Carlson

By: John Carlson— One thing I really enjoy is watching giant barges go floating past on a majestic river. Naturally, being a longtime Muncie resident, this love developed here along the White River. After 34 years of residency, unfortunately, I was still waiting for that first barge to pass. That’s when I commented to Nancy, “You’d think one’d chug by sooner or later.” “That’s what you’ve been waiting 34 years for?” she said, in disbelief. “A barge?” “Well, yeah ……

By: John Carlson— By any calculation, Nancy and I should be multi-millionaires by now, except for the fact she spends approximately $7,000 a week on seeds to feed every single bird residing in Delaware County. Does this upset me? Well, yeah. The worst thing is, of that $7,000 a week in seeds, squirrels consume $6,989 of it. Now, I could understand morbidly obese birds. After all, come October, the majority that don’t want to turn into bird-shaped ice cubes crashing…

By: John Carlson— So Nan brings Toby back from the veterinarian’s office the other day and says she has some bad news to share. “Oh, no!” I scream, hand to my mouth, collapsing on the floor in grief. “How long has he got?” “He’s not dying, dingbat.” “He’s not?” I say with relief, removing my hand from my mouth and rising from the floor. “No. He just needs extensive dental work,” she says, at which point I resume screaming into…

By: John Carlson— I haven’t been practicing yoga very long, but long enough to know my overwhelmingly favorite yoga pose. It’s called The Corpse. As you may have surmised, The Corpse is so named because what you do is pretend that you are dead. Like with many other things in life, as my wife often reminds me, acting dead is pretty much my forte. Now, there are countless yoga poses out there, some of such complexity they appear mind-boggling,  or…

By: John Carlson— What is it about hot sauce that’s so addictive? I’m sure there is a scientific explanation, something about the heat molecules pumping up your brain’s pleasure sensors until your turgid tastebuds can only find sweet release in hotter and hotter foodstuffs before they go haywire and leave you bawling like a little wussy-boy. Speaking of which … Having ratcheted up my own heat tolerance over a period of years, one day I found myself surrounded by family…

By: John Carlson— Full confession: On exceedingly rare occasions and for medicinal purposes only, I have been known to take a teensy-weensy sip of the corn whiskey known as “bourbon.” What’s more, I don’t dislike it. You can imagine, then, the excitement with which I greeted the news that by marriage – through my wife Nancy’s sister Marti’s husband Charlie’s side of the family – I am closely related to actual distillers of bourbon, rye and vodka. Their business is…

By: John Carlson— If it’s true, as some say, that you are what you wear, then at heart I am a square-dance caller. It’s not that I like square dancing. I don’t. Like most guys, when it comes to any form of dancing, if I were given the choice of doing that or pulling out my own toenails with pliers, I would really have to think about it. But I do have this odd fascination with bolo ties. Those ties…

By: John Carlson— My wife has a recurrent dream. It’s about chickens. In this dream, Nancy actually owns chickens. Rather, we own chickens, an assortment of dutiful, fancifully feathered cluckers that reside out back. Sometimes she will go for eight or nine months without even mentioning chickens. But then, out of the blue, she’ll verbalize some crazy chicken pipe dream of hers that reminds me she hasn’t forgotten them and, indeed, remains in the throes of her chicken obsession. This…

By: John Carlson— One thing you can say about outer space is there’s a helluva lot of it. This profound observation occurred to me over years of casual star gazing. But a recent visit to Ball State University’s super-cool Charles W. Brown Planetarium left me with lots more observations, not least of which is that movie star Morgan Freeman will never make it as a rapper. That’s fine, though, because rapping aside, he is his usual dignified, calming self in…