I’m sure you’ve heard — the world is ending this week. Frankly, I am thrilled.

I really think that I’ll be awesome in the apocalypse, and should I survive the initial hulabaloo, I’d like you to consider this my application to be a key member of your spunky band of survivors.

Firstly, I have been carefully studying all sorts of end of the world scenarios since I was a small child. If this end date has to do with North Korean dictator and sexiest man alive Kim Jong Un sending an invasion force to Colorado, I’ve got tons of guerilla tactics memorized, and I will be a much better leader than either Patrick Swayze or Chris Hemsworth, even if they are both much prettier than me, because, frankly, I’ll have better writing.

If North Korea somehow launches a nuclear weapon, and the target is not Colorado, I have a coded book of contingency plans that I’ve hidden in a secure location, not to be casually revealed in this column.

Once chaos has been established, no one’s going to be particularly concerned with earning money or trying to collect it from me. That means survival becomes the primary occupation of whomever is remaining, and only those who are useful and good at lifting the spirits of those who have endured unspeakable horrors with amusing anecdotes will have a place. I can do both of those things.

Since it’s winter, I’ll start by recommending stockpiling of canned goods, while we build some greenhouses, secure sources of water, and create a strong, defensible fort, possibly at an abandoned prison site. I’ve started to learn archery and setting game traps through repeated screenings of “The Hunger Games,” so, the odds are likely to be ever in our favor. With secure living quarters and food supply, we’re going to be in good shape, and then it’ll be time  to put me in charge of everything.

Frankly, I have my sights set on being a benevolent, beloved, charismatic leader, who avoids the pitfalls of dictatorship by working along side the other survivors, developing a consensus of kindness and noble ideals to build our new utopia. If you think for one moment that the notion of a “kinder, gentler apocalypse” is ridiculous, naive, and laughter-inducing, well, let me tell you that outhouses are going to be needed, and I will tell you right now what job you chuckleheads are likely to be assigned.

That’s probably unfair. It’s awfully capricious of me to write something funny and then assign people who laughed to latrine duty. People who laugh at my jokes deserve better.

I don’t want to brag, but, I am excellent at assessing situations, seeing implications and making fair and sensible decisions. Did you see how I instantly  realized it’d be unfair to punish people for laughing at my jokes?  I mean, if I’m trying to win friends and influence survivors, I’ve got to be better at building alliances than that. I really want to be careful and not ruin anyone’s end of the world. After all, we’ve got to be able to work together to build a better, brighter world. Unless, of course, the end is actually an end. In that case, I’m not available.

Among the pitfalls of the holiday season is the waves of nostalgia that can come unexpectedly. They can be conjured from any Christmas of the past, whether or not these eras were personally experienced.  These little ghosts of Christmas past bring all sorts of baggage when they visit and they have a tendency to overstay their welcome. I had a few of these guys show up this week, and let me tell you, none of them brought presents I wanted to keep.

One of them was assigned to bring me oddly-timed Melancholia. He was from a time when the various maladies had quaint and curious names, like “Consumption” and “Vapors.” His arrival was triggered by a lovely compliment, and no one expects to wander into a tidal wave of tears because of a happy comment, but somehow, this Christmas past managed that feat.

I had no sooner kicked this unwelcome guest to the curb, then his younger brother showed up, reminding me that Christmas is really all about children, and seeing their faces light up with wonder and joy at the magic all around them.

This punk would’ve made fun of anyone who uses the term “Melancholia,” and yet, his little visit had much the same effect on me. You can imagine, I guess, what I think about spending another Christmas without kids.

The good news is that for these low-level battles with general sadness, I have a simple cure. I go to the nearest office supply place.

Weird, I know. You should no longer be surprised by the depths of the oddity that is me.

There’s just something about wandering around the shelves of unblemished paper, and the boxes of beautiful writing tools, and all the useful items for organizing and putting things in order that soothes my soul. I don’t even have to buy anything, I can wander for a few minutes, and all the potential solutions for very basic problems fill me with hope, and “the gloomies,” (cousins to the vapors) disappear.

There were three visits to office supply stores in the past week, which tells you that embracing the more cheery spirit of the season has been challenging. Maybe these three ghosts have been sent to me as a warning. They want to prevent me from falling into the trap of countless television writers, who’ve unabashedly mined in the caverns of “A Christmas Carol” for seventeen decades when they needed a holiday-themed story for their shows.

That’s it, isn’t it?

Too bad for you all that it took me 400 words to figure out their cryptic message. I just hope that is the message, and that they don’t decide to come back and force me to see the death of Tiny Tim, or the heavy chains I forged in life, or some other weighty metaphor. I promise I will go about with a “Merry Christmas” on my lips until the end of the year. That should keep them off my back and out of my dreams until next year.

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Are you looking for a unique experience for your whole family? How about an Adventure kit?

If you’d like to get Flying Solo, (and just Flying Solo) on Sundays via e-mail,  you can Subscribe to Flying Solo 

This is the 52^nd consecutive week I have sent out a column. If you’re one of those people who recall that there are 52 weeks in a year, you might’ve whispered a shocked, “Already?” to no one in particular.

Unbeknownst to anyone who isn’t me, I picked this week, a year ago, since it happened to be the week before my 38^th birthday. I was determined to start this project while I was still 37 since Erma Bombeck was 37 when she first published her column, and I was determined to take advantage of that particularly obscure bit of numerology.

It probably would’ve been more auspicious if it were the 1960s, and newspapers weren’t dying.

In the dark recesses of my mind, when I paused to consider this ridiculous scheme, there were shadowy figures of people lurking in alleys and doorways laughing their posteriors off at me for even attempting to do this when the content of newspapers has shrunk to the size of a lengthy pamphlet.

I just assumed that was my over active imagination feeding me fear to prevent me from trying anything.

Papers these days are little more than a handful of AP newswire releases which most people have read on the internet days before it appeared in print.

I might’ve been aggressively optimistic about my chances.

To my credit, this was before the Denver Post got rid of pretty much all of their full time beat reporters.  It’s a very small credit, but, when I’m scraping my dignity off the bottom of the barrel, any little bit helps.

Within a few months, I’d more or less abandoned the idea that this was going to turn into a lucrative venture. No newspapers were beating down my door with even a whiff of casual interest, much less, waiting with merry bushels of cash.

While that fantasy faded, I switched tactics, and invited people who were not newspaper editors to join me. That has been a much more successful gambit, and in the spirit of Thanksgiving, which, should be allowed to gestate past 8:00 PM on the fourth Thursday of November, I am grateful for each of you. You’re the reason I made it to week 52.

I had wanted to make this column extra special. I’ve been pondering it for so long that when it got here, I no longer had any sense of what to do with it, and the pressure I built around commemorating this event turned into, well, nothing remotely remarkable.

Remarkable or not, I’m celebrating the milestone.  There have been many nights before this one, where the fantasy was just to give up, and I didn’t. Every time that I didn’t just give up is a result of seeing the image of a different crowd of people who were cheering me on, expecting to see an e-mail from me.  I will do my best to avoid disappointing those faces.

Would you like to get a personalized letter from Santa for your favorite kids? Buy one now!

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Why Weird is Relative

Every family has its own Thanksgiving traditions. For some it’s a weird gelatin with hot dogs and cabbage in it. These are the dishes that are made exactly once a year, the ones that half the family hates, but, no one can imagine having Thanksgiving without it sitting on the table.

Ours is butterball and noodle soup, which is not at all weird.

Ok, maybe it is. But it’s our weird. We all prefer our own flavors of weird.

Butterball and noodle soup is one of those classic “leftover” meals our ancestors made to use every bit of the resources available on the farm. Dry bread, chicken stock, cream, butter and eggs. At one time, I suspect, (putting on my know-it-all hat to cover the fact that I’ve no actual evidence for these statements) my ancestors had this dish more than once a year, maybe even a couple of times a month!

Now we’re city folk, and the dish that came from things “on hand” is now a shopping trip, where we purchase bread to dry it, and we don’t know the cow(s) that provide the dairy, nor do we stick our hands under a chicken to get eggs. The noodles will also be purchased, not made.

The stock will be provided by the other star of Thanksgiving, the turkey.

All that’s left to do? Try and remember the recipe.

You see, like any good “family recipe” there are hundreds of variations. Most of them have the ingredients listed above. Some mention sweetened condensed milk (avoid those, you’ll thank me). Others, probably in a misguided attempt to “reduce the fat content,” substitute margarine and half and half for the butter and cream. WRONG. This is not just from a flavor standpoint. This is from a “do you want your butterballs to hold together, or do you want to eat watery mush?” perspective.

Getting the right ingredients is only part of the equation. They need to be prepared “just so.” If not, the butterballs will fall apart. And everyone knows (well, everyone who’s our flavor of weird knows) that the true test of any cook is: “Can you make butterballs that don’t fall apart?” The second test, is “Do the butterballs taste like Grandma Kathryn’s?”

Everyone agrees that my great-grandmother made it best. Her butterballs always stayed together and always tasted wonderful.

It has been 20 years since I was given the sacred duty of making the butterballs, a test of cookery and a rite of passage. It hardly mattered that I had never made them, or that I’d never tasted anything my great-grandmother had cooked, my mother was rumored to have therecipe.

Could I live up to my namesake?

My grandfather, who loved this soup but had struggled for decades to reclaim the food memory of eating the soup at grandma’s table, was so hopeful, he offered to make the breadcrumbs. No one remembered him ever doing that.

I was feeling the pressure.

After two days work, butterballs came out of the fridge and slid into the hot soup. When we sat down to eat, the balls were still intact, a hopeful sign. Grandpa took a bite, but held a poker face. Everyone watched him, not even breathing, waiting for his verdict.

“You done good, Katie,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. And everyone set to eating it, and was thankful.

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Words Can’t Pay Our Debt

I’ve been thinking about what to say on this Veteran’s Day for a few weeks.  LikeMother’s Day, it’s a holiday requiring gratitude, humility and respect, hardly convenient for column comedy.

So why did I decide to make a Veterans Day the topic?

Naturally, I felt like I should say something, and I kept thinking of all the thoughts I had about veterans, and only one of them had the faintest whiff of having punch line potential. I kept telling myself that I could build on it, somehow turn it into something worth reading.

I didn’t want to just say the same old phrases, because, a) I hate sounding like someone else, b) it feels like lazy writing, and c) none of them conveyed all the things I wanted to say.

I thought about all the people I knew who had served in the military, of my relatives who spent time doing all manner of less-than-pleasant things so that the rest of us could do things like not vote, write a Facebook post about our dissatisfaction with lines at the DMV, or organize a protest against the consumption of shellfish.

Not one of those things comes without a cost, and we all owe much more than a few clichéd phrases to the ones who pay those prices for us. And before you decide to blame veterans for those long lines at the DMV, I want to be clear, they are not responsible for the length of the line.

Then I thought about the veterans that I wasn’t related to, and the first to pop into my brain were Sgt. Malcolm Reynolds and Cpl.  Zoe Alleyne, who fought with the Independents against the Alliance. The Firefly marathon today probably had nothing to do with this. Probably.

Anyway, when I thought of them, I recalled all of the soldiers who struggle to find a place in the world when the war is over. I thought of all those who came back with wounds that no one could see, and those who were unemployed or homeless after giving up so much on our behalf.

And I wondered how I could write about those sorts of things without being completely depressing. How could I possibly put them inside a column without them becoming trivialized as a set-up for a joke? And, worse, how do I have the audacity to spend a mere handful of words on these issues without sounding like a world-class hypocrite?

Setting aside the fact that part of me is tempted by the idea of finally becoming a world-class anything, the rest of me prevailed by telling that small part that we can do better than being known as a hypocrite.

I probably should’ve stuck with those well-worn phrases. Thank you, veterans. We owe you more than a day and words that fall short.

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If you have had the good fortune to be living in a secluded bunker incapable of receiving television or radio signals, you might not know that the end is near.  Worse, you might not know how many of us are eagerly anticipating that day, welcoming the silence, the cessation of hostilities, the termination of robotic voices heralded by the non-stop ringing of our phones.

You would think that someone like me might welcome all the attention.  It’s nice to know that my phone number is known to someone other than my parents.  That warm glow of attention evaporated with the sound robotic voices, nothing more than unholy harvesters of my attention.

Our national suffering will end in less than 48 hours.

All of the election-related voices emitting half-truths and hollow rhetoric, insults and inflammatory images, they will finally be silenced.   Facebook feeds will be returned to the ho-hum minutia of food consumed and errands completed;  gone will be the postings asserting that people on their side of the discussion are clearly smarter, kinder, and better for our country, while the people on the other side are ignorant,  selfish, and “ist” (i.e. sexist, racist, ageist, elitist, jerk-ist, zombie-ist, etc).

It’ll be nice when the misleading statements and ridiculous promises we hear are related only to things like hemorrhoid cream and cable companies.

It’s hard to think that the one thing we have in common as our nation looks down the barrel of the ballot is our collective fatigue over getting harassed over the phone, in the mail and on the radio and TV.  After the chads have settled, we can all go back to the consensus generated by the state of apathy that settles over the country between presidential election cycles.

I am looking forward to returning to peaceful time when I’m ignored by the political machine, because, the only time they seem to know I exist is when they want something from me.

This year, I’ve decided to vote for the candidate that spent the least amount of money filling my recycle bin with useless mailings and my voice mail with long-winded messages that I couldn’t wait to delete.  Which, as I’m sorting the propaganda, is starting to look like a vote for Roseanne Barr.

And then, I remember that she’s well-known for atrocities against her writing staff, and I must stand in solidarity with my fellow scribes, and make sure that she doesn’t get the opportunity to nationalize her policies. By the end of her first 100 days, she’ll have ferreted out all the people who made jokes about her candidacy. She’ll have them put on a list, and rounded up for a quick trip to Gitmo. While there, we’ll all be water-boarded, and forced to watch the Conners live their lottery-lifestyle dream, over and over and over again.

Maybe I should re-think my voting plan.

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I pay far too much attention to bathtubs.

I’ve always been that way. I remember as a toddler imagining that the chrome plate with its two screws holding it to the side of the tub was a face, and the screws were eyes, and the lever which controlled the drain stopper was a nose.  It was my own private Pinocchio, and I was oh so gentle when tweaking that lever up or down, lest I injure my friend.

There came a time when I wished I hadn’t imagined the chrome circle as a face, because, it became awkward to have it staring at me while I was naked and going on about my business.  In those moments, it was convenient to hang a washcloth on that nose and cover its eyes.
As time passed, and my contemporaries moved onto taking showers, I remained, in large part, fond of a good cleansing soak.

People speculated that my reluctance to shower was brought on by a perfect storm of seeing “Psycho” and reading Stephen King’s “It” soon after learning about the sewer-dwelling necromancer that reanimates pets buried via the toilet. That necromancer, with his army of goldfish, crocodiles and hamsters, liked to invade households through the plumbing and torture them with the corpses of their former pets.

I will neither confirm nor deny this theory, except to say that I have never actually read Stephen King’s “It,” and didn’t see “Psycho” until I was out of college.  Necromanced hamsters, on the other hand, could possibly be a contributing factor in my ongoing preference for avoiding the shower.

It’s not like I never take a shower. If that were true, I’d have graduated college with a fine crop of radishes cultivated in the thick layer of top soil on my skin.

But, back to the bathtub.

This week inspired a whole new crop of thoughts about bathtubs, as I got acquainted with a whole new tub in my mother’s apartment.This tub is oval-shaped and wider than the typical bath, which I suspect is handy for recreating that one scene in “Pretty Woman,” not that I anticipate that will be happening anytime soon.  A basin built for two but only being used by one was not the most cheerful thought.

The more awkward discovery was yet to come. I soon realized the placement of the chrome plate, which has but two screws and no lever for a nose, is in quite an unfortunate spot.  That was the moment I noticed it reflected my underthings right back to me.

I admit that I don’t particularly want that view while I’m relaxing. And while I’ve not seen much of that region since I added a sub-basement, I am not interested in getting reacquainted.

With no handy hook to hang a rag, well, other methods for blocking those prying eyes had to be arranged.

But that’s another story. Which I will not be sharing.

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As Halloween decorations spring up in yards all over the city (and, I assume, the country), I am constantly fighting the urge to critique the displays.  Most of the ones I see make me want to fix them.

I see handfuls of “spider web” lazily draped on a fence or bush, and they make me want to cry.  They’ve managed to take one of the few commercially available tools for creating authentic looking atmosphere and turn it into a sad statement of decorative apathy.

Where are the true builders of a nightmare? The people who take the time to really stretch those webs to their fullest extent, to make them not only believable, but, make them invisible when the sun goes down, guaranteed to cause a shudder of fear and revulsion to the poor soul who walks into the gossamer threads of pure evil.

In my mind, a Halloween display should tell a cohesive story, one which unfolds like the layers of an onion, the longer you look at it, and the closer you get to the door.  I want every element to contribute to the illusion, and not pop the bubble of my growing terror.

In other words, if you are making a cemetery and have a “stone” that reads “Rest in Pieces?” You thought it seemed so clever on the shelf, didn’t you? POP goes my little bubble of disbelief.

My highly refined sense of proper Halloween displays is directly at odds with the predominate decorating theme out there. The kindest description I use to describe it is the “hodge-podge” approach. This method seems to apply the wisdom of Christmas displays to the Halloween season. The motto for this technique?  “More is better.”

I hate to break it to you, but with scary? More is definitely not better.

Maybe I’m asking too much. I’ve got the wrong perspective.  Most people haven’t contemplated how to actually create a scary setting. Most people just want to put out some nice decorations and have an excuse to pretend that that the Christmas lights they’ve left up for the last year work just as well for Halloween. Maybe most people have lost the true meaning of the holiday:  terrifying young people into expensive psychiatric care.

I have no nostalgic memories of spectacularly decorated yards for Halloween. The scary houses were scary year-round, with authentic run-down fences and weeds, and a broken window or two.  The most anyone bothered to do in the way of seasonal yard decorations was to make a nice, traditional jack-o-lantern and put it on their porch, where it would usually get covered in a few inches of snow on or about the 31^st, and then would sit there until it rotted into a creepy lump of mush.

Now, of course, Americans spend seven billion dollars celebrating Halloween.  I just wish they’d gotten better value for their decorating dollars, and tried harder to create a truly memorable experience, instead of a holiday version of a cluttered yard.

Admittedly, I’m not particularly fond of Halloween, so, my disappointment with the assorted yard displays is more than a little ironic.  I really have no business being critical of people’s attempt to liven the holiday with a bit of Halloween cheer.

Stranger still? I don’t get this worked up about Christmas decorations.

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