As a one-time human companion of a border collie, I can testify that the following clip is not nearly as far-fetched as one might think. They’ll herd (or attempt to herd) just about anything that moves:

Damn clever ad, in my opinion. Thanks to the Copyranter for bringing it to our attention. And Happy St. Patty’s Day to all!

A friend sent me this the other day, because he thought it sounded like something I would say:

Not only does it sound like something I would say, I think it’s more or less something I have said. Guess I should’ve copyrighted the sentiment when I had the chance.

At least I know now that I’m not the only one who ever believed I’d someday just magically… arrive. Yeah. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m still very much at sea.

So, my dad (who, you will recall, recently had gall bladder surgery, a little detail which will shortly become immensely important to our story) is in the habit of walking up to my place with his cup of coffee in the mornings and chatting for a few minutes before I leave for work. It’s a pleasant little ritual we’ve developed over the last couple of years, a low-key means of connection for a father and his grown son who’ve never been terribly close. We rarely talk about anything more meaningful than whatever funny thing our respective cats did the night before, but these conversations matter anyway.

The other morning was a strange one for these desert climes. It had rained just before sunrise, so everything outside was wet and glistening, and there was a hazy, golden quality to air. It was far more reminiscent of what I remembered of England than Utah, cool and crisp but not truly cold, and Dad and I were both enjoying it. We felt cozy enough inside our coats. The concrete apron around Dad’s shop, which stands behind the old house where I live, was dotted with shallow puddles. As we stood there chatting, I noticed one of my cats lapping at the ground directly in front of a battered old Chevy pickup. Dad’s work truck. The one that leaks numerous fluids cats ought not be ingesting.

“Hey,” I said, “You don’t suppose there’s any anti-freeze in that, do you?”

Dad shrugged, shooed kitty away from the puddle, and then bent down, dipped a finger into the potentially toxic liquid, and stuck it in his mouth.

A little jolt of alarm zipped through my stomach. “Dad…!”

“Ah, it’s fine,” he said, wiping his finger on his pants and then taking a mouth-cleansing sip from the mug in his other hand. “Just rainwater.”

Seeing the expression on my face, he continued in a nonchalant tone. “I used to dip my finger into radiators all the time. It was an easy way of telling whether the mix was strong enough or if you needed to add some more anti-freeze.”

“One of those old-fashioned backyard mechanic things?” I ventured.

“Yeah. ‘Course, nobody told us it’d make your gall bladder go rotten after about 30 years.”

He said it was a deadpan face that would’ve made Buster Keaton proud. Then I caught the twinkle in his eye, and I laughed out loud, and my father, a man who once seemed to me the most terrifyingly humorless creature on Earth, actually cracked a smile himself.

I cherish these mornings.

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but 2012 got off to a pretty shaky start for the Bennion Collective (a wholly owned subsidiary headquartered on the fabulous Bennion Compound).

First of all, remember that awful head cold I had a few weeks ago? If you’ll recall, The Girlfriend was relatively unfazed while I was knocking at death’s door. Well, that situation inverted itself right after I wrote about my cat wanting to eat my eyes: I began steadily improving (although I still have an irritating dry cough first thing in the morning) but her iteration of this filthy little bioweapon abruptly exploded into a full-blown bronchial infection that kept her indoors on New Year’s Eve and required a round of antibiotics and an inhaler for her to gain any traction at all against it. (Like me, she’s now mostly over it aside from that nagging cough.)

As if Anne trying to retch up her lungs didn’t give me enough to worry about during the first week of January, I got a phone call from my mom on the afternoon of the third, my first day back at the office after a week-long holiday break, to inform me she’d taken Dad to the ER that morning with severe abdominal pains. I was a little miffed she hadn’t bothered to inform me until hours after the fact, but my irritation seemed petty under the circumstances. I had bigger things to be concerned with. Like, the fact that my dad was in the hospital. That would concern anyone, of course, but in my case, the concern was leavened with a big fistful of disbelief. My dad? In the hospital? Nah, my dad doesn’t get sick. Not seriously sick. Not hospital sick. Oh, I’ve seen him injured before, sometimes badly enough to leave him essentially incapacitated for a time (such as when he suffered for several months with a ruptured disk in his back). I’ve seen him ill with the usual complaints: viruses, food poisoning, hangovers (which are kind of the same difference as food poisoning when you think about it). And I’ve seen him physically diminish in recent years as age finally starts to catch up with him. But even with those ailments, in spite of them really, he still looms in my imagination as some kind of elemental bull, immensely strong, fundamentally vital even as he begins to slow down. Such men do not go to the hospital.

Except Dad had to. After two nights of worsening misery — the pain had gone away during the daytime, only to return with a vengeance the following evening — he decided he’d had enough. He spent the first day undergoing a battery of tests, including an MRI, which revealed his gall bladder was full of stones. In addition, one of those stones had escaped into his bile duct and gotten wedged there. He underwent two separate laparoscopic surgeries the next day, Wednesday, January 4; the first was to clear the bile duct, followed by the more routine procedure to remove the gall bladder.

The surgeon who removed the gall bladder later told my parents and me that he encountered two major challenges with my dad: the first was that Dad’s abdomen is full of scar tissue from an operation he had when he was an infant, and all that had to be “broomed aside,” whatever that means. I guess this was a tricky enough situation that the surgeon almost abandoned the laparoscopy and opened Dad up. The second issue was the gall bladder itself, which the surgeon seemed rather astounded by. He described it as “ugly,” and “the worst he’d ever seen.” To be blunt, the bladder was filled with pus, and the surgeon couldn’t help but spill some of it into Dad’s abdomen as he was removing the diseased organ, setting the stage for a post-surgical infection. And that, as well as the trauma of having two back-to-back surgeries (and therefore a double-dose of anesthetic) kept Dad in the hospital for three more days.

I was never terribly worried about the surgery itself; Anne had her gall bladder removed several years ago and was home later the same day, so I just expected that Dad’s operation would be similarly smooth. But the aftermath — and the fact that Dad’s case turned out not to be as simple as Anne’s — was much more difficult for me to deal with. It was… sobering… to see him night after night, laying there in a backless hospital johnny while he soaked up antibiotics and painkillers, struggling to sit up and wincing if he twisted his torso too far in any direction. The bull disappeared within the confines of the hospital, and that troubled me in a way that’s difficult to put into words. No one wants to face their parents’ mortality, I guess, or the frailties that precede it. It’s even more difficult when you’re used to seeing your parent as a force of nature.

Of course, it’s all turned out fine. Dad was released to come home on January 8, and even though the release orders called for him to rest and take it easy for six weeks, he was impatient to get back to work after only one. He’s never been the sort to enjoy or even tolerate just sitting around, doing nothing. He had a follow-up with the surgeon a few days ago and was told everything has healed very well, and surprisingly quickly. He still tires easily, though, and just between you and me, I can’t help but wonder if his stamina will ever fully return to its previous levels. But for the most part, everything’s back to normal around here.

Unfortunately, having him out of commission for a couple weeks has thrown a big monkey wrench into certain plans that should’ve been finished — or at least much further along — by now. More on that another time. For now, I’ll just say I really hope the whole damn year isn’t going to be like this…

A new year already? What the hell happened to the old one? Seriously, 2011 is just a blur for me… as I think back and try to remember exactly what happened during the past twelve months, only four events come immediately to mind:

• The death of Osama bin Laden. (I wonder if this is going to become one of those “remember where you were when you heard about…” kind of things, or if the event proved too anti-climatic to make much of an impact on most people? I think I’m going to remember, at least, because the circumstances of my hearing about it struck me as very weird: I was at a TV-viewing party with about a dozen other people, watching the HBO series Game of Thrones. If you’ve never seen it, it’s when I got a text message from my friend Mike G. delivering the news. I thought he was yanking my chain for a moment… and then everyone else’s cellphones started lighting up with similar messages of their own.)
• The Girlfriend and I driving to Las Vegas to celebrate the wedding of our friends Dave and Sarah, and all the assorted misadventures associated with that.
• Meeting up with Cranky Robert in DC and road-tripping our way through several Civil War battlefield sites on the way back to his home in Pittsburgh.
• The end of the space shuttle program.

And that’s pretty much it.

Oh, there was a Rick Springfield concert with our friends Jack and Natalie in there somewhere. And another concert with Jack and Nat, one of those old-fart triple-threat shows comprising Night Ranger, Foreigner, and Journey. And I bit the bullet and took Anne to see Erasure, one of those inscrutable synthpop bands I’ve never cared for, but which she really likes.

And there was the wedding of Anne’s niece Kaitlyn (occasionally referred to in the past on this blog as “The Teenager”), which was a truly weird experience because it wasn’t all that long ago she was a jealous three-year-old who didn’t want to share her “Nana” (she couldn’t pronounce “Anne”) with some scruffy guy (that would be me); surely 16 years haven’t passed that quickly, have they?

And my uncle Layne died. And the father of my old friend Keith.

There was also a development in my personal life that I’m not quite ready to blog about yet (don’t worry, it’s nothing bad, and in fact, most of my friends already know about it; I just have other blog-business I want to deal with before I write about it).

But otherwise… a blur. My impression is that I was generally happy during 2011, not counting the occasional off day. At least I wasn’t as consistently depressed and angry as I was in 2010, but I couldn’t tell you why, i.e., I don’t know what changed or was different from the prior year. Certainly I didn’t experience any of the difficulties so many people faced in ’11; my job remained (thankfully) rock-steady. And it seems like there were fewer of those last-minute “wait, you have to stay late tonight because someone else screwed up and now our hair is on fire” moments at the office that so piss me off. But my more upbeat mood nevertheless puzzles me considering all the ways in which 2011 drove home the point that my youth is officially, irrevocably, irretrievably behind me.

Yeah, I know, I know. I’ve been talking about getting old and being out of touch for ages, but this thing I’ve been feeling lately is… something else. Something much harder to articulate. And somehow it’s also much more authentic and consequential than my earlier whinging about landmark birthdays and losing my hair, although, again, I can’t really put my finger on why. Or what caused it. Maybe it was seeing that grumpy toddler all grown up dancing with her groom. Or perhaps it was the startling moment a few weeks ago when I realized my friend Cheryl’s daughter is now about the same age Cheryl and I were when we met. Maybe it was the observation that all the pretty young things walking around out there no longer pay much attention to me (and why should they, since I’m the same age as their dads?) Or the even more unsettling observation that I now tend to find their mothers more appealing anyway. Probably it’s all these things and a million more, large and small, all adding up to an understanding of something I’ve been trying to deny or simply ignore for a very long time: that while there may always be possibilities — as Mr. Spock so frequently counseled us back in the days when Star Trek was relevant — the probabilities of a great many things are shrinking for me. It’s a thought and a sensation that should fill me with panic, or at least a tremendous slug of regret. And it does, from time to time. Still, the impression remains: I think I’ve been generally happy this year. Or so I believe at this particular moment. Maybe I wasn’t really as happy as I think and this is just some kind of post-holiday glow I’m feeling. Because Christmas in 2011, for the first time in recent memory, was not a completely depressing and anxiety-provoking ordeal for me.

What the hell is happening to me? No, seriously, this is weird… enjoying Christmas, having an epiphany about lost opportunities and not instantly overwhelming myself with self-recriminations?

Some among you may be tempted to suggest I’m finally growing up. And you may even be right. But if you say it to my face, I’ll most likely tell you where to stick it. Because there’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to hear that. The part of me that once made a pact with the very Cheryl I mentioned above to become Lost Kids rather than grow up.

I’m beginning to babble, I know, but I have one more thought about 2011 before I click “Publish” on this entry: generalized sense of well-being aside, I feel like I really dropped the ball on blogging during the past twelve months. I haven’t actually compared the number of entries I published this year to what I posted in 2010, but it seems like there were a lot fewer ones, and most of the ones that did go up were shorter and pretty superficial. Or so it seems to me. As I said, I haven’t actually quantified it. But our esteemed colleague-in-blogging Jaquandor mentioned a while back that he wished I wrote more, and this blog’s archive is filled with half-finished entries that I keep hoping I’ll get back to, but somehow know I won’t. Maybe one little guy out in Utah slacking off on his personal blog doesn’t matter in the Big Scheme of Things, since we’ve been repeatedly told throughout 2011 that blogging is over as a social phenomenon anyhow. But it troubles me to see myself letting Simple Tricks slip away from me, because my little rants and musings here are about the only writing I do anymore, and if I stop doing even those…

Which parts of your self-image — which dreams — are okay to let go of, and which do you have to keep fighting for?

Good lord, has it really been two weeks since my last entry? Sorry, kids. I didn’t mean to vanish without notice like that. To explain, The Girlfriend and I have both been under the weather since the weekend of the 16th. And when I say “under the weather,” I mean “down in a two-mile-deep bomb shelter with a Cat-5 hurricane stalled above it, slowly grinding away the very crust of the earth.” Seriously, I can’t remember ever having a head cold lay me out the way this one has. I normally have a fairly strong constitution, or so I like to believe, but while Anne has remained relatively functional, I’ve been helpless in the face of this shit. At its peak, I spent two days on the couch in my bathrobe, weak as a kitten and drifting in and out of a fitful sleep. A few days ago, I ruefully joked — and it was one of those jokes with a grim kernel of truth at its not-very-funny heart — that I have in fact picked up a case of Captain Trips, the implacably deadly weaponized flu virus from Stephen King’s novel The Stand (his scariest work, in my opinion; I don’t do “outbreak” stories anymore, because they’re all too plausible in my mind).

It started pretty innocuously as a sore throat and a raspy voice, which I chalked up to Salt Lake’s annual winter temperature inversion, when a mass of cold air traps car exhaust, fireplace smoke, and all the other atmospheric filth you can think of near the valley floor for weeks at a stretch. Soon I had a cough too, which I again attributed to the inversion-caused “crud layer.” But then came the runny nose, the nasal congestion, the weepy (and then gooey, and then crusty) eyes, the sinus pressure — I had a day where I felt like Rocky Balboa had given me a solid right cross, the entire left side of my face ached so badly — and the stuffed-up ears, all of these rotating in and out of prominence. Just as I started to feel like I was making headway, a new symptom would pop up and smack me back to the couch. And underpinning all of it was a mind-deadening fatigue that quashed any ambition to do, well, anything. I suppose my kitty boys have enjoyed the constant company, at least.

Speaking of the kitty boys, on the second or third night after this thing really got a hold on me, I awoke to see one of them, Jack-Cat, sitting in the open doorway to my bedroom. Well, to be more accurate, I saw his silhouette sitting there. Unlike his shaggier, Creamsicle-colored brothers, Jack is sleek and black, a classic Halloween-style cat, so it was easy to identify him in the dark. I don’t know if I was feverish or if it was just the hour of night when the lack of good sleep finally gets to you, but in the instant of spotting him there, only a few feet away, his face ominously invisible in the shadows, I knew, just knew, that he was waiting for me to die. And once I’d rattled off my last breath, my normally sweet-natured little black buddy was going to eat me. Starting with my eyeballs. My tender, juicy eyeballs, round and bulging, primed to pop in Jack’s fangy little mouth like giant grapes…

Silly, right? Of course, it’s silly. But that was a bad night regardless.

I think I’m finally making headway on this stuff. My left ear is still intermittently stuffy, and I have a nagging cough. But my nose is free again, and I’m starting to regain interest in doing things that I used to do in the Before Time. And Jack-Cat hasn’t made any suspicious moves whatsoever. But still… I’m keeping a close watch on him. You never can tell…

As far as I’m concerned, few things in this life are as satisfying as a good cheeseburger. Now, your definition of “good” may (and probably does) vary from mine. My personal ideal is the simple, old-fashioned, Jimmy Buffett-style burger: a juicy, medium-well-done patty on a buttery toasted bun; cheddar or American cheese; a big leaf of lettuce (none of this finely chopped McRoughage crap); a ripe, flavorful tomato; onion (sliced into rings or at least crescents; again, none of the teeny-tiny shard things you get at many fast-fooderies); the holy trifecta of condiments, i.e., mayo-ketchup-mustard; a pickle spear on the side along with a heap of crispy krinkle-cut fries; and all of it washed down with an icy Coke (or my more recent obsession, iced tea) or a good beer… and no, I’d probably better not go off on a tangent about what constitutes “good” beer, because that’s a whole other blog entry. But however you like your burgers, I’ll bet it’s never occurred to you that it wasn’t really possible to enjoy one until relatively recently in human history. It certainly hadn’t occurred to me.

But there’s a cat named Waldo Jaquith who has considered the problem, and his findings are… provocative:

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors–in all likelihood, a couple of dozen–and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.

Just something to think about the next time you’re feeling (as I frequently do) like that whole Industrial Revolution might not have been the best idea. I mean, who really cares if Five Guys is superior to In-N-Out, or if you (like me) prefer a local mom-and-pop cafe burger (when I can find them)… at least we have the option of arguing over such things! Seriously, this is an issue that irreparably skews that whole “which time period would you like to live in?” question for me.

And now, it’s off to dinner… three guesses what I’m in the mood to eat…

Last night, a buddy of mine sent me some photos from the good old days when we worked together at Movies 9, a.k.a. the Niner, a.k.a. the Shithole, i.e., the multiplex movie theater that looms inordinately large in my memories of my late teens and early twenties. The image above is my favorite of the batch, one I don’t remember ever seeing before. That’s me, of course, sitting behind the wheel of my beloved Cruising Vessel, the 1963 Ford Galaxie that also loomed inordinately large over my youth. The stories I could tell involving that machine… nah, probably better not. Have to protect the innocent, you know. Or the not-so-innocent for whom the statue of limitations still applies.

Anyhow, I have this notion, based on no solid evidence whatsoever, that everyone has a moment in their lives when they are most authentically the person they’re meant to be. For most folks, I imagine, this moment comes when they’re relatively young, before the compromises and disappointments of grown-up life begin to weigh them down too much. What you see in that photo there, taken sometime around 1991 or ’92, was my moment. I knew exactly who I was and who I was going to be, there was still time for everything I wanted to do in life, and I even still had most of my hair! This is the guy I still expect to see when I look in the mirror, and I am always slightly wounded when I don’t…