Category: Marriage

Was It Something I Said ?!?!?

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

 

Ever since I fled from the Windows world and into the effervescent and perpetually happy Apple universe, I’d been sitting at a desk thrown together in twenty minutes and composed mostly of scrap lumber (different colors), 4×4 for legs, and a fair number of exploratory holes, saw marks, spinning-drill-bit-skid marks, a couple of awkwardly placed and slightly askew keyboard and it’s baby sister, the touch pad.  All in all if you saw it you’d immediately ask me, “Who built it, the 3 Blind Mice?”

So after eighteen months of zooming around the internet on my sleek, gorgeous, fast, and sexy iMac which looked ridiculously out of place atop a “lean-to” or “slogbod” much like hanging your Chagall in the broom closet, we gathered our notes and set off for Ikea to buy a desk as sophisticated and natty as my iMac.  And what better place to look than Ikea where umlauts and chic Danish styling meet flat cardboard boxes and a picture-book as instructions.  It’s a maddening place, three oddly shaped floors keep inattentive browsers circling like planes above O’Hare during a blizzard.  The noise level rises with each entrance of a different language or dialect.  It’s the hunch punch of furniture stores!

Our excursion to the suburbs netted a sleek stainless steel desk and return, and a stout storage cabinet for office essentials which, unfortunately, never grew past page eight and was hastily disassembled and now waits in the back of the car like a repeat offender returned to jail.  The iMac went gaga the moment I placed its serpentine stand atop the stainless steel.  At the moment of contact I experienced goose bumps then heard Neil Armstrong’s voice from afar as he set foot. . .but the iMac’s new throne is less a desk and more a table, and the return is really a shelf, and it’s stainless steel veneer shrink-wrapped around a hollow-core interior: “All meat and no potatoes,” as my dad would say when characterizing anyone or anything that scores high marks in one area but falls woefully short in others.  My iMac’s stainless steel desk and return was more representation than substantial.

Today we decided to modify our chic and Danish modern representation of a stainless steel desk by adding a pinch of legitimacy: we installed a sleek, 5/8’s inch steel, pull-out keyboard tray. . .actually we only installed a representation of a keyboard tray.  As the drill bore into the fake under belly of the table it created an incredible vibration causing everything sitting on the desk top to bounce around like kids on a trampoline.  Including my iMac.  Which jumped around like a Walleye at the bottom of the boat.

The next thing I knew I went left and the iMac went right as it ricocheted off my head and landed, screen-first on the thickened edge of the stainless steel veneer.  As I write this my head is pounding, my wallet is weeping, and my iMac screen resembles a spiders web.

I’m sure there’s a hidden message in this debacle: never mix chic and cheap? iMac’s are really iWant so iGet? Now I know: Make sure that the pedestal upon which you place the one you love is meat and potatoes!

Stones (poem for 25)

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 2 Comments

Twenty-five, (it’s reputation easily tarnished)

Is known for silver, soft

Metals needing polish and restoration,

But our twenty-four glitters with precious

Stones like Essen and Paris and Rome; semi

Precious stones like gardens, forests, mountains.

 

We’ve stood at low-tide and watched

As water bent the edges of river stone

Flat, oblong, eraser-like, fits my palm

 like your hand.

 

Shoes off socks in hand we cross

The creek feeling the pebble stones

Poke and bite our feet, the portage

 pained and hesitant but the opposite

shore another adventure.

 

Like an ice-rink or race-track

We cover years circling back

To the beginning, annually crossing

The start, each time a mile stone.

Rights are Blind

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

I am not a fan of convention.

Convention was the double-barreled shotgun pointed at my mother and father back in April, 1955.  Convention forced them to marry.  And I suppose convention could be held partially to blame for my mother’s black-eye’s, broken nose, bruised ribs, cut lips, broken dishes, thrown plates, kitchen walls stained by brown gravy as the thrown pot-roast stuck then slid to the linoleum floor.  Yes, I suppose convention could be held partly to blame for decades of humiliation, abuse, eventual divorce, and questions my mother never had answered as to why convention revoked her right not to marry.

Convention is simply a thoughtless reaction designed to uphold order.  Marriage has been painted as the villain recently when the “have’s” and the “have-not’s” start arguing.  But it’s not Marriage we’re defending or demanding, it’s Convention.

There are lots of people willing to go to great lengths to defend Convention.  I am not interested in Convention.  I was sucker-punched by Convention once, as a child, when it told me to do as I was told, even if it seemed odd or strange or painful.  And yes, Convention said, Priest’s are adults.

Keep your Convention.  Here, take mine; it’s never done me any favors.  I have lots of friends who’ll gladly off theirs.

I just want what Convention thinks it is.  What I want is quiet, firm, loyal, blind, and the most powerful tenet of American Citizenship.  I want my Rights.  I don’t want better or different or bigger or smaller.  I just want my equal rights. And if there are fellow American Citizens that are afforded rights which are different than mine, then the Declaration of Independence is a lie from the very beginning.  We’re not all created equal.

And if the foundation upon which all our rights are built upon is fundamentally a lie, then not one American Citizen has a right to anything.

Tell that to Convention.