Today's YMCA follies

—1) Called Linda from the Mens Locker-Room on my cellphone.
“How many bags of spinach do I get?”
“What?” said Joel Freedman, buck-naked and also in the Mens Locker-Room.
Joel Freedman is Canandaigua’s Mr. Green, head of the local prevention-of-cruelty-to-animals chapter.
He used to write hand-written diatribes to the mighty Mezz; re: the great chicken caper, where Canandaigua High-School Biology students were dissecting chickens they had raised.
He wasn’t allowed in Weggers, after Dippity-Dawg threw him out for rescuing lobsters.
An envelope would arrive at the mighty Mezz offices, containing his letter-of-the-month (only 12 letters-per-year were allowed Messenger letter-writers; intent being to throttle the tub-thumping conservative blowhards that continually badmouthed everything we said or did). It’d be hand-written, meaning I couldn’t OCR scan it, and had to hand it over to a typist.
“When’s that guy gonna move into the new century?” I’d ask.
Once we got a Word printout (“That could be an e-mail attachment,” I said); so I was able to OCR-scan it, and we printed it within three days.
A hand-written letter got typed into the system when the typist had a chance; which meant Freedman might go unpublished for a week or more.
But only one ‘pyooter printout. After that Joel probably recycled his ‘pyooter.
No doubt Joel thinks cellphones are of-the-devil.

—2) Here I am quietly cranking away on a Cybex machine.
A pretty young blond college-girl mounts another Cybex-machine, and she’s wearing a “Houghton” tee-shirt.
After numerous Cybex machines, I confronted her and asked “what class?”
“2008; I just graduated.”
“1966,” I said; “and I’ve never regretted it. Your whole life is ahead of you, and mine is about done; but Houghton better prepared me for life-in-the-real-world than some silly engineering-school that passes even blowhards. The I-35W bridge in Minneapolis is in the drink thanks to engineers.”
(“Don’t get me started about engineers,” our shed-slab contractor said.)
“I’ve never regretted attending a so-called ‘Liberial-Arts’ school like Houghton. I was a History-major; much more feet-on-the-ground than the engineers that supervised the Big Dig (allowing ceiling collapse, and leakage).
“I got an engineer brother that supervises his beloved Porta-Johns disgorging raw sewage all over Crapo St. They were shot out by al-Qaeda. He went in a Porta-John, sat down, and it blew up under him. Al-Qaeda had installed an IED! He was so mad, ya could hear him bellowing all over New England.”

“Linda” is my wife of 40+ years.

The “mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over two years ago. Best job I ever had.

“Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at. They have a store in Canandaigua.

“OCR scan” (optical-character-recognition) is scanning that creates computer-text of the scanned document.

“‘Pyooter” equals computer.

“Cybex machines” are strength-training machines, much like the old Nautilus machines, but much better. The Canandaigua YMCA has a whole circuit of many machines — at least 15.

“Houghton” is Houghton College in western New York, from where I graduated with a BA in 1966. I’ve never regretted it. Houghton is a religious liberal-arts college.

My macho, loudmouthed brother-from-Boston, the ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, got an engineering-degree from an “engineering-school” in Texas, and noisily claims superiority to liberal-arts majors — like me, who majored in History. Engineering is the supreme discipline; anything else is slacking off, so I am inferior.

RE: “Our shed-slab contractor” is the small independent concrete-contractor who poured the floor-slab for our storage-shed.

“Liberial” is now how my loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston noisily insists “liberal” is spelled. (Now it’s “liberila.”)

The “Big Dig” is the massive tunnel-project around and through Boston. Some of the underwater tunnels leaked, and ceiling-tiles fell on cars passing underneath.

My blowhard brother-in-Boston supervises Porta-Johns at where he works, and his grown-up-and-married daughter lives on “Crapo St.”

“IED” equals improvised-explosive-device, the military nomenclature for improvised roadside bombs in Iraq. —Long ago, my brother-in-Boston had a leaky kitchen-faucet I labeled an IED. His wife endured it for six years.

My brother is always “bellowing.”