Blue-Footed Musings

• There’s a snowstorm coming our way. I’ve looked at the snow menu and I’m ready to place my order. I’d like the Snowball Snow, individual portion (just enough to feed one Snowman), served medium-cold, with a side of light breezes, please.
• I’m in no mood for . . . anything. I’m not happy with any book, any TV show, any hobby, any task, any anything. This is the most blah I’ve felt in a long time. I feel so blah that even my adjectives have blahhed into blahness.
• I keep telling myself to do something every day that I don’t want to do. It doesn’t have to be some big, horrible task. It could be a small, easy one. I figure that if I do a small task every day, eventually I’ll run out of them. Then I’ll have none left but the harder tasks, but they’ll seem easier, because I’ll have worked my way up to them.
• One seemingly small thing that I need to do soon is to go through the stack of magazines on my desk. If I don’t handle it soon, it’s going to get out of control. It reminds me of a great scene from The Good Place, a show which I enjoyed back in the days when I was feeling less blah. In that scene, a character was consigned to a prison cell for all eternity with nothing to entertain them but a stack of The New Yorker. The character said something like, “Aw, come on. You know I’m never going to read them,” and even has they said it, another magazine dropped onto the pile. I laughed and laughed, because that was such an accurate representation of what it’s like to be a subscriber. You haven’t had a chance to look at the last one before another arrives, and no matter how much you think you ought to read them all, you never will. You couldn’t, even if you had all the time in the world. It’s a Sisyphean task.

I found an unpublished post from 2015 in my drafts folder. I can’t believe that it sat there so long. It’s still funny, and for me it’s also nostalgic, so I’ve decided to publish it now.

My son wanted some dominoes for vacation, probably because he remembers setting up cascading dominoes with his cousin Colby last year. So, at his Grammie’s request, I bought a big box of them before we went. I picked the Click n’ Play brand, because they seemed like they were a good size, and the price was right.

I’m happy with the product, and I would buy them again. But the best part, for me, is the writing on the box. Here are the highlights.

• Dominoes are one kind of game, one kind of movement, also one kind of culture.
• Its game rule is simple, the dominoes according to certain spacing becomes the single line, or the branch platoon becomes ground.
• Sound of the dominoes hit, clear delightfully.
• Warning: Please don’t mutually throw the toy.

P.S. 1/16/2022: We still have this set of dominoes, which we keep in the drawstring bag that came with it. The kids have been pretty good about not mutually throwing the toy, but they’re still really bad at putting the dominoes away. Just the other day I accidentally stepped on the whole bag of dominoes, which the children had left right next to my piano. Perhaps the manufacturer should add an instruction on how to put the game away after playtime is over!