Film Review: FAREWELL TO ADVENTURE

Bob Shepton at the helm of his beloved sailboat.

A 28-minute documentary that might be hard to find but I'm betting it's out there somewhere (try Vimeo.com), Farewell to Adventure was screened last weekend at a local art house we frequent. I consider myself lucky to have seen it. It tells the poignant story of a Scottish adventurer named Bob Shepton, who at 85 is forced to sell his beloved sailboat in order to pay for his wife's nursing home. Wow, talk about the gift of the magi! ("The Gift of the Magi", short story by O. Henry written in 1905, if you haven't read it by now, do so.) For someone who admits to being "addicted to adventure," this stage of his life is especially hard for him.

The film also bluntly illustrates the inescapable realities of aging, so if you are planning to get old or already have, there's a lot to learn here. Despite being a married father of five, Shepton has spent huge chunks of his life sailing around the world to foreign ports of incredible beauty, some of which are shown here in stunning color and sharp cinematography. Now in his dotage, his adventures have been whittled down to the final few local outings on his sailboat or cooking meals for his wife Kate, who has Alzheimer's, in their small cottage.

Old family photographs show Kate and Bob at various stages throughout their marriage, shocking us with how much they have changed over the years. If you live so long, it will happen to you too so it's best to take a hard look and get ready for it. Shepton offers valuable advice on healthy aging, and the most important one is to keep moving! Once his boat is gone and he is landlocked, hiking into the nearby mountains remains his one adventurous outlet, although it's obviously tough for him. But still he keeps going.

You will fall in love with Bob and come away determined to make the most of every minute of life you have left. I'd say that's a great takeaway from any film.

Crazy Trans People

Here's part of a letter to the editor printed in today's New York Times:

"I needed tampons the day I got my double mastectomy. When I made the choice to exert my bodily autonomy and get lifesaving care as a trans person, I also needed reproductive care for menstruation. Why? Because I am not a woman and I still have a uterus. My uterus does not care if I am trans. My uterus does not care if you are scared or confused about its existence." 

The letter was signed "Henry." 

Well Henry, I have some news for you: You are a woman. You can lop off your breasts but you are still a woman. You can call yourself Henry but you are still a woman. If you menstruate, you are still a woman. Forget the reproductive care, you need psychiatric care -- a ton of it, and quick. And don't ask your uterus what it thinks, just do it.

All the Bad News Fit to Print

Sunday is the day we get the New York Times. We buy it for the magazine crossword puzzle and usually I don't look at anything else, but today I decided to leaf through the other pages in hopes of finding a story that wasn't biased against Republicans since I am one I guess. (I'm not a Democrat, certainly, but I don't fit the ridiculous picture of Republicans that has been painted by the media: I don't own a gun or a pickup truck. I am in favor of abortion, although well before the child says its first word. I love gays, at least I love a few of them, and I don't give a damn what transgenders do.) 

Anyway, one of the things I read in the Times today is that "Roughly one in three American adults have  criminal records." I found that to be a staggering statistic! Who knew? Now I'm afraid to go outside.

Speaking of which, something else I read was a long and tortuous article about a woman living with her partner who suffers from PTSD after being beaten up for no reason by a group of thugs. It was a very depressing story which I read in its entirety and definitely wished I hadn't.

On the front page and continuing on two more full pages inside, an article about a 15-year-old girl who was sexually abused by her 45-year-old ROTC instructor in high school stretched the limits of belief. The alleged assaults went on for months, and she never told anyone. Why not? And why did I need to know this? Below that, also on the front page, was an article about how Joe Biden is old and frail and the Democrats are worried. Hmmm, that's an odd story to print in the Biden Bible. What are they planning?

The war in Ukraine continues and in fact Putin says we ain't seen nuthin' yet. Remind me to just do the crossword puzzle in the future.

What Are Your Nouns?

Everyone is all caught up with their pronouns, like that's the most important thing in life suddenly. But what about nouns? They are the real deal, way more important than pronouns. Without them there would be nothing to talk about. Although I like pretty much all of them, below are my preferred nouns:

Cat

Toast

Pasta

Museum

Flower

Puzzle

Diet

Philosophy

Baby

Policeman 

It's All Bad News, But Have A Nice Day!

I have decided to become an isolationist. This is an act of self-preservation, as I don't want to end up hanging myself from a doorknob or shooting myself in the head or loading my pockets with rocks and drowning myself in the Casco Bay, the easiest method of all since I live close by and could walk to it in 15 minutes. 

Instead I want to enjoy that glorious first cup of coffee and listen to the songbirds in my yard and watch them pecking at the seeds in the feeder under the watchful eye of my fluffy, adorable cat who knows that hurting one of them would spell the end of his cushy life in our home.

And so to that end I must carefully curate what information enters my brain. To avert disaster I must avoid the Internet, the TV, newspapers and of course talk radio, all of which I currently employ and which bring me a steady stream of depressing, dastardly and ultimately debilitating news. For example, just in the last few days:

James Caan died at the age of 82 after battling an illness. ("Look what they did to my boy!") One of my favorite actors, I was saddened upon hearing the news and spent the rest of the day in a funk, ultimately taking a fall on my front steps when my foot exited my sandal. Now I'm not blaming Jimmy, understand, but my weakened emotional state played a part since this is the first time I have fallen since 2016 when I was out walking a few weeks after my hip surgery.

Shinzo Abe, former Japanese Prime Minister, was killed by a crazy. See, they have them in Japan too, where the gun laws are so tough the assassin had to make his own.

Boris Johnson was ousted as British Prime Minister for having too much personality. Illustrating that, he said in his departing announcement, "Them's the breaks."

This week the National Education Association proposed replacing the word "mother"with "birthing person."  These morons are in charge of what is taught to our children. No wonder so many kids are so twisted that when they finally escape the cold, hard grip of forced education, they go out and buy weapons and shoot up a school. 

A new, even worse strain of COVID has been detected. This one defies vaccination, is highly contagious, and can be contracted over and over again. All help appears futile.

And don't forget the war in Ukraine, the Russian despot, and the old man in the White House.

Have a nice day!

The One Where Everyone Was White

I guess the one where Ross got too tan doesn't count.

So now the producer of "Friends," the popular 90's sitcom, is donating $4 million to somewhere, God knows where, to make up for the show not being diverse enough since the six main characters were all white. She says she's "embarrassed."

I'm embarrassed that she's embarrassed. How much of this nonsense can we stand?

Our Very Modern Dilemma

As a member of the Woodstock Generation I understand that I am super cool, very smart, and wise in the ways the world; we all are. But lately I have been noticing that I am totally out of touch with the current zeitgeist. Like many things, this is both good and bad. 

It's good because until now I have been blissfully ignorant of the waste of time and talent rampant among the younger generations. I spend very little time online, visit almost no websites and thus have no idea what they are doing all day besides listening to music and playing video games. I write my blog, check my email and see what my son has posted, then I'm outta there. Playing Words With Friends, which I truly consider to be good for my brain and a way to stave off Alzheimer's, is an exception.

But there's another one. I post photographs on my Instagram page that usually garner a few "likes". Lately my account has been flooded with videos, called "Reels," which I watch with mouth agape: Who are these idiots and why do I want to see them do anything? It's scary and often quite embarrassing, especially the fat ones dancing badly and the ladies applying face make-up, as if we don't already know how.

As happens when you venture down a bad road once too often, I got stuck in a rut and started watching one particular guy on Instagram who cracked me up. He posts videos of himself talking to his French bulldog, and I'm a sucker for that breed. Anyway, I started following his account just to see him and his dog argue; they are so funny! And the guy is so talented and witty, I wondered if he is a famous comic. So I googled his name and found out that it's different from the name shown on his account. Turns out he isn't the clever one at all -- he is simply lip-synching the comedy routines of a true stand-up comic. 

With some research I saw that many other people are lip-synching the very same vocal material, only with pairing it with different faces and situations. WTF? So today I googled "lip-synch for Reels" and found dozens of tutorials on how to do it! And dozens more on how to make a great Reel or TikTok video. This is how our young people are spending time now. 

As for why it's bad: This might explain why many disturbed young men are arming up and shooting at random groups of people. Life has become an empty, fake, photoshopped joke where dinosaurs like me  are still running things because we are the last of our species still in possession of functioning brains, even when they don't function that well. (Joe Biden, Maxine Waters)

Can She Really Be Next in Line?

I was still a little groggy having just gotten up and had only a few sips of coffee, so when I opened my computer to a headline that read, "We need to end this horror!" above a photograph of Kamala Harris, I thought to myself, finally we can all agree-- she's simply got to go. Then I read the story and saw that they were just quoting her about the fireworks parade shooting in Chicago. 

What a disappointment.

Craziness at the Post Office

I went to our little South Freeport post office to pick up a package that had been delivered there. The guy ahead of me was hoping to mail a package, but apparently it was not to be. Our regular postmistress was out sick and so a sub was behind the counter. 

The guy wanted to pay with a credit card, which is always done there, but the acting clerk didn't know how to use the charge machine. WTF? She told the guy he would have to go get cash and come back, explaining, "I don't really work here. I haven't been inside a retail postal establishment for at least a year."

Alarmed, I asked, "So what are you doing here? Who are you?"

"Oh, I am an employee of the US Post Office, just not a clerk. I'm a supervisor."

I asked, "So does that mean you are above a postal clerk?"

"Yes."

The Terror of Neighborhood Thugs

I was enjoying a second cup of coffee with my breakfast and appreciating the serenity of our lovely backyard woods when suddenly an ungodly shrieking pierced the silence, rudely interrupting my reverie. It was a woman in the neighborhood frantically shouting out the names of her two dogs who were circling our yard like hounds on a fox hunt. With a sinking feeling, I knew my cat was involved. Lurch was outside, enjoying the sunshine and nibbling on dandelions when these two monsters, a black lab and a golden retriever, spotted him and decided to nibble on him. 

While the pitiable cries of their hapless owner went completely unheeded ("STOP!", "COME!", "NO!"), after about five minutes the dogs accepted defeat when Lurch ran into a patch of bramble they were too big to enter. As suddenly as they had arrived the three trespassers took off without so much as an apology, leaving me to worry if my 14-year-old cat had suffered a heart attack from fright and lay dead somewhere in the thicket. I took an extra lorazepam.

Two hours later Lurch came home, covered in dirt and debris and pissed off to high Heaven. "Damn those thugs," he snorted in kitty talk. "Doesn't that woman know about leashes?" Explaining that she was a Democrat and thus feels above the law, I gave him a handful of treats and brought him up to speed on our local leash laws. While somewhat lax, they do specifically forbid the horrors he had just undergone:

"In public places, you must keep your dog 'under control'. Generally, this means close to you and ideally on a lead. If they're not on a lead, they need to be under control in another way, such as paying attention to your voice commands."

Scheduling Death

2022 Mercedes: $80,900 is fine if you die before the first payment.

It's very annoying, not to say inconvenient, not knowing when you will die. For example, my husband and I were planning a trip to Israel for this coming October into November to which I had grudgingly agreed. But finally I blurted out my true feelings: I simply survive all the rest of the year for the exquisite joys of October and November in Maine! Israel is hot then! Why would I sacrifice two weeks of glorious, crisp, spring-in-your-step, cozy sweater cold weather for extra hot weather? What if it's my last autumn? 

Mitch saw my point and said we could go next March or April when the weather is not great here in Maine. (It's called Mud Season.) I agreed. But then he muttered under his breath, more to himself than to me but I knew what he meant, "What if we don't make it?" OMG, the man is three weeks shy of 65 and is already thinking he could die before the year is out. 

Of course, the truth is we could both die today. I could die before I finish this post. If that happens, those expensive bed linens I ordered yesterday that are scheduled to arrive in a week would be a complete waste of money. And last night at The Gelato Fiasco I would have ordered a larger size instead of the paltry "kiddie treat" that was over in a flash. 

If we all knew the date and time of our death we could be much wiser about all our decisions. Like if I have only a month left I would go out today and buy a Jaguar, or maybe that Mercedes I saw on the road yesterday. (It was stunning.) Certainly everyone would benefit from such information. 

At the very least we could all use a "due date" like they give to expectant mothers. I guess we could call it a "past due" date. Anyway, you get the idea.