What 2020 gave us: a new appreciation of normal

This yard sign has almost nothing to do with what I’m writing about today except it pretty much sums up what I think of the past year and if I’d known there was a “Dog Party” I would have voted the straight Irish Setter ticket.

Just saw the sign on one of my walks and it made me laugh so figured I’d share it because we sure as hell didn’t laugh enough in 2020, so let’s start out 2021 on the right paw.

Anyway…

There is a point to what’s about to be a fairly disagreeable anecdote, so bear with me while I get through it; a story about the time I had food poisoning.

I was out in California and visited one of my favorite restaurants that had changed ownership and apparently the new owners decided to change the menu and add botulism to their recipes.

After I went to bed that night, my intestines started working on getting whatever they didn’t want in me out of me and my intestines weren’t overly picky about which orifice they used to jettison the unwanted cargo, if you get my drift and I apologize if you do.

So that night was what seemed like a never-ending series of intestinal explosions that would have made Mt. Vesuvius green with envy or some bad ribs. At one point I thought that little evil dude from Alien was going to chew its way through my stomach, burst out and say hi.

After a while I started wondering where it was all coming from because I was getting rid of way more material than I remembered consuming. Pretty sure I saw some gum and a cat’s eye marble I accidentally swallowed as a kid go by.

Now here’s the point:

I’m hugging the commode at 3 AM, waiting for the next eruption and thinking how I’d give just about anything to feel normal; a condition we routinely underestimate.

• Get sick and you appreciate normal.

• Lose your job and you appreciate normal.

• Have a car accident and you appreciate normal.

When things are going OK, we usually walk around failing to appreciate the absence of something awful and that’s a mistake. Any day you don’t have some terrible thing happen is not only a good day – it’s a great day.

And 2020 ought to remind us of that.

There’s some hope we’ll get back to some version of normal in 2021 and if and when we do, I’ve made a 2021 To-Do List, mainly because I’ve now lived long enough to know New Year’s Resolutions are futile. At this point in my life, I’m unlikely to get six-pack abs or stop drinking entirely or learn a foreign language, but when things get back to normal, here are some things I can do and they’re all pretty normal.

My 2021 To-Do List of Normal Stuff I Failed to Sufficiently Appreciate in the Past

1. See my mom.

In August of 2019 I went to California for my mom’s 94th birthday and when I called her this past August and apologized for missing her 95th birthday, she corrected me and said she was actually going to be 96.

Neat trick if you can pull it off without a DeLorean.

So when she started arguing with me about how old she was, I said, “Mom, when were you born?” She said, “1925” and then after a moment of silence added, “You’re doing the math, aren’t you?” Yeah, I was, but then decided there was no point in correcting her because when she hits 99 I don’t want to be the one to tell her she isn’t 100 and has another year to go.

2. See my son.

One of the great pleasures of growing older – and there aren’t many – is watching your children grow into interesting adults.

Those kids you had to help go poopy produce a song that appears in a Will Smith movie or publish a book or create a video game and it’s like your Golden Retriever comes into the room riding a unicycle, wearing a tweed suit, smoking a pipe and asks if you’ve seen his copy of Plato’s Republic lying around somewhere.

Your reaction is damn, when did he learn to do that?

Two of my sons live here in KC and I get to see them all the time and thank God for that, but Paul – the music producer – lives in LA and I haven’t seen him in 365 days and I know that for sure because it was January 2nd, 2020 when I left Los Angeles and waved goodbye through a shuttle-bus window.

Way too long without seeing him.  

3. See my best friend.

OK, now that I think about it I’ve got the order all wrong because I do things for my mom and son and my best friend does things for me. When I go to California he lets me stay at his house and lends me a car and for some reason thinks he needs to make me breakfast every morning, so I really can’t recommend his bed and breakfast highly enough.

So, Phil, you’re back to being number one and I’ll let you know when I’m headed your way so you can stock up on that French Roast coffee I like.

4. Fly on a plane.

To see any of the people on the top of my list I’ll need to fly on a plane which most of the time I hate because I consider it a bus ride that can kill you. People are always saying how safe flying is, but if something breaks on a bus it can pull over to the side of the road and if something breaks on a plane it can pull over to the side of a mountain.

Nevertheless…

After 2020, a plane ride represents the freedom to go where I like and I’ll try to stop bitching and moaning about flying on airplanes unless I die in a plane crash and if that happens you can rest assured that all the way down I was yelling: “I knew I should have taken a Greyhound!”

5. Get a haircut.

As I might have already mentioned once or twice, I haven’t had a haircut since all this started so all I do is randomly snip off parts or my hair that are sticking out and I can’t see the back so who knows what kind of dumpster fire I got going on back there?

Right now it looks like my hair has been styled by a guy with a nine-iron, a bad slice and a 24 handicap.

It would be nice to sit in a chair and have someone who knows what they’re doing give me a haircut and do it in less than the 45 minutes it takes me to butcher my own head.

6. Eat in a restaurant.

I dress like Dustin Hoffman shooting a scene in Outbreak and get take-out food, but it’s not the same as sitting down in a restaurant because you miss the whole restaurant ritual; looking at the menu, ordering a drink and an appetizer while you wait for your main course and deciding whether your waitperson was a pain in the ass who ought to get something less than the 20 percent tip I usually give; partially because I’m a great guy and mainly because 20 percent is way easier to figure out than 15 percent.

I’ve given horrible waitresses a 20 percent tip because I’m just too lazy to do the math and I’d like to have that experience again as soon as possible.

7. Appreciate normal.

When life gives you lemons you’re supposed to make lemonade, but as anyone who made it through 2020 knows; enough with the goddamn lemonade already. On the other hand, we probably ought to get something out of our global shit storm and if you made it through 2020, maybe it’s a new appreciation of normal.

Because it turns out, normal is pretty damn awesome.