I know you’re prepared for serious amounts of snark, here, but you won’t be getting it. I am truly grateful for country I live in, the United States of America. There are any number of reasons. To start with, the fact that we are a republic based on a written constitution that has stood for 227 years without being scrapped and rewritten from the ground up is pretty amazing. Granted, the Constitution is sometimes honored more in the breach than in the observance thereof, but I think that is itself something to be proud of and grateful for. We can pass all kinds of laws, and choose to enforce the ones we’ve already passed selectively or not at all, even in bold ignorance of the Constitution, so long as we’re all pretty much OK with it.

But if anyone is not OK with it, we have mechanisms in place by which they can raise their hands and say, wait, that’s unconstitutional, and have their claim heard and evaluated by a more-or-less independent panel of highly-qualified judges.

There’s more to be grateful for. We’re an incredibly rich country, by almost any measure. We have immense natural resources, including mineral wealth, vast farmlands, and scenic wonders. We have an enormously diverse and talented population, representing just about every ethnic group on the planet. We don’t have an official language, nor does our unofficial one have an official body that rules on what is correct or incorrect usage, which keeps us flexible, if nothing else.

America is where jazz and the blues and rock-n-roll were born. America has produced so many great novelists that I hesitate to name any because of all the ones I’d have to leave out. (OK, I’ll name Mark Twain. He’ll have to stand in for all the rest.) America produced the German chocolate cake, for crying out loud! How can I not be grateful for that?

If you don’t have enough slack, you’re wrapped too tight. If you have too much, then I guess you’re a slacker. The tricky part, as so often in life, is knowing what’s too little, what’s enough, and what’s too much.

This is not to mention the question of why the plural of slack refers to a pair of pants. But we’ll set that aside for a moment and focus on the singular.

All of us need to be cut some slack once in a while, and it’s nice to know when you’re in an environment where folks will do that. Your friends will cut you some slack when you need it, and your good friends will call you on it when you’ve asked for slack too many times, and you’re at risk of becoming a slacker. Here’s a quick rule of thumb I just invented: imagine that you are obliged to do something to a particular level of quality at a particular time (let’s say, buy beer for a party and show up a half hour early to put it in the cooler and help get things set up), and you fall short. You get one case of beer instead of two, and you show up a half hour late instead of early. Possible responses from your good friend, the host, when you say, “Damn, bro, sorry I’m a case short and an hour late. Can you just cut me some slack on this one?” and what they mean:

1. He acts astonished and asks if everything is OK in your life right now. You are wrapped too tight. Cut yourself some slack in the future.
2. He’s sympathetic, and mentions that it isn’t like you do this all the time or anything. You hit the sweet spot.
3. He says it’s OK, but you notice he’s not real surprised. You might be becoming a slacker.
4. He doesn’t say anything, but you realize he also had another friend signed up to bring the beer. Who’s already there, with two cases of beer and a spare cooler. Face it, you’re a slacker alright. But you’re a slacker with an extra case of beer, and you’re at a party, so that’s cool, anyway.

Which is by way of saying, I got cut some slack at work today, without really having to ask, so I’m grateful for that. And they didn’t ask what was wrong, or heave a big sigh, either, so I figure I’m in the sweet spot for now. Whew!

Not only is it the soul of wit, but it allows me to knock off a day of gratitude with a single sentence, thereby not only keeping my promise to myself to write a hundred posts in a hundred days while not completely preventing me from actually enjoying some of the physical things that I am grateful for, such as good food and drink, the company of my wife, sleep, dreams, and so forth; but also allowing me to indulge in one of the mental activities a talent for which I am also grateful for, that being irony.

I have very narrative dreams. In fact, several of my short stories (available for the Kindle on Amazon, by the way, hint hint) are essentially transcriptions of dreams I’ve had. My dreams tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a narrative arc and the whole thing.

They often tend to have punchlines of a sort. I’ve been known to wake up from a dream laughing. For example, I once dreamed I was watching a documentary about baby seals, and the narrative voiceover described how terrible it was that baby seals were clubbed to death to make fur coats, while the video portion showed baby seals on the ice being clubbed, and leggy fashion models on the runway with gorgeous full-length seal coats. Then the voiceover explained that activists had gone out onto the ice and sprayed the baby seals with paint to make their pelts useless for the fur trade (video: bearded men in parkas spraying orange stripes onto baby seals), but that only worked for a time, as the fashion industry adjusted expectations (video: leggy models on the runway with full-length orange-striped seal coats over matching orange satin sheaths). Finally, voiceover says that activists, undaunted, have adapted their tactics to meet the challenge (video: bearded men in parkas loading crates onto seaplanes. Zoom on the crates: they are labelled Nair depilatory.)

My dreams also like to play around with cliches. I’ll be late for a test in a class I only realized today that I was enrolled in, and I’m in the wrong building, and no one can direct me to the right room, but finally I make it there and I find a seat and I realize I don’t have a pencil, but hey, it’s OK–at least I’m naked! Woo-hoo!

I’m grateful I don’t have those dreams that you can’t even relate to someone else–I was in a car, no, it was a boat–well it was a car but then it was a boat, but it was still on the highway, and I don’t know, the police came? And there was an owl? Or something? My dreams are very specific. If the car turns into a boat, there’s a mechanism involved, and I can tell you why it’s there and how it got activated.

So I’m grateful for that. Vagueness in dreams–it’s just sloppy.

We used to have two guinea pigs. That’s terribly politically incorrect–nowadays, they want to be called cavies, and you don’t “have” them, they live with you. So, these two cavies used to live with us. For some reason they chose to live in a little wire-framed apartment on a tabletop in our house, and I chose to bring them food every day, keep their water bottle filled, trim their nails, and so forth.

They were very nice roommates. They were always thrilled when I came home from work–they lived upstairs on the landing, but as soon as they heard my footsteps downstairs they would start racing around in their little wire-framed apartment wheeking at the top of their lungs. I would go up and speak to them and check on their water bottle, and then go out in the vacant lot next door and harvest some food for them. They loved to eat kudzu and this wild sweet pea vine that grew in the vacant lot. You have to be grateful for any animal that likes to eat kudzu, and they ate a lot of it. I could stuff their apartment so full of kudzu that it was essentially 8 cubic feet of solid foliage, and they would eat it down to nothing. Well, nothing but a double handful of what looked like black rice. That process would take about an hour. I’d covered the floor of their apartment with foot-square floor tiles, and I could take the shop-vac and vacuum up all the black rice without even removing the cavies first, so they were extremely low maintenance.

When the cavies were little they were seriously full of energy, and the little wire-framed apartment was too little for them to expend it all. I was told exercise wheels weren’t good for them because they have weak backs, so what we would do is take them out of there and turn them loose in the hallway in a maze the kids would build out of oversized cardboard bricks. They seemed to love that maze–they’d race around in it, occasionally figuring out they could climb over the bricks or plow right through them, but mostly following the laid-out passageways. It was wonderfully calming to sit on the stairs and watch the cavies investigate a new maze.

One of my cow-orkers at the American Cancer Society had a cavy a lot like one of ours, a black-and-white long-haired one with a big lock of hair that fell over one eye, that she named Elvis. From time to time at work she’d tell me what Elvis was up to.  One day, when we were both working embedded in the offices of Sapient, an agency we were using to redesign our website, she came in and was obviously in a very bad way. I asked her if everything was OK, and she wailed, “Oh, Fred, Elvis is dead!” and glommed onto me for a long comforting hug. All the Sapients were standing around looking mystified and I could practically see the thought bubbles over their heads. Did she just find out? Did she secretly know he was really alive until now? I never explained it to them.

I’m grateful those cavies lived with us as long as they did, and that there are cavies out there for other folks to live with. I’m sure they are helping lower their roommates’ blood pressure and bringing smiles to their faces right now.

I really love haute couture. My paternal grandmother taught me to sew, a bit, when I was a wee thing. I used to make buttonholes for her, because her thumbs were arthritic and the buttonhole attachment on her Singer sewing machine was a fiddly thing that she couldn’t work all that well any more. At one point I was putting buttonholes in many of her neighbors’ homemade garments, at twenty-five cents a hole, which enabled me to keep myself well supplied with firecrackers one summer when I visited with her for a month or so.

From there I graduated to making my own Mardi Gras costumes, and I’m sure that’s where my love of haute couture grew from. Just take a look at the couture the model in the photo is wearing. It’s pretty darn haute, if I say so myself, and could as easily be part of a Mardi Gras costume as something anyone would wear under normal circumstances. More easily.

I was delighted, when I was working at SAS and Al Gore invented the World Wide Web, to discover that there was a company that put photographs of every dress modeled on every runway of New York, London, Paris, and Milan’s fashion weeks online. It was called firstview.com. During fashion weeks I was in heaven paging through shot after shot, collection after collection. I had no idea when anyone would actually wear clothes like these, but they were fascinating.  Then, around the time I started working at the American Cancer Society, firstview went behind a paywall and I was devastated. I kept up my interest, but had to be satisfied with occasional news supplements that showed the highlights of one or two shows.

My interest in high fashion is one of those things that the people I work with don’t understand. Actually, I can’t say they don’t understand it so much as they just don’t believe it. One day there was a big group discussion at the office about the hats worn at Kate Middleton’s royal wedding, and I walked in just as our graphic designer pulled up an image of one of the hats in question. “Cool,” I said, “who’s that with the Philip Treacy hat?” And everyone just stopped talking and stared at me.

(This is great! I was wracking my brain to remember the exact name of the firstview website, and put in a placeholder in the text so I could finish my post. And as I was typing Philip Treacy’s name up above I suddenly remembered firstview.com, and opened it up, and at some point they have stopped having a paywall! I have 15 years of fashion shows to catch up on. This does not bode well for days 21 through 100, but man am I grateful for this! Later, everybody!)

You have to love a brand so big, it can charge you to advertise it. That’s right, I’m talking about you, The Big Game. Other businesses can’t sell large screen TVs to watch your commercials on, commercials that are the most expensive commercial time ever sold, and mention that you are what folks can watch on their big screen TV, without paying to mention your actual name.

Even the sellers of Popular Cola Drinks in Iconic Red Cans and Triangular Cheese-Flavored Tortilla Chips can’t mention your name without paying, when they suggest that folks might want to buy Popular Cola Drinks in Iconic Red Cans and Triangular Cheese-Flavored Tortilla Chips to serve at parties where they and their friends watch the most expensive commercials ever made on large-screen TVs they purchased for that purpose.

So why am I grateful? Because once The Big Game starts, I can go out and shop for a large screen TV or Popular Cola Drinks in Iconic Red Cans and Triangular Cheese-Flavored Tortilla Chips, eat at restaurants (the ones that don’t have large screen TVs) that are normally booked months in advance, and drive on highways that are as devoid of traffic as they will be after the zombie apocalypse. And if, in the process, I miss seeing Katy Perry and some sharks, well, that’s kind of sad, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

So thanks, The Big Game. I’m grateful!

I have kind of a special relationship with colors. I only know one other person in the world who sees them exactly the same way I do, and that’s my brother. We inherited the same gene for anomalous trichromatism from our maternal grandfather. Anomalous trichromatism is a kind of color-blindness, but color-blindness really isn’t a good word for it. I see just as many colors as you do. I just don’t see exactly the same ones you do, nor necessarily on the same objects.

I’m glad I have different color vision. Admittedly it can be a drag when someone wants to know what color something was that isn’t around any more to point to. “It was green. Or orange. It was really that color that’s a little bit green and a little bit orange,” doesn’t inspire confidence. Purple, as far as I’m concerned, comes in exactly one shade. Oddly enough, it’s the shade that K&B Drugstores in New Orleans chose as their signature brand color. All other shades of purple are just rumors, supposition, and variant names for blue.

On the other hand, I can spot stuff that is supposedly camouflaged like nobody’s business. Some woodchuck can be sitting quietly in a field of dead grass thinking to himself, “Hah, nobody can see me! I’m just as brown on brown as a ‘chuck can get,” when I walk by and say “Holy Cow, what’s that bright green lumpy thing out there in the middle of that field?”

And I really love those colors that I can’t tell what the heck they are. Many times I’ve been walking through the mall, marveling at how well-behaved everyone is, when from the very back of a clothing store a shirt or sweater will scream out, “Look at me! I’m so pretty!” and it’s always got some of those colors. And when I buy them and wear them, other people tell me it’s a nice muted color combination that they wouldn’t really have noticed, but they like it now that they see it.

So there you have it. I’m grateful for colors. Especially my colors.

If you’re a world traveller like me, you’ve visited any number of hot spots (e.g., the Chilean-Argentine border; the west bank of Jordan; Dearborn, Michigan) where folks are inclined to deploy land mines, shell each other with mortars, or launch rocket attacks at random intervals. And if you’re a collector like me, by now your house is cluttered with souvenir unexploded ordnance and you’re wondering how to free up shelf space.

So I’ve done some brainstorming and some experimentation, and I’ve come up with a short list of useful and fun things you can do around the house with those items of unexploded ordnance that you’ve decided you just can’t keep any longer. Obligatory message of gratitude: I’m glad I came up with these, and I’m awfully glad I’m still here to share them with you.

1. Remove a stump. Always the traditional choice. Nothing gets a stubborn stump out of the ground like a WWII hand grenade. Dig it well in under the main mass of the stump, tie a stout string to the pin, back away to a safe distance, and pull. Presto, the stump is gone!
2. Create a koi pond. I like a good WWI Stokes mortar bomb for this, but you have to have a suitable launcher and do some careful math to get the pond exactly where you want it.
3. Clean your oven. Carefully open an S-1 “Bouncing Betty” land mine and pour the explosive charge into a non-reactive bowl. (I think there’s an Instructable for that: you can Google it, anyway.) Mix with extra virgin olive oil to make a thick paste that you can smear on all the interior surfaces of the oven. Now set the oven timer to heat to a low temperature starting in two minutes’ time and get well away from the kitchen.
4. Celebrate a special occasion. You don’t have to wait until the 4th of July, Guy Fawkes, or New Year’s Eve to set off a mixed batch of ordnance. Your nephew’s graduation, successfully renewing your automobile registration, or even just Friday getting off work are all perfect excuses to gather an armload of arms and (safely) explode them in the driveway or a nearby community college parking lot.
5. Shade a backyard picnic. Sometimes on a hot summer mid-day you don’t want to cook lunch (or maybe you’re cleaning your oven), and a picnic sounds like just the thing, but the sun is too bright in your yard and you’re worried about developing a burn. I find that setting off an L83A1 smoke grenade 10 minutes before you spread your blanket really creates quite a nice sunscreen effect.

Please comment and share if you find other handy uses for unexploded ordnance at your house!

I have a lot of unfair advantages that I’m very grateful for. I’m a straight white male, so I was born with these advantages, and I don’t really have a way to give them up, if I wanted to. I could move to Japan, I guess, or equatorial Africa. But I like my advantages.

It’s fashionable not to like labels, and “straight white male” is certainly a string of them. These are labels that bothered me before being bothered by labels became so fashionable, so let’s take a moment to–what’s the buzz phrase–unpack that a little. “Straight” is what I used to call non-hippies when I was a hippie, so hearing it or saying it about myself always takes me a moment to process. Although I’m not a hippie any more, I guess. I have no idea where to get drugs, and I’m starting to look a bit like a cop, so I’m not likely to have any offered to me.

“White” has always bothered me, too. I mean, when it comes to what people generally mean by “white” I don’t suppose you can get much whiter than me. But from a scientific basis (see Day 12) I don’t think there’s a test you can do to demonstrate reliably that a given person is “white.” I used to fill in the “Race” field on forms with “African American” because I am pretty sure my ancestors came from the Olduvai Gorge region of Africa, but then I figured out that was likely to offend a whole bunch of people, so I started filling in “Human” instead. I feel I’m on safe ground there.

“Male.” OK, I’ll own “male.” I have good evidence that I am. I’d show it to you, but Facebook photo policies again, see Day 1. Also, I have fathered a couple of children, which is difficult for non-male types.

But that’s a huge digression. This is about unfair advantages. You read a lot these days about “white privilege” and that’s a phrase that really gets a lot of people’s panties in a bunch. I won’t even go into what it is–you’ve read it all already. Here’s the only tidbit I want to add to the discussion: all this about unfair advantages doesn’t mean straight white males are somehow obligated to feel guilty for or to give up these things we take for granted, like a nice place to live, job promotion on our merits, the freedom to marry our partner of choice, walking down the street without getting hassled by the cops. It means that it’s unfair that someone from outside those groups can’t take those things for granted. And when we see someone being subjected to unfair disadvantage, it isn’t particularly on us to speak out against it. It’s on everyone to speak out, and that includes us. We just stand a better chance of being heard.

So I’m grateful for the advantages I’ve had. I think everyone should have them.