"These go to eleven." - Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap

 

The Transco® Tower, now the Williams Tower™, rumored to be negotiations to be sold to Stephen King©, who wants to use it so he can stand up at the top and brood above the mist, and anchor some sort of beam (Geeky Dark Tower® reference).

Overheard at the Wilder House:
“Those people are generally very smart iconoclasts who think deeply and believe strongly in individualism. Either that or they’re rebellious morons. From the outside they pretty much look the same.”

The Mrs. and I had a nice weekend. We ended up in a bit of a tiff on Friday, which is unusual for us. Our marriage is like a Spinal Tap® amplifier, in that it goes to nearly 11 (years) and during that time, we’ve had a vanishingly small number of significant arguments, certainly less than one per year. Unlike many people, The Mrs., when she argues, mostly stays as rational as a Vulcan©, and mostly sticks to the subject at hand rather than bringing up subjects older and deader than Ben Affleck’s fame (remember back in 1998 when you . . .).

The Mrs. did get angry enough to raise her voice. My viewpoint was that The Mrs. had been a teddy bear, and I had gently petted it, only to find that instead of stuffing it surrounded a core of nitroglycerin. The Mrs. viewpoint was that she had clearly indicated that she was stressed, like a wounded grizzly bear, and that I had come in and jabbed her with the pointy part of a broken shovel handle.

As the action began to dwindle down, I walked through the front room where The Boy was sitting and watching some show or another on ghost hunting on the Ghost Hunting Network™ that our television has become.

“Are you in trouble?” The Boy asked, very gravely. The Boy knows the sound of being in trouble intimately.

“No. Momma just yells at me when she’s disappointed in you.”

Okay, I didn’t really say that, but that’s what I told The Mrs. later on as we were sharing a bottle of wine grape juice in the aftermath of our disagreement, causing her to nearly shoot wine grape juice out of her nostrils onto her nachos.

What I really said was: “No, I’m not in trouble. Everything’s fine, watch your ghosts.”

Untroubled, The Boy turned back to his show. By the time he went to bed, The Mrs. and I had long since worked through our issue, and were sitting and laughing. Okay, we were sitting, and talking and laughing. If we were just sitting and laughing, that would make us seem as nutty as Hollywood remaking mediocre television shows from the seventies into big-budget movies and calling that “creativity.”

“I feel sorry for the women The Boy’s going to date, since he sees us resolving things amicably and not being irrational all the time. He’s going to look for a decent relationship and boot out the psycho-nutty-needsomedrama-chicks that come along.”

The Mrs. smiled, as she correctly interpreted the compliment that I’d given her. The Mrs. is generally rational, and generally puts up with far more idiosyncrasies than any one person should have to cope with, especially when you commingle those of The Boy and Pugsley with mine. It’s like living in a house of extraordinarily picky, yet indescribably lazy people. Oh, sure, we want the grapes peeled and our pillows fluffed with a nice mint on them at bedtime, but we certainly don’t want to peel grapes, fluff pillows, and find the gosh-darned mints. That’s what The Mrs. is for. Besides, Pugsley has already found the mints, and now there’s baby slobber all over them.

Me? I’m glad to have The Mrs., and certainly understand that on occasion we push her buttons a bit too far, even if she does look like a fluffy teddy bear, we need to remember that sometimes, just sometimes, there’s a bit of nitro in there.