Retirement = Blonde Bombshell

I've never been one to fall for get-rich-quick schemes. However, I am one to think up or discover get-rich-quick schemes with little effort. I knew a friend once who told me that he slugged through a dead-end job shortly after college when challenged by a fellow dead-end coworker to concoct a "Million Dollar Idea" every day. Ever since then I've had a flurry of million dollar ideas -the most embarrassing being an invention of a contained area, maybe the size of a closet, that you could put in shopping malls, hotel lobbies, casinos, whatever. This enclosed space would somehow -through use of aluminum foil and high powered antennae -concentrate cell phone signals so as to guarantee a clear connection. Turns out someone already beat me to this, sort of.

They're called phone booths.

Just last week though, I've uncovered another diamond in the economic rough. There exists a commodity, totally legal and readily available, that upon purchase nets me a 140% gain. Not too shabby for an amateur. Of course there is a risk of depreciation and the commodity is solely market driven, but I tell you what, the numbers check out.

Say for instance Ivan the Investor is at his local grocer and notices that one of the many products for sale carries the likeness of a dead yet still marketable celebrity. Ivan the Investor thinks nothing of this item as he has seen it on every visit for the past four years. But being the informed investor that Ivan is, his daily perusal of local media print drags an article about an increasing collectability of said grocery items. Ivan the Investor's interests are piqued.

A quick trip to eBay merits some information on how the open market is taking to this investment, and the numbers spell success. For instance, the item that Ivan can pick up for less than a dinner out is fetching between 40% and 80% above purchase value. Ivan the Investor is now met with a conundrum. Should I a) throw myself wholly to the market and become the repository for a multitude of items or b) let this obvious money maker pass me by?

On one hand, Ivan would have to hold on to the items for a prolonged time because the market has proven that things get better with age, but Ivan's wife isn't one for pack rats. Yet an everyday investment as easy as a trip to the grocery would be too easy to pass. Sure makes that 401(k) look like a bowl of cherries.

Hypothesis aside, I'm going for it. Don't begin to think that I plan on retiring young based on something between the butcher and chili beans, but this is definitely going to be more fun than any quarterly report I've read lately.

Monopoly and Riesling

I can't recall the last time I even attempted to forge through a round of Monopoly, but as of this post-Thanksgiving evening that statement is now a fallacy. The short of it: my wife handed my ass to me wrapped up in St. Charles Place and a hotel.

Monopoly is such an incredibly American game thriving on capitalism, luck, wheeling and dealing. Our game this evening was no different. However, early on we realized that so many of our presconceived Monopolyisms had to be exorcised in order for the game to reach a level of purity that even the Parker Brothers would be appreciative of. Among these

• We finally read the fine print about mortgaging properties. My Lord, it's incredibly similar to real life. How unfair.
• We broke from the childhood tendancy to plop $500 in the middle of the board as a reward for the next roller to hit Free Parking. With all honesty, when was the last time someone ran up to a slumlord and said, "Through no more cosmic chance than a roll of the dice do you, sir, deserve this pile o' cash." It just doesn't happen, and it shan't happen again in our Monopoly universe.
• No more of that, "Hurry up and roll" business that used to get you off the rental hook. If only banks could be fooled the same way opposing NFL teams are when you hurry to run a play before the red flag flies.
• One final difference between the Monopoly of my past and the Monopoly of this evening, we were drinking wine.

The game progressed a bit more speedily than the last games I remember that have to have been more than fifteen years ago. That could be due to a myriad of reasons:

• We're older and more deft at not tossing dice across a room
• Through five plus years and $40,000 of university education I can work out faster the amount of change when I buy Marvin Gardens with a wad of yellow C-notes
• There were two adults playing as opposed to twelve kids who are more than willing to cough up Boardwalk when one can't pay the rent on Baltic Avenue.

I was most amazed at the confluence of adult tendencies that crept into the gameplay. I held back on buying more houses for fear of being cash-strapped should I land on the damn B&O Railroad for a tenth time! (Seriously, how many times can I roll snake eyes?) Money flowed in and out so easily, and by the time I was sitting in the lush green properties of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Pacific I was just praying that I had got enough dough to get me to Go/Payday. Replace the $75 luxury tax with the annual, yet always unexpected, license plates and registration and you've got yourself a metaphor.

"Oh life, I got to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul enough money to avoid another cash advance on the Discover card."

-James Joyce The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Living in an Economy Where the FED Keeps Raising Interest Rates

Throughout all of my playing though one thing was clear: my wife had her teeth in me and was not going to relent. She already makes more money than me in real life (a point I cheer not curse, mind you), and she has an amazing propensity for never landing on Tennessee and my meager flea-infested hotels. I suffered through lap after lap while she kept ending up in triple-double jail only to roll a 7 to escape my snare on the corner. Damn you, Community Chest!

I did have one glimmer of hope when a chance landing on Chance allowed me to bypass the murders' row of Park Place and Boardwalk only to forfeit my $200 for yet another landing of those infernal railroads. By that point there was only one option remaining, mortgage the utilities and pour the wine.

Who builds an empire on Water Works?

In the end, I cheer the reemergance of Monopoly into our cadre of games we pull out when absent friends and random free days merit a desperation for activity. I only hope Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet enjoy the riesling as much as I do.

Randy Scouse Git

Now I won't even begin to act like I know who Ian Rush is, but I do know that some of the best memories I have are of two English friends, one from Manchester the other Brighton, doing their impression of some legendary British commercial for milk that involved name dropping little scousers who loved Ian Rush.

It's one of those things that you've seen so many times in an interpreted inarnation that you have no desire to see the original for fear of a let down. Other items to add to this list include

• The infamous "Raymond and Ass" bit from the long defunct Jon Stewart Show.
• The "Royale with cheese" exchange between Vincent and Jules in Pulp Fiction
• Boo Radley

How did that tower of 20th century American literature get into the list, you ask. Easily. It all has to do with a woman.

She was my freshman English teacher, and for the most part she was quite handy at what she did. We were mostly engaged in class, held in our pubescent haze by a 26 year old teacher. We tromped through A Tale of Two Cities and forged onward to To Kill a Mockingbird. Our teacher was in no way deterred by the fact that most of us had read the novel, and so she soldiered forward. Who knew that it would in a tragic "curtain pulling" moment.

The novel really is a stalwart classic, and a literary one hit wonder to boot. It's hard to imagine someone as crafty as Harper Lee being lumped in with Tommy Tutone, but I feel the comparison is justified. (No truth to the rumor that Harper Lee's phone number on the small island she (yes, Harper Lee is a woman) inhabits is 867-5309). However, I was never too locked in on the racial misgivings of 1930's Alabama as much as I was mesmerized by the character of Boo Radley. He's for all intents and purposes a tangible, although unrecognizable bogey man in the town and county of Maycomb.

I first encountered Boo in 1990 when a literary exhortation on unseasonably hot weather turned into my sixth grade teacher reading the entire novel to us. Overnight this guy had classes of 12 year olds teeming with excitement. We begged older siblings not to reveal any plot details, nor to reveal what the hell mockingbirds had to do with Scout, Jem, and Atticus. Nevertheless, I locked myself into my desk daily all the while imagining what the mythical Boo must look like.

Fate intervened and I was getting a cast sawed off of my arm after a nasty, and I mean nasty, skateboarding incident the day the movie was shown. (Do not begin to suppose that I am or have ever been a skater though. We all have the skateboard phase, and Vision Street Wear was too appealing to ignore.) Therefore, I never saw the Gregory Peck tour de' force that most people love and still leaves me wanting more. Again, I never saw what director Robert Mulligan thought of ole' Boo.

Flash forward three years and I'm locked in another classroom watching Gregory Peck peck about the classroom as all of Maycomb's second class citizenry stand to see him walk out. My tongue salivates with pensive anticipation to see the denouement. Scout and Jem get attacked. Sheriff Heck Tate strongarms Atticus into exporting a lie that Bob Ewell fell on his knife. And at last we see him, pasty and wan, smearing his sweat against Jem's bedroom wall. With God as my witness, the mental image I'd carved of Boo Radley matched the man I saw on the screen. I can feel those goosebumps even now.

She had to do it.

I don't know if it was smarmy know-it-all-ism or even harmless trivia, but my teacher who I'd otherwise enjoyed to that point pipes up with, "You know who that is, don't you?"

A chorus of muted mumbles follows as I fumble out, "No." She hears me and in one of those twists of two letter words that make Scrabble-smiths giddy my teacher thinks I'm in someway begging to know the actor's name. What I really meant to say was, "No! You're about to crush a childhood dream. There is no Easter Bunny and Boo Radley will someday end up in Gone in 60 Seconds. (Although he's been in other better flicks)"

• The producers of SportsCenter choose the first highlight no matter what the online poll results dictate.
• The NBA player reminding your grade school not to do drugs would never dunk for you, even if his ankles were taped. Cop out.
• The wizard is very real, and very human. Just pull back the curtain, Toto.

She tells me.

I'm crushed. I don't really care that it's him. I just care that he's no longer Boo Radley, but rather a man playing Boo Radley. I could have spit in her face. Sadly she pulls out the life lesson book and reminds me to be careful what I wish for. Pointless.

Kids need the bogey man. Scout needed Boo Radley before, and she has Arthur Radley now.

It's never fun to pull back the curtain.

Try a literary quote. Those seem to keep 'em coming back.

"It was a bad time."
First line of Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien.

It's really not that bad. I'm serious.

However, I did have to make my foray into the world of blogs because I can't stand not to any longer. What's so incredibly sad is not that I feel compelled to blog, yet that I felt more compelled to come up with some overtly clever blog name. Therefore, I give you This Day Won't Last at All, an homage to the greatest Canadian band I've heard from lately, Plumtree.

http://www.endearing.com/artists/plumtree.html

Take that, Loverboy.

Here's why Plumtree deserves more listens than they're getting these days (and it's also a blatant chance for me to show off my blog-bulleting)

• They were the first indie band that I fully threw myself toward
• They're so indie they're not indie, nor will they be worried about pegging themselves as such.
• They're uninterested in blog-waxing wags trying to suppose whether Plumtree's indie or not indie because they're too busy rocking.
• Even though they've been kaput since 2000, people still blog that they are "rocking" albeit a symbolic, yet lasting, rocking.
• They seamlessly wrote the soundtrack to that night, and any adult male who was ever 22 knows about that night, in their song "Tonight's Not Alright."

That song, "Tonight's Not Alright" is a shining example of a perfect song. "What's a perfect song?" they ask. Perfection can be reached when after multiple listens one is sure that there is absolutely nothing to be added to the song to improve it, nor is there one iota that one should remove or diminish. Ipso facto "Tonight's Not Alright" is perfect.

The cardiac drum intro resonates with that hint of DIY yet floors the listener with precision as tight as a, well, you know. We climb aboard the verse in time for Carla to remind us, "It kinda makes sense," only to have our storyteller trip that reassurance with an inability to "make head or tail of it." I dare not toss out any idea of simplicity, yet I have always imagined the four members of Plumtree standing on stage in a graceful reverence to the unfolding song, almost knowing that what they're about to play for the hundreth time might be catching someone on that night. Wishful projection at its finest.

The guitar sound is one easily faked in duplication, yet so pristeenly unique (and yes, I'm quite aware that one cannot qualify anything's "uniqueness" yet the merits of this four minute slice of heaven allow for such heresy) that I only wish I could have met my one-quarter of Plumtree before their disbanding. By now we're locked firmly in the song and even now I'm somewhat bittersweet knowing that the greatest moments are yet to come as is the end.

The song progresses into a second verse that ends with this delicate, yearning walk-down the fretboard that must be heard to be worshipped for the rock deity it is. From there the perfect specimen moves to its logical yet always surprising end.

Syncopation. Grasping the intangible. Somehow cutting into a timeless psyche that teleports me even at this moment when I'm forced to butcher the song outloud as I've lent out my only copy of the album to a trustworthy fan who would give me his firstborn should he somehow sully the disc. It truly is worth laying your hands upon.

I love "Tonight's Not Alright."

-FCI

This Day Won't Last at All

"'Cause it takes the two of us
to screw this whole thing up.
Yeah, it takes the two of us
to screw this whole thing up."

Regards to Catriona, Carla, Lynette, and Amanda