You guys know exactly which deficiency I’m talking about.  That’s right, I can’t keep track of anything.

Our first apartment as newlyweds was so small our phone number only had five digits.  We had to buy our furniture from the Mattel Barbie Dreamhouse ™ collection.  The oven (a masterpiece of industrial miniaturization) couldn’t actually accommodate a regular sized cookie sheet or cake pan.  All of our desserts looked like petit-fours and we had Cornish Game Hens instead of roast chicken.

Understand that we inhabited something with less actual living space than most recreational vehicles.  It should have been impossible for me to lose track of anything, let alone an actual pair of pants.

In an effort to be helpful to my new bride, I took one load of clothes to the laundromat.  I washed them, dried them, and never-ever left site of the machines and returned home short one pair of slacks.  Returning to the scene of the crime did no good.  The pants were lost forever … until they turned up neatly folded (and still dirty) in my drawer a week later.

I floated various explanations — including extra-terrestrials and government conspiracies — but my beloved wasn’t buying any of them.  The mixture of pity and sorrow in her eyes told me that knew she’d said, “I do” to a defective husband.

She’s adapted well over the years, though.  At the exact moment the pants turned up, she clearly realized she was going to have to be the memory for the family.  This meant she’d have to know all of the important birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays.  My brain retained that kind of information the same way a strawberry carton retains water.

To aid me (and give me a fighting chance to remember her birthday and our anniversary) she purchased a wall calendar and meticulously filled in dates with notations about all of the important dates in our family.  I’m sure it would have been a great help had I ever actually remembered to look at it.

Even so, in twenty-one years I’ve never forgotten our Anniversary.  This might be because about two weeks before the actual date she asks, “What would you like to do for our anniversary this year?”

“Um….it’s our fifteenth, right?” I’ll ask just to annoy her.  I know that it’s really more than that.  Eighteenth or nineteenth at least.  She finds that less knee-slappingly funny than I do.  On the other hand, she doesn’t find it face-slappingly annoying so I’ll take what I can get.

  At least once a month somebody in one of our families is celebrating something.  With machine-like efficiency my wife creates an individualized card and puts it in front of me to sign.
“Who is this for?” I’ll ask.

“Our niece,” my wife says. “She’s turning eight.”

“Ah…” Once I know that, the clues are obvious in hindsight.  The card said Happy Eighth Birthday to our favorite niece.

My wife’s memory comes in handy for things other than dates.  At any given moment she knows the stock levels for everything we have in the house.

Let’s say I’m standing in the kitchen looking forlornly into the coffee cannister, wondering how I’ll manage to get a decent morning jolt from the pathetic quarter-teaspoon of grounds left in the bottom.  I could go to the basement larder to see if I can find another brick of coffee, but that would be inefficient.  It’s much easier to holler out, “Honey, do we have any more coffee?”

“Yes.  Two bricks.”

“I can’t find any.”  I can say this confidently without looking because I can never find any.  If I took my wife at her word and went downstairs, the coffee spot on the shelf would be empty.  A heavy layer of dust would indicate that not only was there no coffee now, there hadn’t been any coffee in years; not since before we actually bought the house.
The coffee only appears when my wife names its location.

“Eye level to the right of the door,” she says.  And then the coffee appears.  Right where she told it to.  My suspicion is that she never shops, she simply calls things into existence when we need them.  Except milk.  For some reason I have to go to the store for that.

She performs the same trick with shoes, coats, telephone books, and clean underwear.  In fact, she’s so good that she can do it by remote control.
She’ll be at work, busy helping save lives in the hospital lab and I’ll be trying to locate my favorite argyle sweater, the one she gave me for Christmas.  Thinking she has nothing else to worry about, I’ll call her up.

“Did you look in the middle shelf of the closet?” she’ll ask.

Of course I looked in the middle of the closet, I’ll think.  All I say is, “Yes.”  Any use of sarcasm might interfere with the magic and, besides, sometimes she does the making-it-appear trick and then I just look stupid.

“Try under your beige turtleneck.  The one you never wear even though it looks so good on you.”

I have a beige turtleneck?  If I never wear it, why is it on top of the argyle.  Clearly the whole notion is ridiculous.  Only, when I check, she’s right.

She’s never a know-it-all, but her gift is sometimes annoying.  If she has to be psychic, why can’t it be something useful like knowing the winning lottery numbers or cool like talking to animals?  Still, in truth I’m glad that she has that gift and that I have her.  On my own, I’d be lost.

Getting lost is a guy’s right — a privilege of manhood.  Of course, no guy will ever actually admit to being lost.  Let’s say that some guy sets out for a drive from New York to Boston and winds up in Hawaii.  If anyone challenges him, he’ll say, “It was faster this way.  We avoided the traffic on the 405.”

The fact that the 405 was nowhere near the intended route is irrelevant.  Once a guy goes somewhere, that’s where he always meant to go.  Chris Columbus set out for India and wound up in America.  Would he admit his mistake?  Certainly not.  He told Queen Isabella that it had always been his plan to surprise her by discovering America.

A few thousand years ago, it was harder for guys to get lost.  Most of the time people just walked from one place to another so the place you were going was visible from the place you left.  Even if it wasn’t, you just had to keep walking in a consistent direction and eventually you’d find your destination.  Or you’d starve to death and eventually your mortal remains would be found by some poor fool who was trying to walk to some entirely different destination.

Scripture records that Moses lead the Israelites around the desert for forty years.  With a never-say-lost attitude they eventually found their way into the promised land.  If they had stopped to ask directions from some desert dweller, they’d probably have been lost for eighty years.

Asking directions when you’re lost is usually about as effective as lighting a candle in a tornado.  You’ll either get something incomprehensibly folksy and confoundedly complex.
The folksy-directions guy would have said something like, “The promised land?  Never been there myself, but I hear tell it’s nice.  All you’ve gotta do is go twenty-two-hundred cubits in the direction of Jacob’s Well – you know about Jacob don’t you?  Nice kid, but he married badly that first time.  He shoulda knowed that the old man was gonna trick him.
Anyway, go toward Jacob’s Well until you come to Potiphar’s Oasis.  Can’t miss it.  The paint’s all gone green.  I told him he needed to put down primer first, but he didn’t listen.   After the oasis you turn left and keep heading in that direction until … Hey?  Where’re you going?  I ain’t finished giving you directions yet.”

The Israelites, having realized that they’d all be old and gray by the the time the folksy guy finished and besides they’d never remember it all, decided just to wing it.
Confoundedly complex guy would have given them directions by following the stars and the course of rivers and camel tracks.  I think it must have been one of his descendants who invented map making.

A map is a handy way of taking the real world and reducing it to a set of incomprehensible lines on a piece of paper.  Watch a guy with a map and you’ll see a man deep in conversation with himself.  “Let’s see…if that’s the west coast of France ahead of me then Africa must be to my right!”  And he’ll set off in the wrong direction, completely confident because he’s following the map.

And when he arrives in Norway instead of Africa he’ll say, “It was faster this way.  I avoided the traffic on the 405.”

Map making eventually became an industry with thousands of maps published each year for the express purpose of creating heated discussion among traveling companions.
“We’ll go this way,” the guy will say.  “Right up 89 through Donner Pass.  We can stop along the way for lunch.”

“Wouldn’t it be faster to go up route 222?” his wife will ask.

“What are you nuts?  That’ll take us too close to the 405.  Trust me.”

The beauty of this arrangement is that no matter what route they take, they’ll end up lost.  So the person who “lost” the argument about the map will win in the end because they get all of the “I told you so” privileges.

Unfortunately, modern technology has changed this equation.  We no longer have to plot our own trips.  Just go on-line to one of the many convenient mapping sites and you can get a custom-built map that is guaranteed to get you to your destination … eventually.

Just enter your starting location and ultimate destination and the computer will plot a map for you taking into account traffic patterns, highway construction and probable weather and ensuring that you get the worst of all three.

For those who can’t plan ahead far enough to print out a map before leaving home, there are in-car GPS navigation units.  Some of these even come equipped with a soothing female voice that gives verbal warnings like “turn left at the next intersection” or “slow down you’re going to fast” or “you just missed your turn stupid”.

These units are even easier to use than the mapping programs.  All you have to do is mark your starting location on the screen, look-up your destination in the on-board database, lock it in using your six digit user identification code, set the time and date, agree that you won’t sue the manufacturer if you wind up in a ditch because you were looking at the GPS unit instead of the road, confirm the destination and take off.  Follow these simple steps and you’ll be lost in no time.

Of course, if you do wander off track, you can always pull over at a roadside produce stand and ask directions.  I’m sure the proprietor will be happy to tell you where to go … so long as you don’t mind listening to his opinions about Jacob’s first marriage.

Each time a graduate crossed the stage, a handful of audience members popped up like meerkats emerging from their burrows — except (outside of Disney cartoons) meerkats generally don’t engage in flash photography.  When the next graduate walked, an entirely different set of people popped up.  The whole thing felt more like a runway session at a Milan fashion show than a commencement ceremony.  All that was missing was the bass-heavy music and the lame announcer saying, “Angie is wearing a black gown with a mortarboard hat.  Perfect attire for the new graduate!  Steve has chosen to accent his outfit with honor cords!  Here comes Harry with a daring, backless number and the words ‘Hi Mom’ emblazoned in masking tape on his hat!”

To be fair, at least the guests stayed more-or-less in their seats.  If you’ve been to any kind of public event featuring small children lately you’ve probably noticed that the digital dads all fancy themselves linebackers.

You’ll have a dozen or so kids on a stage trying to remember the words to “America the Beautiful” — Oh beautiful for spacesuit guys and amherst whales and rain. And peppered mountains major suit along the fat-free train!” –  while the moms and grandmas sit nervously while the dads rush the stage.  I don’t know if they’re fulfilling a latent paparazzi fantasy or just completely clueless that they’re trampling other people in their quest for the perfect shot.  Further scientific study is definitely indicated, but good luck finding a scientist willing to put themselves in that kind of danger.  Looking for lost tribes in the Amazon or working with exotic diseases is simple and safe compared to getting between digital dads and their offspring.

Another part of this phenomenon that deserves study is the sheer variety of equipment these guys possess.  If you hid at the back of the stage behind the kids (probably the safest spot in the auditorium) you’d see cameras ranging from the obscenely expensive and complicated (the Pro-Journalist XJQ55ZZZY – now with go-faster stripes) to snapshot cameras (the HomePhoto 25 – featuring a six color LCD screen and a full byte of memory) to the one poor guy who always forgets his camera and whips out his flip-phone.

The actual cost of the camera is usually an indicator of how tough it is to use.  Mr. Flip-phone presses a button and click he’s got a picture.

HomePhoto guy has to wait for his camera to boot up.  (Something that your famous photographers like Ansel Adams, Richard Abadon never had to worry about.  Instead, they were concerned with trivial matters like lighting and mood and composition.)

For professional photo dude, taking a picture is more complicated than operating most modern weapon systems.  With all of the meters, gages, interlocks, bypasses and settings on his camera, it would probably be easier (and faster) for him to sketch the image than it is to take a picture.

If there were a locker room where these guys met before the concert, you just know they’d be slyly checking out everybody else’s equipment and commenting on it.
“Hey,” the guy with the professional rig would sneer at HomePhoto guy, “Nice camera.  Does it come with a matching purse?”

Flip-phone guy would probably sit quietly in a corner and hope nobody noticed him.

The funny thing is, in the dim light of the auditorium, these cameras probably all produce equally lousy pictures.  That’s okay, though, because for the Digital Dads it’s not about the pictures, it’s about being in the best spot.

For the poor kids, it’s a lesson in what it must be like to be a celebrity.  Maybe some good will come from this after all.  If the kids are traumatized enough, they’ll do anything – including actual work – to avoid becoming a Paris Hilton famous-for-being-famous clone.

Unfortunately, the rotten quality of the pictures is inversely proportional to the quantity taken.  With no film to buy or develop, the Digital Dads are free to shoot dozens (or even thousands) of photos without worrying about the cost.  Which would be fine if they didn’t feel compelled to share the pictures with the rest of us.

In the “old days” (pre-digital) if someone wanted to bore you with their photos, they had to invite you over to their house so they could sit beside you on the couch and force you to go through their albums a page at a time.  Or, going back even farther, they’d bring out a carousel slide-projector and you’d get to sit through a hiney-numbing six hours of vacation photos of pay toilets from around the world.

Now the photographer can skip human contact and just post the pictures to an album on the internet.  Then they send you a personalized, automated message which reads:
Dear Friend—I’ve posted some new pictures to my internet album.  I sure hope you like them.  Your friend, the photographer.

When you click on the link in the e-mail you’re automatically taken to a website where you can see the hundreds of low-quality pictures they took.  The only upside is that since you’re home alone, the photographer doesn’t actually know if you’ve looked at the pictures or not.

The other thing you have to remember about digital pictures is that you can’t actually believe what you see.  Once upon a time, modifying a photo took expensive equipment and highly specialized skills.  Now modifying a photo takes an expensive computer and highly specialized skills.  Only, more people seem to be willing to develop the skills on a computer.  A few minutes with a program like Adobe Photoshop or the GIMP, and the Digital Dad can vastly improve the photo by removing people he doesn’t like (mothers-in-law are favorite targets for this treatment), adding people he does (swimsuit models), fixing quality issues (substituting a swimsuit model for his mother-in-law) or helping to set a particular mood (substituting swimsuit models for everyone in the picture).

Even the press has fallen victim to digital guys manipulating pictures.  Not to name names, but the initials of the service involved are “Reuters”.  In a recent famous case, a news photo of an Israeli plane dropping one flare modified to show the plane dropping a swimsuit model.  No, I’m kidding.  It was shown dropping three flares.  But don’t you think the whole thing would have gotten more attention if it had been dropping a swimsuit model?

We might as well get used to this.  The Digital Dads are here to stay.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some photos of my mother-in-law that I need to work on.

At least it was cheap.

According to the label, my ninety-nine dollar investment bought me the Hearthwood Heirloom Chest of Drawers. The full-color photograph showed an elegant piece of furniture with a dark wood-grained finish. You could almost smell the warm, rich scent of old oak.

The inside of the box was a different story. The wood evidently came from the finest pressed-board forests of Europe. The pebbly-brown material had a few chunks of actual wood embedded in it, as if to assert that some portion of the dresser was in some small way related to the illustration on the box. In truth it resembled a thicker form of the paper kindergarteners write on. All it lacked were the dashed blue lines.

The contact-paper veneer (authentic simulated oak wood grain) on the outside of some of the parts did nothing to fool me. It was no more convincing than a politician’s election-year religious conversion. Sure, it looks good, but it has no depth and won’t hold up to any real stress.

I had plenty of time to contemplate the veneer since the first task was to empty the carefully packed box and identify all of the parts. The manufacturer tried to make my task easier by providing a thick book filled with incomprehensible drawings.

Let’s see. If those two holes match the two dots in the picture, then this piece is item ‘J’ the left-side balance flange. Right? Wait, wasn’t this item ‘ZZZ’, the right-side lift gate?

There wasn’t time to ponder this question, though, because I now had to identify the hardware. The hardware comes as hundreds of tiny random metal bits sealed into airtight plastic bags. The manual which had been oh so helpful in identifying the wooden parts also offered assistance with the hardware. One page featured full-size profile illustrations of each item along with the expected quantity. Left-handed grommet – 15. Counter-threaded spacing washer – 278. Spiked Finger-Stabber – 99.

Comparing the actual hardware with the illustrations, I found that the numbers were just approximations. I didn’t have 99 Spiked Finger-Stabbers. I had 101. The extra two must have mutated from Left-handed grommets because I only had 13 of those. There was a helpful long-distance number I could call. Twelve bucks worth of toll calls later, I was talking to someone named “Bob” who had a musical Indian accent and a poor grasp on what I was trying to explain.

“Never mind,” I told him after a fruitless hour of one-way conversation. “I’ll just buy some more at the hardware store.”

“Thank-you,” Bob said brightly. “Have a nice day!”

Nice day? Doing hand-to-hand combat with a piece of furniture which had clearly been developed by a lunatic intent on sharing the madness was hardly my idea of a nice day.

Eighteen dollars and one trip to Home Depot later and I had replaced the missing hardware.

Which left me with no excuse to avoid assembling the thing. The instruction booklet was no more helpful on the subject of construction than it had been on identifying parts. Cryptically, I was supposed to connect panel A to corner brace Q. I followed the instructions blindly, hoping that before my sanity completely slipped away, I’d finish the project.

Things proceeded smoothly until I hit step eight and I realized that I’d installed corner brace Q upside down back in step one. Muttering, I worked backwards through steps two through seven undoing what I’d done. With corner brace Q correctly positioned, I moved forward again.

In a lot of ways building a furniture kit is like taking a long trip following an uncertain map. You end up going down some blind alleys, getting lost, turning around, and heading back the way you came – all in the hopes of eventually arriving at your destination.

In either case – building the furniture or on the road trip – the unseen destination takes on a mythic dimension. Whatever it is, it’s perfect. It has to be. Why else would you go to all of this trouble to get there?

Only, the Hearthwood Heirloom Chest of Drawers was going to be less than perfect. No two of the corners were actually square. The best I could hope for was that all of the weird angles would cancel each other out in some hyper-dimensional mathematical miracle which would make the corners square on average.

I blame the guy who designed it. Assembling the dresser required putting screws into spaces which were inaccessible to anyone with hands larger a Barbie doll’s. Instead of the neat, straight installation shown in the instruction, my screws canted into the wood at a variety of jaunty angles. Instead of military precision, I had hardware that looked like the aftermath of a drunken frat party.

Eventually, after a certain amount of swearing, two more trips for hardware and one for new contact-paper veneer, and another call to my friend Bob – two-hundred and eight dollars more — the dresser was complete. My unique approach to construction has given this dresser a real quality of “individuality”.

It sways in the slightest breeze. Two of the drawers are more decorative than functional. A gap of eight inches shows between the dresser top and the first drawer. One of the drawer pulls is upside down.

If it’s ever stolen (although I can’t imagine anyone desperate enough to steal it), there’ll be no trouble identifying this as my son’s dresser. Except he’ll probably be too embarrassed to claim it.

Oh well, at least it was cheap.
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Attacks of IDS are triggered by things in the environment which frustrate or annoy dads.  For example, someone — let’s pick a hypothetical person at random, say an adolescent male — might put a milk jug back in the refrigerator with a scant sixteenth-of-an-inch of liquid remaining.  Technically speaking, this isn’t really a quantity of milk as much as it is a film of milk!  If it spilled there’d be no need to cry over it because the whole mess could be easily cleaned up with a medium-sized cotton ball.  Now why would anyone do something like that?  Why not drink the rest of the milk?  Why entomb it like a Holy Relic? WHY! TELL ME WHY!

Sorry.  I got a little carried away there.

Virtually all high-level IDS attacks are preceded by low-level incidents of FDS (Frustrated Dad Syndrome) or ADS (Annoyed Dad Syndrome).   These incidents aren’t hard to predict and follow regular, established patterns.  A typical case might involve the unexpected absence of toilet paper in the bathroom.  Dad’s sitting there, when he suddenly realizes that the current roll of toilet paper is a single layer of tissue wrapped around a crumpled paper tube.  Not yet panicked, Dad checks the strategic toilet-paper reserves in the bathroom and finds them empty.  Why would anyone do that to Dad?  How many times have I … I mean “he” … said “When you put the last roll on the holder bring up more toilet paper from the basement?”  Is that so hard?  It’s not like ROCKET SCIENCE FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD.  I MEAN…

Sorry.

Got carried away again.

Some attacks of IDS are quite sudden.  There is little or no warning…

COULD SOMEONE PLEASE CLOSE THAT DOOR?  I’M NOT PAYING TO AIR-CONDITION THE WHOLE STATE!

Oops.

Sorry about that.  It won’t happen again.  I promise.

IDS isn’t a particularly new condition.  In fact, anyone who has a dad has probably witnessed it.  Dad will be going along doing his thing – say using a snowblower, or fixing the transmission on a ’79 Camero, or negotiating a peace settlement between warring nations.  Some part of the process will veer off in an unexpected direction.

The snowblower dies with a dramatic cough worthy of any Academy Award winning actor and then just sits, immobile and unresponsive.  The transmission falls out, right in front of Dad’s unbelieving eyes, and spontaneously converts itself into a pile of useless junk.  One of the warring nations launches a sneak attack on Dad’s country.

Then – BANG – Dad experiences IDS.

Often IDS manifests itself in the use of language which is normally associated with sea folk or members of particularly disreputable motorcycle gangs.  This may be the first time that Dad’s children are exposed to the full extent of his vocabulary.  Given that these same children will grow up to be teenagers, it’s certainly not the last.

Dad may also begin to ask rhetorical questions.  He’ll do this even if he’s alone at the time of the attack.  Researchers aren’t certain as to the reasoning behind these questions, but they feel that understanding and answering these questions may be the key to cracking the IDS riddle.

My own personal experience with IDS goes back to childhood when my father seemed to be obsessed with the location of his tools.  If I borrowed something – a hammer, a screwdriver, a table-mounted reciprocating saw – he expected me to put it back exactly where it came from.  And I mean exactly.  Across the garage wasn’t good enough for him.  If it came out of the toolbox, he wanted it back in the toolbox.  If it came off the peg-board on the wall, he wanted it put back right on top of its spray-painted silhouette.  He failed to see the humor when I traded the rubber mallet and the sledge hammer.

“Do you think tools put themselves away?” he asked, locked full in the grip of an IDS attack.

Well no, I thought, but it’d be cool if they did.

On days that I felt like testing the limits of his vocabulary, I’d say something like that.  Most of the time I kept my mouth shut.

And I started to put the tools back just the way he wanted.

Fortunately, my early exposure to IDS has inoculated me and I’m not a sufferer.  I don’t get frustrated or annoyed by…

WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE SHUT THAT DOOR!  THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I’VE ASKED.  IS IT TOO MUCH TO EXPECT A LITTLE HELP FROM ANYONE AROUND THIS HOUSE?  MIGHT IT BE POSSIBLE FOR ONE OF YOU TO SHOW SOME INITIATIVE AND CLOSE THE &*#$%^$# DOOR!

Sorry.  Sorry.  Just a momentary lapse.  I won’t let it happen again.

There is no cure for IDS.  However, there are effective treatments.  Removing the possible triggers from Dad’s environment has been shown to be very effective.  If people would just be a little considerate around here, things would go a lot better.  Have you looked in the microwave lately?  It looks like something exploded in there!  What were you doing, nuking a critter made of pizza?  What is this dripping from the top?  Cheese?  Cheese stalagmites?  That’s disgusting…whaddya mean stalactites?  Don’t get smart with me!  Just clean the darn microwave when you use it!  Do you think other people want to see that mess? HOW CAN YOU EVEN EAT FOOD THAT CAME OUT OF THERE?

Sorry.

Sadly there’s no real hope for suffers of IDS.  Which means – even more sadly – there’s no hope for the rest of you either.

Time was I could stuff random facts into my brain and fetch them back as easily as picking stones off the ground.  Now when I want to retrieve some tidbit of information – my social security number, one of my many telephone numbers, my children’s names – I have to work with a pick and a shovel to dig it out of my skull.  I’ve gone from a steel-trap mind to the Amazing Teflon Brain.  Nothing sticks anymore.

If you want evidence, look no farther than the cupboards, pantry and storage shed at my house.  I have thousands of dollars worth of things that I’m almost out of.

For example, I have a trimmer I use to beat the edges of my lawn into submission.  Periodically, I have to replace the spool of thick plastic trimming line.  Every time I go to the hardware store I ask myself, “Do I need trimmer line?”

My brain always responds promptly with, “I don’t know.”

To be safe, I buy a spool of line, take it home, and then put it in the shed with the spool I bought the day before.  And the week before.  And several months before.  If this stuff ever goes out of production, I could sell my spools on eBay and retire in comfort to my own personal tropical island.  Cuba might even be in my price range.

And yet I know that next time I go to the hardware store the Amazing Teflon Brain will betray me again and I will come home with another spool.

Much the same phenomena happens with razor blades.  For months I’d been inadvertently stocking up on blades for my favorite razor.  Suddenly all of the stores were out of the blades.  I was very upset because the blade I had been using was growing dull.  It no longer cut so much as it dragged along my face pulling the hairs out individually.  After I shaved my face looked like it had been run through a rosebush.  All I needed was a new blade.

I couldn’t find one, so I switched to a new and inferior brand of razor for a couple of weeks.

When I finally found the blades for my preferred razor, I bought two packages and took them home and put them in the drawer with all of the blades I had before the crisis.
Why couldn’t I have remembered I had blades?  It’s as if my brain is getting back at me; punishing me for the years I’ve spent forcing it to watch Fox television.

My personal favorite memory lapse is when I find myself in the middle of a sentence and I can’t quite get the right word.  I might be in a work meeting saying something like, “It’s clear that this situation is … um … um ….”  Inside I’m frantically clawing through my remaining brain cells like a thief ransacking a house.  Intolerable?  Acceptable?  Nougat-coated? None of the adjectives quite fit.  For that matter, do I even want an adjective?  I know they’re an important part of speech, but I honestly don’t recall what makes them different from nouns or gerunds or cow pies.

On the outside, I’m winding down like a music box at the limit of its spring.  People in the room are staring at me with vague expressions of concern.  One or two join in the game by offering words of their own.

“Unusual?”

“Exciting?”

“Disposable?”

At this point I have completely forgotten the topic of the conversation, so I go with one of the suggestions – usually the suggestion from the youngest person present on the premise that they still have a functional memory and therefore the best chance of being right.

Getting other people to finish my sentences is only one adaptive strategy.  There are others.

I keep lists of things I need to do.  My daily task plans might include things like:

Finish financial report
Check into pricing for equipment
Verify cost on supplies
Clean glasses

No kidding.  Without thinking I actually wrote “Clean glasses” on my list one day.  My glasses sit on the front of my face, between me and the world.  When they’re dirty, my world is hidden behind a film of spots.  Do I really need to write “Clean glasses” on my list?  What’s next “Take breath?” or “Restroom break” or “Stay awake”?

Even so, it took me to the end of the day to clean my glasses and that only happened when I saw it on my list.

Of course the list only works if I take time to write understandable notes.  If my handwriting is off I might find myself contemplating a reminder which reads:  Call to check on panties.
Panties?  Did I mean pastries?  Did I want pastries for something?  Maybe I meant paints.  If only I could remember.

The worst reminders are those which are perfectly legible and completely irrelevant.  Call Joe.  Why?  Is he going to tell me something useful?  If I call, will he know what I wanted?

The Amazing Teflon Brain can be very frustrating sometimes.  Especially because I think it actually does remember all of this stuff.  If it actually doesn’t work, why can it spit back the names of all seven dwarfs, all five Marx brothers, and the complete lyrics of The Ballad of Jed Clampett.  (“Come and listen to a story ’bout a man named Jed. Poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed.)  My brain is sitting up there laughing at me; mentally pulling the rug out from under me.  I wouldn’t mind so much if it let me in on the joke.

Now, what was I talking about?

The relationship lasted about a year before I was bored and ready to move on.  Like most guys, I’m fickle and faithless when it comes to technology.

It starts – at least it started for me – in high school.  I used to hang out with my geek friends reading magazines.  You know the kind…”industry publications”; their pages filled with provocative full-color photos of circuit boards and interfaces.  We told everybody we bought them for the articles, but in truth we were after the hardware pictures.

“Hey,” we’d say slyly, “did you see the latest issue of Byte? They’ve got a sweet S-100 system running a Z80 CPU!”

“Whoa!” somebody else would reply.  “Really?  Let me see that!”

Of course when adults were around we hid the magazines and played it cool by saying things like, “How ’bout those Dodgers?”  (Hint for female readers: When a guy is talking about sports in your presence, he’s not really talking about sports.)

A friend of mine even won an actual computer in a contest.  He was the first among us to get his hands on some real hardware.

It was a Radio Shack TRS-80 (affectionately known as a “Trash 80”).  The smooth, silver plastic case looked like something from a really bad episode of Buck Rogers.  Every time we used it the screen flickered as if the computer was having electronic seizures.  Loading programs in by way of a cassette tape took approximately the length of the last ice age.  In terms of being an actual, usable computer it was only a little better than a chisel and a stone tablet.

And I wanted one so bad it made my teeth ache.

So I did what all guys do when they are pursuing the object of their affection.  I straightened up and got a job.

Six months later I was ready to buy my computer.  I could have gotten one like my friend’s, but I needed one that was better.  I settled for an OSI C1P.  The enameled metal case looked like something from a bad episode of Star Trek.  The screen flickered like a candle in a hurricane.  Cassette loading took longer than most presidential administrations.  As a functional computer it rated just above a pile of dung and a pointed stick.

And I loved it because it was still cooler than the one my friend had.

Then I saw some pictures in a magazine of a tiny, sleek, black computer called a Sinclair ZX-81.  It had everything that mine didn’t.  Where mine was big and clunky, the Sinclair was compact and streamlined.  And memory?  My first computer could barely remember it’s own name, the Sinclair offered an add-on pack that gave it a full 16K of RAM.  I had to have one.

So I did what all guys do when they are pursuing the new object of their affection.  I dumped the old computer and used the money I saved to get the new one.

The bumpy plastic case looked like something from a bad episode of Battlestar Galactica.  The screen flickered like a disco light on steroids.  Cassette loading took as long birthing quadruplets.  As a functional computer it rated just above an abacus.

And I loved it for almost two years.

My lengthy relationship with that particular piece of computer hardware can be explained by my lack of funds.  I didn’t have the money to pursue a new techno-relationship, so I stayed with the one I had.

There were always magazines, though.  With their pictures of new hardware to tempt me with the promise of exciting new experiences – color and sound and exotic interfaces.  Before long it seemed like every new computer had a floppy disk drive.  No geek worth his salt would admit to not having one.  Then came hard disk drives which were even better because they were faster.  Just reading about them was enough to make me sweat in anticipation and desire.

Over the years I’ve lost count of the new computers I’ve bought.   Many of them are gone now, but some have taken up residence in my basement.  When I go down there they whisper to me; How about taking me out again?  We had some good times, didn’t we? I always promise them I’ll take them out again and feel slightly guilty knowing that I don’t really mean it.

Technolust knows no bounds.  It’s not just computers that drive me wild.  Any cool new tech can turn my head.  When GPS units came out, I had to have one.  Never mind that I only ever go hiking on well-marked trails in public places.  Never mind that I can barely operate the GPS and if I had to rely on it for directions I’d probably end up hiking into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  The point is that it is cool tech and so I had to have one.  And one won’t be enough.  I’ve been looking at the pictures in hiking magazines.  The newer GPS units have color and sound and probably hard drives.  Sooner or later I’ll have to get one.

Even my toaster is evidence of my uncontrollable desire for cool tech.  It makes toast and poaches an egg all at the same time.  One glimpse of it in the store and I had to get it.  If I ever saw a toaster that made toast, eggs, and prime-rib, I’d have to have that.

I’ve started reading Good Housekeeping…but only for the articles about toasters.

The slimy critter in question was videotaped gathering up coconut halves from the ocean floor near Australia, cleaning them out, and then using them as a rudimentary form of shelter. I’m no scientist, but watching the video raised several very important questions in my mind. Why were there coconut halves on the ocean floor? Where did the octopus live before he built himself an environmentally-friendly new home? And what kind of interest rate did the octopus get for its new coconut shell house?

In answer to the first question, scientists say that people drop the coconut halves in the ocean. Once the octopus discovered them, it figured out how to use them for shelter. I think I speak for all of us when I say that I’m grateful no one is dropping handguns, explosives or refined uranium in the waters off the Australian coast. The last thing we need is a new terrorist group consisting entirely of cephalopods. If you think pre-flight pat-downs are a pain now, wait until the guy ahead of you in line has eight legs to check.

The reason that scientists got so wound up about the octopus is that tool-use has always been seen as a sign of intelligence; something that marked human beings as different than animals. If animals are starting to use tools, the only remaining difference is that we wear pants. And, let’s face it, off-the-rack plaid trousers or jeans that have a waistline just above the knees doesn’t exactly make the case that we are the smartest creatures on the planet.

We could argue that human beings are still superior because we use more sophisticated tools. Anybody can whip up a quick shelter with a couple of coconut halves, but it takes real intelligence to strip out an imperial hex nut by using a metric socket set. Anthropologists like to point out that there are chimps using sticks to fish termites out of anthills, but if they were really smart they’d invest in the Craftsman ™ 9v Re-chargeable Automatic Termite Retrieval System. Like all cordless tools it would a) make the job much easier and b) have a battery which is incompatible with every other cordless tool ever made.

Really.

Creating incompatible systems seems to be a major pastime for the tool manufacturing industry. I imagine they have entire teams of engineers dedicated to the task of ensuring that no tool is ever compatible with any other tool. This explains the freaky, mutant screwdrivers that keep showing up in hardware stores.

When I was a child we had three TV networks, two types of screwdrivers, and one telephone company. Things were a lot simpler back then. For some reason — possibly as a result of the hole in the ozone layer — screwdrivers started to mutate into weird new varieties including the star-shaped torx, the odd-looking tri-wing, the snake-eyed spanner head, the complicated double hex, and the non-Euclidian Lovecraft-slotted bolt. Half of my tool inventory is now devoted to hundreds of different interchangeable screwdriver heads none of which is just the right size and shape for the screw I’m currently trying to remove. Every new project requires the purchase of a new, special-purpose tool.

I learned this lesson during the first year of my married life. As a bachelor, when something fell apart in my apartment, I just ignored it. Paper towel holders, drawer fronts and even doorknobs could come off and I’d just find a way to work around them or do without. My new bride, though, had definite preferences when it came to living in a space that was both attractive and functional. When two towel holders — one in the upstairs bathroom and one in the kitchen — fell down on the same day my wife insisted that I repair them.

Since we were only newly married she can be forgiven for thinking that I actually possessed the necessary repair skills. I barely even had tools at that point. The only set I owned had been a gift from my brother-in-law, Bernie. James Bond had Q, Batman had Lucius Fox, and I had Bernie. I also had a tool set that included a screwdriver with interchangeable heads and an upstairs towel holder that needed screwed back into the wall.

As it turns out, owning a set of tools didn’t make me a handyman anymore than a tights and a cape would have made me Superman.

Like an assassin assembling a sniper rifle, I snapped the pieces of the screwdriver together, fitted the Phillips-head into the screw, braced my feet and … pushed the screw through the wall. I muttered a few rude words at a volume somewhere between “rock concert” and “fighter jet on final approach.”

“Problem?” my wife asked.

“Just checking for studs,” I mumbled.

“Let me know if you find any,” she said.

Very funny.

That was the moment at which I began to understand the twisted relationship between jobs and tools. Repairing the damage I’d caused was going to require additional tools including a keyhole saw and a spackling knife … and a sanding block … and a paint roller … and a power drill. Patching, taping, spackling, sanding, painting, and drilling kept me busy for two days. My wife stayed clear of the work site until I was done and I proudly showed her what I’d accomplished.

“Thank-you,” she said.

“No sweat,” I said. “Now I’ll get started on the one in the kitchen.”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I fixed it two days ago with a butter knife.”

It was my fault. If I didn’t want to answer highly technical questions from random strangers, I shouldn’t have worn my red fleece vest to the home improvement center. The disaster that happened the day I wore a white shirt and black tie to the Buy More electronics emporium should have been a clue, but maybe I’m a slow learner.

In my defense, it was cold on the morning I went to the home improvement center and my vest is warm and comfortable. It’s also — and I don’t want to underestimate the role this played in the deception that followed — red.

“I’m hanging a flat screen TV. Can you tell me what kind of hardware to use?”

Was he asking me? Was a total stranger really asking me a question about home improvement?

Well, to be fair, only a total stranger would ask me for home repair advice. Anyone who knows me would know that getting my opinion on hardware is about as useful as having a surgeon ask me, “What sort of clamp should I use to resect the posterior cerebral artery in a patient with a rapidly evolving aneurysm?”

“Ummm….a clean one?”

So, I’d gone to the home improvement center to find a new snow shovel and suddenly I was an expert because I happened to be wearing a red vest. I might as well have worn a tutu in the hopes I’d turn into a ballerina.

I started to tell the TV guy that I had no idea, but something about the look in his eye stopped me. He was looking up to me as the man with the answers. It’s hard to resist that kind of admirtion so I did what any self-respecting guy would do in that situation; I made up an answer.

“Is it bigger than thirty-two inches?” I asked.

He nodded proudly. “It’s forty-eight.”

“Ah…that’ll be a heavy one. You’re probably talking about TV that’s at least … let’s see … pi times the circumference of a rectangle multiplied by Planck’s constant … hoo-boy! That TV has got to mass in around three hundred eighteen foot pounds. That’s gonna take some serious mounting hardware. You do have a strong enough bracket, don’t you?”

“I think so. They sold it to me with the TV.”

“Yeah, it’ll probably do, but you’re right to get some new screws. In fact, I’d suggest you use nickel-molybdenum self-anchoring lag bolts, probably with eighteen gauge threads, a number six eye-ring, counter-rotating blades, and a liquid-cooled exhaust system.”

In the time-honored tradition of guys, I was hiding my bitter lack of actual knowledge under a thick, sweet coating of technical mumbo-jumbo. It worked. Stunned, the other guy blinked and asked, “How would I install those?”

“Oh easy.” I was on a roll now, I just needed another gee-whiz term to seal the deal. “Just buy yourself a a lag bolt install-ulator. You’ll find them in the tool aisle.”

As he wandered off, I felt a quiet pride mixed with the sincere hope that he’d get some advice from someone else before he actually tried to install his TV.

Don’t judge me too harshly. I’m not the first guy in history to make something up in answer to a question he knew nothing about. Stonehenge is just the end result of a guy who got overly enthusiastic when someone asked him if he knew how to make a calendar.

Come to think of it, if a brain surgeon actually did ask my opinion about an operation, I’d probably suggest a Kelly clamp because I vaguely recall hearing it on an old episode of M*A*S*H and it sounds very doctor-ish.

Guys want to appear smart the way dogs want to appear friendly. This explains the current international banking crisis. A bunch of guys in nice suits were asked if they knew of any innovative ways to make money. Instead of admitting the truth — pretty much all of really good ways of making money had already been invented — they came up with the idea of making risky loans. They tested the idea with home mortgages and the housing market folded like a lemonade stand in a hurricane. When someone asked why the first idea hadn’t worked, the suit guys came up with an even better idea and loaned billions of dollars to the city of Dubai for construction projects.

When the loans came due, Dubai asked for a little more time to pay up, but assured the suit guys that it “totally promises to pay the money back.”

Based on their track record, the suit guys are probably trying to figure out how to loan trillions of dollars to the planet Pluto. If they manage that, we can expect our first contact with extraterrestrials to be a message telling us they really are going to pay back the bazillions of dollars they owe if we’ll just give them a little more time.

You would think that guys would be smarter about this and stop believing each other. After all, we know that we make stuff up. Shouldn’t that make us suspicious of what other guys say?

You would think so, but you’d be wrong. Just like the politician in The Emperor’s New Clothes who bought an outfit made entirely of empty promises and flattery, we’re easily taken in by a guy who sounds sure of himself. We’ll believe any outrageous idea that’s delivered in a self-assured tone of voice by a guy with a firm handshake and good eye contact. In fact, the more outrageous the better.

If it comes down to choosing between the guy who says he can work out the nature of the universe through quiet contemplation and the guy who says he needs a multi-billion dollar research facility built underground near the Swiss border; we’ll build the Large Hadron Collider every time.

“I can’t eat this,” I said. “The pork chop is completely burned.”

“Not all of it,” my wife said. “Just cut away the burned part and eat what’s left.”

“What’s left is the bone.”

“Then eat the green beans.”

“Burned.”

“The applesauce, then.”

“Burned.”

“The salad.”

“Burned.”

If it actually had been evidence in an arson investigation, the report would probably have read:

Although the exact nature of the accelerant used hasn’t been conclusively determined by laboratory testing, early results point to barbeque sauce; most likely a cheap house brand. What is clear to this investigator is that the perpetrator is obviously vicious, with deeply anti-food tendencies.

“I want send this back,” I said.

“You can’t,” my wife sighed. “You cooked it.”

Sadly, she was right. My cooking skills are easily a match for Simon Cowell’s gifts at diplomacy or Keith Richard’s highly-developed fashion sense. If we had been forced to rely on my cooking, we’d have starved to death years ago.

This is not to say that all guys are lousy cooks. My brother-in-law Bernie is the MacGyver of chefs. Give him a jar of pimentos, an ostrich egg, and a quarter-teaspoon of flour and he’ll whip up a memorable three-course meal including an appetizer, your choice two entrees, and a dessert. In his hands, food tastes good because it wants to. In my hands, it burns because it is ashamed.

If I had to put my finger on the root cause of my cooking problems, I’d have to say that it’s because I never actually learned to cook. When I was in college, I subsisted by focusing my attention on two main food groups; box-shaped foods and can-shaped foods. Things that met my criteria included cereal, microwave meals, and foods that ended in “roni.” Can-shaped foods included soups, fruit, and gourmet pasta meals that ended in “oli.” I was also partial to anything which featured the words “instant”, “simple”, “fast”, or “quick” on the label. The ideal meal would have been called “Fast and Simple Instant Quick Food.” Even if it had been some form of doggie dinner, I’d have eaten it just for the name.

Later I expanded my diet to include the group of “things wrapped in plastic” which included pre-made deli sandwiches, burritos, and tortilla chips. Fortunately, before I moved on to the group called “foods purchased at the odd lot store because they were cheap”, I married an awesome cook. While we were dating, I took precautions to hide my own culinary deficiencies lest she find a more attractive mate. As a result, she tragically asked me to cook for her after we were married.

Specifically, she asked me to grill some chicken wings. I think she suffered from the illusion that grilling is an instinct for guys and that I couldn’t possibly mess up. She was wrong.

While I grilled the wings on a tiny Hibachi by our back steps, I passed the time reading a particularly absorbing book. In fact, I did more reading than actual cooking and when I looked up again the wings were so charred they appeared to have been retrieved from the bottom of a fire pit at a campsite.

My wife — and this is part of the reason I love her — thanked me and actually ate a couple. More incredibly, she took the leftovers to work the next day. As she gnawed her way through the cinders, a steady parade of her co-workers passed through the break room. Finally she asked what they were all doing. One of them sheepishly admitted that they had a pool going about what her meal had been before it was burned.

Really.

I could probably learn to cook if I could learn to decode recipes. Part of the problem is that I went to school during the brief period when the United States flirted with the metric system. Oh sure, the reliable imperial system with its halves and quarters and eighths had stood beside us for decades, but we wanted a fun new system; a system based on the shapely number ten and all of the interesting ways it could be manipulated. For a while, cars had both systems on their speedometers — kilometers per hour and hectares per equinox. Even some road signs toyed with both systems, but the fling didn’t last long and by the eighties we had gone back to the imperial system with its sensible shoes and its reliance on fractions to get the job done.

My teachers always encouraged me to ignore the imperial system in favor of the metric system and, as a result, both systems are incomprehensible to me. As a practical matter, this means I’m incapable of dividing a recipe when I need to make smaller portions. If the recipe feeds eight and calls for a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract, I can’t figure out whether to put in four quarts or two centiliters if I’m making the dish for three people.

Decoding the recipes isn’t purely a mathematical problem, though. There’s also the linguistic component. Suppose I want to make a simple, traditional, French favorite such as boeuf bourguignon avec moi enchante fleur de lis ennui. Once I have the ingredients assembled, I’m called upon to do things like “reduce the sauce”, “fold the batter”, “julienne the fries” or “toad the wet sprocket.” I suspect this is actually a massive joke (sort of like the classic snipe hunt) in which experienced chefs compete to see who can taunt a new cook the longest.

Fortunately, as I mentioned, I married a wonderful cook who is content to prepare most of our meals…or maybe she just does it in self-defense.