This Time I Mean It, I Think
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
I lost a column. I know, I know, when a person reaches the mid-point in their life, he, she, or it, should expect to have little lapses in memory when they find themselves, or itself, standing in a bedroom naked holding a snow shovel in one hand and a peanut butter sandwich in the other and wondering how they got there, and more important, who he, she, or it, left the window open during the biggest snowfall in the past twenty years?
That is a normal sign of reaching maturity, but losing a column is serious stuff – especially when that column is his, her, or its, annual resolution announcement. (As you can see, I am having problems with the new LGBTQ+ pronoun rules and to be honest I have no intention of joining the rest of the world in this madness. Dear friends, I will respect your right to choose whatever gender you feel comfortable being, but I’m too old to join your crusade.)
Having said that, I believe I mentioned that I am missing a column. I remember writing it and I am fairly sure I saved it, but I can’t find it and I can’t open every message of hope and inspiration I have ever written since there are roughly 1300 of them.
Hence I have to start this column once again. It seems that it is the duty of columnists everywhere to sit, or sometimes lie down, once a year with a dram of single malt, and rethink the failures and disasters he, she or it, caused over the dying year and set new goals for the future, all the while knowing he, she, or it, did the same thing the year before and several years before that and corrected absolutely nothing.
Nevertheless I’ll try.
Number one: I will attempt to reorganise my filing system so this won’t happen again. It is totally screwed up and it was not my fault. Microsoft, in its never-ending mission to cause mass confusion for seniors everywhere, introduced a new streamlined Microsoft 365 Word program a year or so ago and as they no doubt planned, managed to louse up my filing system, a system that wasn’t all that good in the first place. I now have two different Word systems running on my computer that seem to work at cross-purposes from each other. The new one may be simply excellent for a five year-old who understands these things, but for a man far too many years into his dotage, it is mass confusion. The old Word may not have been the greatest but at least I could find something I wrote twenty minutes before. Granted I know I can haul the damned computer downtown, or call a geek and hand him, her, or it, a hundred bucks and they will find my errant column, but if Bill Gates had left Microsoft Word alone in the first place I wouldn’t be having this problem.
Number two: I may lose a pound or two. I can’t take a chance on dropping much more since I am wearing one of Marlon Brando’s suits from The Godfather and the bum area is a bit baggy already. I wouldn’t want to look ridiculous. I actually dropped a ton a year or two ago but somehow it all came back plus a stone more. (14 pounds in real weight or 6.35 kg for bozos who switched over from Imperial just because someone in Ottawa said we had to)
I hope you don’t remember this, but a few years ago I thought of a wonderful way to force myself to actually lose the weight I promised myself, my wife and my medical practitioners. My doctors had developed the annoying habit of calling in their associates while I was still on the scales and saying odd things, like “That can’t be right, can it?”
What I did was every week I would weigh myself Tuesday morning and print it at the top of my column so all my readers (both of them) could keep track of my progress towards the body beautiful. That worked very well for the first week since I only gained a pound or two, but the second week was a bit of a disaster. I believe that was the week I discovered Rusty Nails (Scotch and Drambuie). There was no third.
Let’s see… no that’s about it. Other than those two things that need tweaking, I am pretty well perfect.
