One Night In Puerto Rico

It’s been 16 months since I’ve written anything, but preparing remarks for my daughter Dani's wedding got the creative juices flowing again. Unfortunately, that's not the only thing that started flowing.

Despite 21 days of traveling and eating Caribbean food from kitchens of dubious cleanliness, my stomach had held up remarkably well. That hasn't always been the case. Back in 1996, while traveling in Japan, the sushi I consumed for lunch one day suddenly felt like it was still alive and swimming through my intestines and making a mad dash for my colon. I was in full blown panic mode. Kellie kept telling me to calm down but I just yelled at her. "I can't calm down, it's quivering."

Free Will: A Philosophical Discussion

The Hand Of Reason

There’s never a good time to discuss philosophy with Kellie, but there are certainly bad times. One of those less opportune moments is right after Kellie has consumed a half liter of Turkish wine following a twelve-hour flight from Los Angles to Istanbul. I’m not sure why I brought up the subject of free will, but I certainly regret it.

“We don’t have free will,” I told Kellie. “We believe we're in control our own actions but it’s just an illusion.”

Whack! Kellie's right palm landed landed flush against my left cheek.

The Unhappy Camper

I'm jumping for joy. Notice my smile.

I am not a happy camper. In fact I fail to see the point of camping. How can anyone possibly derive pleasure by abandoning the amenities of home and living in dirt, using an out house, and having to pay fifty cents for a three-minute shower in a room where the previous user bathed their dog? (I should mention that the previous user bathing their dog was my wife, Kellie.) The privilege of experiencing poverty doesn't come cheaply. The beat up RV we rented ran $125 per day for five days, not to mention the $400 in gas it took to transport that beast from Los Angeles to Morro Bay and back. And just like living in a Third World country, I had intermittent electrical power, drinking water of questionable purity, and no convenient place to dispose of human waste. 

Boehner Blames Obama For Pit Bull Attacks

WASHINGTON (Living in Kellie’s World)—Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) said today that he blames President Obama for the rise in Pit Bull attacks since 2008.

Here We Go Again!

It’s been more than month since I’ve written anything in any of my three blogs; life intervened. Spending a month with my father following his open heart surgery broke my writing habit. In a couple of weeks we start our biggest trip of the year, which should give me time to start writing again. I say biggest trip because we’ve already cruised a few times this year and plan to finish 2014 with a few weeks in the Caribbean. What started out as an eight-day tour of Ireland somehow grew into a two-month trek.

Voicemail

My brother Gerard and I chat periodically. He usually calls during his drive home from work. If he calls at any other time, it typically means he has family news to share. If he leaves a voicemail that says, “Call me,” it’s usually not good news. A week after his last call me message, I was on a flight to New York.

The Limitations Of Inductive Inference In Marital Relations

Marriage is an educational institution, one where graduation is impossible and dropping out or expulsion is the only escape. I should know; I flunked out on my first attempt, but it wasn't my fault. My primary instructor was distracted tutoring other students. Now I'm enrolled in another institution of higher learning, the School Of Kellie, and while there's still no hope of receiving a diploma, there's little risk that my tutelage will be interrupted because Kellie's campus is closed to new admissions. She has all she can handle with her one transfer student who is on perpetual academic probation. Thanks to my sustained lackluster performance, frequent remediation is required, and I regularly get schooled. This week's lesson, conducted aboard the Celebrity Century while cruising along the California Coast, explored the limitations of inductive inference in marital relations.

Mr. Winky Goes To A CrossFit Box

I have not been very conscientious about protecting Mr. Winky over the years. Throughout a lifetime of carelessness I have subjected him to multiple chemical burns and countless assaults from an endless variety of projectiles. Today I wacked him on his head; he never saw coming. It was an accident. I apologized profusely. Just to be clear, Mr. Winky is a euphemism for the centerpiece of my family jewels, the royal staff, if you will.

Reckless Abandonment

When the alarm went off at six-thirty on Valentine’s Day morning, Kellie jumped out of bed and started packing. I smothered my head with a pillow and ignored her until she started rattling around next to the bed. She dropped my Valentine’s gift on the nightstand: a 2009 Beaulieu Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon and bag of barkTHINSTM snacking chocolate. I didn't know what the hell barkTHINSTM were, but at $15.99 a bottle she plunked down about four times what she normally spends on my wine. She's clearly guilt ridden about abandoning me on Valentine's Day.

The Many Faces Of Kellie

I tried finding my wife’s condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but Kellieness is not a generally accepted diagnosis. Dissociative identity disorder, more commonly known as multiple personality disorder, was the closest match I could find after ruling out the only other likely candidates, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

Marriage Risk

Kellie claims that marriage extends a man's life expectancy but reduces a woman's. I didn’t believe her and needed only minutes to prover her wrong, again. Studies show that married women outlive their single counterparts too. I'm tired of always being right.

Big Brain, Little Brain

A University of California, Santa Barbara, study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that some men have an enlarged pelvic splanchnic ganglion, just big enough to be classified as a second, albeit much smaller, brain.

Valentine's Day, Alone

Valentine's Day is approaching. By this time I'm usually obsessing over what gift to buy or where to celebrate, but not this year. Kellie is leaving me—for another woman—two other women to be precise. She and a couple of girlfriends are planning a trip to Sedona, Arizona, for a long weekend of hiking, hot tubs, and happy hour specials. Back home, the other abandoned men and I will have to console ourselves with hot wings at Hooters.

Science Is A Drag

What do extraterrestrials, cross dressing, (not to be confused with cross dressing extraterrestrials), antigravity, The Gulf oil spill, free energy, 9/11, Fukushima, a messiah complex, and the Bermuda Triangle all have in common? If you guessed my anti-radiation ray gun wielding neighbors, the Hutchisons, then give yourself a pat on the back; you’re a loyal reader of Living in Kellie’s World.

A Problem Of Biblical Proportions

It’s bad enough when your vacation home sits next door to a man who believes he invented a combination ray gun and sound system that neutralizes radioactivity from the reactor accident in Fukushima, Japan. It's an entirely different problem when his wife claims that she and her husband are the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. I’ve written about my neighbor John Hutchison and his ray guns before; you can read about it here, here, and here, but I recently discovered this biblical gem by his wife Nancy on a message board at the Cosmic Token:

Death Begins

At the age of 54, the day that I had been dreading for years had finally arrived. On Thursday, January 9, 2014, I discovered my first gray hair. I found it while examining my recently receding hairline. To be perfectly truthful, it's not the first gray hair on on my body, just the first gray hair on my scalp. Gray hairs sprouted elsewhere several years ago and have been migrating north from my nether regions ever since. I was initially quite concerned because those early white settlers were much more crinkly than the darker natives. I envisioned a future looking like a less intelligent Albert Einstein.

A New Year's Day Surprise

Kellie doesn’t allow sexy time to happen unless the bedroom door is locked. Period. Unfortunately, for me, the bedroom door on our Cannes apartment was lacking the required lock. I improvised by wedging a beach umbrella under the door handle, propped up by a couple of magazines and copy of Rick Steves’ France, the 2011 edition with the foldout color map.

Breasts To Die For

A German study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that staring at women's breasts improves men's health. According to the research, men who stared at woman’s breasts had a reduced risk of heart disease and better cardiovascular health.

John Hutchison's Ray Guns Redux

The Ray Gun

Kellie is back home in Oceanside, California, and I’m alone in Gold Beach, Oregon, trying to quell my neighbor’s ray guns. Since they first showed up next to our vacation rental property with their ray guns mounted on top of an old, white sheriff’s bus, they have been busy establishing a more permanent setup. They are remodeling their building, formally a small storage facility, into a laboratory with personal living quarters for self proclaimed scientist John Hutchison and his lovely wife Nancy. It looks like they are spending a good deal of money. I never knew crazy was so lucrative. 

Binge, Distracted By Breasts

I’ve gone off on a binge, a reading binge, which has effectively starved me of any time for writing. It started when I offered to do some research on Daniel Kahneman’s and Amos Tversky’s prospect theory for my friend David Marquet, a retired submarine captain and author of the book Turn The Ship Around. When I discovered that I had online access to academic journals using Kellie’s community college account, I spent days looking up and reading all manner of papers related to the theory because that’s what we obsessive-compulsive types do when we fixate on something. Subsequently, I decided it would be worth reading Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. This forced me to put aside the other two books I was reading, Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday:What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? and E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.