liquid Diet himself, and I threw them away. I documented it here, and that made it easier. Suddenly, I realized that I could do away with a great many things in the same manner. I admitted to myself that I would never use these items for any giant, complex reasons or to moderately impress future generations of talk show audiences, even twice removed.

So I’m going to purge our lives of these things, and tell you about it here, whether anyone cares or not.

Documenting these things and posting them here will be my new reason for saving these items. Except that instead of saving them just to save them, I’ll be saving them to get rid of them, the latter of which is what you have to do to get rid of things, by definition. But I’ll still have saved them, after a fashion, as I can always come here to look at them.

And their being here won’t interfere with Jill’s ability to walk across a room, open a closet, or make her all mad and… rational whenever she opens the downstairs fridge. 

And maybe the next time Peter Walsh says something insightful, she won’t stare at me. But if she does, it will be with that ‘I-love-my-man’ look, and we can raise our cups in a toast to self-awareness, and a willingness to cut the bonds of sentimentality, unrealized practicality, and foolish pursuits.

And when we do, it will be with regular cups that we may or may not throw away, because we could totally keep them or we could totally throw them away; we aren’t bound to them by some twisted and misplaced sense of nostaglia or purpose, and therefore don’t really need to save them.

Unless Jill wants to.

I don’t remember my mom taping this to the fridge.

Recently, while cleaning out the area beneath my desk, I came across several soda cups. And by “several”, I mean 867. No, really… I literally had 867 cups under my desk. And by “literally”, I mean “free from embellishment or exaggeration”. Eight-hundred-and-sixty-seven… just 133 shy of 1,000.

Sitting on the floor and holding a stack of cups in each hand, I had a brief moment of head-tilting clarity. Something suddenly occurred to me that has no doubt been occurring to many of my coworkers for the last 866 cups:

“Dude. Why are there so many cups under your desk?”

I suddenly saw myself through the eyes of someone disconnected from the cups. I saw myself swimming through piles of loose cups like Scrooge McDuck swimming through his piles of money. I saw myself as an old man, alienated from my family and complaining about them to colorfully-decorated stacks of cups, seated around a long table. I saw myself wearing a large hat made of cups, flattening cups and laughing. I saw myself drinking, strangely, not from a cup, but from a dishwashing sponge, which is something someone might do when they’re batshit crazy from all the cups, which start out under your desk at work, but eventually take over everything else.

I saw myself on Oprah, and Jill was crying, and Oprah was shaking her head while they rolled footage of a bulldozer pulling down a wall at our house, and cups spilling out into the yard.

Dude…

I was like a zombie lurching to a surprised stop and asking, “Whoa. I’ve been eating WHAT ?”.

…why are there so many…

I was a dog, suddenly self-aware and wide-eyed, slowly removing my tongue from beneath my tail and looking around balefully. 

…cups under your desk?

I was a drone, disconnected from the Borg collective, and blinking rapidly with dawning realization.

I had to act quickly, before I lost my focus and sudden awareness. I had to act while I was still un-undead, un-dog, and un-connected… while the whole cup thing made as much sense as eating brains, picking a fight with Jean-Luc Picard, or tonguing my own asshole.

I suddenly felt like I had to lose some weight. Not from around my midsection, but from the middle of my head. I had to lose several hundred cups that have been weighing me down. I decided to throw them away… all of them, to a cup.

And so they went, into the shitcan.

“Dude. Why are there so many cups in that shitcan?”

Over the course of the afternoon, several people saw the long stacks there, heaped like cordwood and leaning like pairs of giant chopsticks out of the trash, and stopped by to see if I was really throwing them away. To see if I had come to my senses, or if something terrible had happened to me. One person called me on the phone to ask if I was okay. At least, that’s what I think she asked - she was laughing pretty hard, and I think there were other people in her office.

I peeked around the corner at the trashcan several times that afternoon, but resisted the urge to rescue them. I ended up leaving for the day, ignoring them as I strode past, thereby resigning them to their fate there in the can.

I suspect there were several colorful phrases uttered in Spanish that night when the cleaning woman came upon that heaping pile of cups, growing from the garbage like some kind of telescoping monster-plant.

Note: The previous remark is not meant to generalize or stereotype all cleaning women as being Hispanic. I say that because the specific woman who cleans our office is Hispanic. Sometimes when I’m there late, she asks me about my pictures of the boys, and she laughs at my butchery of common Spanish words and phrases, such as “muchachos“, “lápiz“, and “¿Usted ha visto mis muchas tazas finas de la soda?“.

Regardless, the next day they were gone, and I feel a lot lighter without them.

Literally. 

Soda Cups, 2008
28″ x 56″
Depicts 867 soda cups, the number used by Bill every 8 years