While it all falls apart

THE NEW YORK TIMES – (An) offbeat market in Minikowo, Poland, attracted Dutch salesmen and more than a dozen Polish agricultural suppliers and farm representatives on a recent sunny afternoon. The prospective buyers eyeballed, sniffed and ran their fingers through the merchandise. The product? Manure from Dutch cows and pigs, muck that farmers in the Netherlands are desperate to sell. There were lectures, a happy hour and a speed-dating session between customers and sellers, complete with demonstrations and take-home samples.

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Speed Dating: This Way

WANDA:   “Hi, there. Have a seat. Been wanting to meet since I saw you at the semi-liquid byproducts booth. I’m an agri-business representative from the Central Lowlands, near Warsaw. I’d shake your hand, but I’ve just been pawing through some of the finest pig droppings I’ve ever had the privilege of lodging under my fingernails.

(holds out a plate of host-provided canapés) Appetizer? Try the puff pastries with the savory spread. They’re yummy!”

FINN:    “Umm … I’ll pass, thanks.”

WANDA:    “Nice threads, by the way. So, where’re you from? An Armani jacket like that doesn’t usually get featured in Farm and Field.” (winks)

FINN:    “Yeah, I guess so. I’m here with the Dutch Dung Council. Flew in from Amsterdam this morning. We’re making a presentation later this afternoon on new developments in the compost sector.”

WANDA:    “Hmm. I don’t see it here in the program.”

FINN:    “I’m not surprised. It’s a late addition. The guys from Syndicated Stool just, um, dropped out, so to speak, and we got called in.”

WANDA:    “What’s the title?”

FINN:    “It’s called Slops and Night Soil: The Great Waste of Our Time. All about natural fertilizer.”

WANDA:    “Sounds like a growth industry.”

FINN:    “Yeah. The big boys are in it up to their necks, hoping to eventually clean up.”

WANDA:    “Sounds interesting. Any sample cups available at the display table?”

FINN:    “Not yet. Sponsors don’t want to take any chances. They’re waiting until after lunch, so they don’t get things mixed up with the Wacky Cake dessert.”

WANDA:    “Gówno …”

FINN:    “Exactly.”

WANDA:    “You know … (lowering her voice), we probably wouldn’t be here in the first place if it weren’t for that Strait of Hormuz thing. Pretty simple, right? No oil … no chemical fertilizer. What the hell did they think they were doing, anyway?”

FINN:    “Same thing as us, I guess: Mucking things up and selling people a load.

WANDA:    “I have to say, though, it’s been an interesting few days. My colleagues and I have been picking up some interesting concepts …”

FINN:    “Wearing gloves, I hope…”

WANDA:    “… but realistically, we’re not sure the market is ready for wide-spread dealing in this stuff. It’s pretty wet and heavy, you know, and that’s going to have an effect on transportation costs.

FINN:   “Yeah, we get it. You guys don’t take a lot of crap. We think we’ve done a good job anticipating that, though, with the development of something new called Manure Lite. Very little alcohol and only 60 calories.

WANDA:    “Interesting …”

FINN:    Have you met our manure ambassador yet?”   

WANDA:   (surprised) “No. I haven’t. Didn’t realize you had one. Would I recognize him?”

FINN:   Reddish beard. Good looking guy. Doesn’t really stand out that much. Well … except for the cologne. For some reason he wears a ton of it.”

WANDA: (coquettishly) “Well … he couldn’t possibly be as good- looking as you.”

FINN:   “Oh. (following an awkward pause) Say, are you doing anything after the lecture? Would you like to have dinner?”

WANDA:    (smiling) “I thought you’d never ask.”

FINN:   “Great. I’ll pick you up at 7. Would that be all right?”

WANDA:    “Sure.”

FINN:    “Just one thing …”

WANDA:    “What’s that?”

FINN:    “You’ll be showering, right?”

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Bryce Harper shared his morning (wakeup) routine with more than 600,000 followers on TikTok, and one part stopped even his most diehard fans. The Philadelphia Phillies slugger squeezed toothpaste straight from the tube into his mouth, rather than applying it to his toothbrush.

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Whoo, boy. Apparently, things really ARE falling apart. That particularly squishy segment of Harper’s morning ablutions was defined as nothing less than “diabolical” by one of his online social media followers, and troubled readers of London’s The Daily Mail supposedly found the practice horrifying.

Just imagine the chaos that might have erupted if it had been revealed that the baseball hero wore his Jockey™ shorts over his pants instead of under them. I’m not suggesting that’s actually the case, mind you, but examine the odds. Surely, I’m not the only one.

The truth is, in this age of unending political grift and ceaseless mendacity, I’m kind of thankful for the occasional report of innocent quirkiness – innocuous and welcome departures from what’s become the everyday standard of lying, chealing and steating. And no, those aren’t typos. They’re quotes. I have a friend who stumbled into that malaprop 50 years ago when he tried to explain his strategy for winning at Monopoly.™

The way I look at it, you probably can’t be genuinely quirky and at the same time be guilty of doing anything seriously wrong. Most likely, it’s the other way around. I think it might even revitalize my faith in the underlying moral innocence of the human species if I learned that Harper had somehow adapted his toothpaste technique to his batting mechanics and, instead of swinging his Louisville Slugger™ at an incoming four-seamer, was throwing it at the ball while it was still in the pitcher’s mitt.

In fact, I’m beginning to think the world in general would be a much nicer place if we all were just a bit more, shall we say … unconventional.

And in that vein, I have some good news. Luckily, I’m one of the few people on the planet familiar with a little-known reference work titled “Miller’s Encyclopedic Compendium of Quirks and Barely Legal Activities.” I could claim there’s no relation, but you probably wouldn’t believe it. Wait. You say you would  believe it? Well … OK, then. No relation.

Unbelievably (again), the collection is broken down into various sections, one of which addresses sports in particular, and baseball in even more particular – a bit of serendipity that I’m certain will have special appeal to our hero, Mr. Harper. Here then, for his edification and yours, are some suggestions guaranteed to further enrich his reputation for delightful quirkiness … and in doing so, make the world a better place.

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1. Develop a habit of eating soup while wearing an outfielder’s glove on your spoon hand.

2. Steal third BEFORE you steal second.

3. Relatedly, try to actually steal second base by concealing it under your Phillies jersey.

4. Ask a teammate to store your chewing tobacco in his shoe. If that doesn’t keep you from putting it in your mouth, I don’t know what will.

5. And finally, in concert with your current morning wakeup ritual, try brushing your teeth with a baseball bat. Pay special attention to those molars!

POPULAR MECHANICS – For years, the strange phenomenon of precognition – an unwavering ‘gut feeling’ that something will happen in the future – has puzzled scientists. The concept may sound far-fetched, but many studies suggest there’s statistical evidence to back up [its] existence.

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I’ve got a hunch this is going to be a fruitful topic.

To start with, we’ve all got guts, and I’m told that, based solely on the size of mine, I should be fairly adept at predicting the future. But in all fairness, there are literally a ton of people out there who are way more clairvoyant than I am. I ran into a woman at the Stop & Shop,™ for instance, whose precognitive talent was obviously off the chart. As she passed me, I was overwhelmed by an alarming premonition: namely, that the box of donuts in her cart wasn’t going to last very long.

While it’s obvious that the National Weather Service has an employment policy that precludes the hiring of anyone with the capacity to accurately predict anything at all, the CIA has been in the market for prognosticators since forever, urged on by the research of a University of Nevada parapsychologist who postulated that consciousness might not operate according to the clock. If that were so, then maybe a reaction to a stimulus really could be sensed before the stimulus occurred. Kind of like a reverse cause and effect.

My powers of parapsychological intuition tell me you’re having some trouble swallowing that, but it’s true, and I’m including a link to grease your esophagus. I used the theory just recently, in fact, when I explained to a shopkeeper that the shattered ceramic bluebirds lying on her floor were just part of a premonition she was experiencing and, in order to determine if the accident really happened, she’d have to wait a few minutes. Needless to say, I took advantage of the time to make my escape.

The university professor tested his hypothesis by sticking a handful of EEG electrodes onto an assemblage of volunteer noggins and then showing the humans who owned them a few pictures – some nice and some nasty. The pictures. Not the noggins.

But before the images actually showed up, each of the test subjects received a little ‘prompt’ to let them know something was on the way. They had no idea what it would be. Guess what? When the subjects were shown a positive image, in the five seconds between the prompt and the arrival of the picture, their brain activity essentially registered a big “so what.” But in the five seconds before something nasty appeared, their brain activity spiked – all before they even saw the image. It was like they knew something gross was coming.

OK, so none of that necessarily evokes the soundtrack from “House on Haunted Hill,” but it’s interesting, right? Plus, statisticians got out their pencils and confirmed the effect was statistically reliable. Hey. That’s enough for me.

Which is why I’m using my own precognitive artistry – and my prodigious gut – to predict that my wife is planning to serve egg and tuna casserole for dinner tonight. That … and her recipe book was open to a picture of it as I happened to walk by. It took less than five seconds for me to order a pie from the friendly guy at my local pizzeria.

He said he was expecting my call.

Sure. If there had been a choice, I absolutely would have chosen actual manna from, you know, heaven. Who wouldn’t? But there wasn’t, and instead I got bird shit – on my head, on my hand, and in an especially embarrassing spot near the center of my pants about three inches south of the belt line.

I mean, this only happens in cartoons, right? Or in Mel Brooks movies. Or, if you’re really, really lucky, during a televised press conference in what used to be the White House Rose Garden. Oh, please, please. Let it happen there. But no. It occurs as I’m chaise-lounging by the pool, nursing a gin and tonic. Or maybe it was a Bordeaux blanc. It probably was both.

And as you might expect, it came out of nowhere. I was just sitting around, entertaining the adults – exercising a talent for faux worldliness that pretty much all my friends tolerate in exchange for free wine – when the muscles surrounding a randomly passing cloaca cut loose and exposed me as someone who desperately needed to clean up his act. Just an arbitrary natural occurrence, right? A bona fide crap shoot.

Or was it? I decided a little research was in order to ascertain whether something else might be at play. Something a little more newsworthy.

As part of my online analysis of the subject (Yes, I spent an inordinate amount of time coming up with that exact word), the experts at naturewithbirds.com assured me that, “while it might feel like bad luck when it happens, data and observational studies suggest that certain factors make these incidents more predictable than random.” I knew it, God damn it. I knew it.

With a little further help from that world-famous intellect Alphonso Imbroglioni (AI), I was able to determine that roughly 5% of Earthlings get splattered by bird crap every year. Granted, that sounds a little iffy, but they’ve got a whole page devoted to the topic and it sounds, well, really professional. Sure. I could spend a little more time looking for actual quotes from birdologists and statistical specialists, but I’m going with it. I don’t give a shit.

Punch in the numbers and you’re left with the conclusion that some 17 million Americans get unexpectedly doused with a special blend of concentrated nitrogen compounds and pure avian ejectamenta over your average 12-month period. By the way, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the look of the stuff depends on what’s been munched for lunch. According again to Nature With Birds, fruit-eaters produce softer, more colorful droppings, while insectivores and seed-eaters tend to manufacture firmer, darker droppings. I’m convinced mine had spent some time at Chipotle.

You have to remember that the exact number of people with targets on their heads is a little hard to pin down because, well … bird poop incidents apparently aren’t important enough to be recorded in official health or environmental databases. As one of 17 million U.S. victims, I think that needs to change.

And it wouldn’t take much, either. Consider this: Now that the current Washington administration has decided clean air and water aren’t THAT important, I imagine there’s probably a lot of vacant office space available where a slew of EPA officials once worked. How hard would it be to fill some of it with a shiny new agency called the Federal Department of Flying Crap?

Hold on. Hold on. We may have to readdress. I think we might already have one of those.

It’s called the White House Office of Communications.

Yes, I misconstrued things from the beginning, but honestly, the BBC made it way too easy to get the wrong idea. World’s Biggest Condom Maker to Raise Prices, the news headline called out, and in purely reptilian response my brain answered: “Geez! Just how big do those things have to be?”

I realize offering such a public glimpse into my private thought processes risks inviting people to conclude that I have no particular need for anything close to the world’s biggest condom, but I’m hoping you’re the sort of readers who won’t make too many, shall we say … short-sighted assumptions. I get along just fine, thank you.

Anyway, that’s not what this little disquisition is all about. The CEO of the company was warning that his firm might have to raise its prices by up to 30% because America’s war with Iran was disrupting the supply of materials used to make its products. If you’re wondering how fossil fuels got mixed up in your sex life, it’s because materials like ammonia (a latex preservative) and silicone-based lubricants are all derived from – you guessed it – oil.

The business executive went on to reveal that demand for the little things – once again, don’t make too many assumptions – had shot up something like 30% this year. Why? “In bad times,” he explained, “the need to use condoms is even more because you’re uncertain with your future.”

Is that it? Really? Uncertainty drives the market for prophylactics? The more bad things that happen to you, the more you need condoms? Cripes. I always thought that equation tilted the other way. In my neighborhood, a bigger collection of condoms usually meant things were going pretty well for you.

But, OK. Let’s take the word of the condom king and make an assumption – just this once – that some kind of socio-economic theory could be fabricated to correlate the number of bad things happening to you with the number of prophylactics in your possession. Yeah, it’s a stretch (here we go), but I’m sure we could find something to fit.

In fact, unable to suppress neither the award-winning economist in me nor a sudden thirst for large amounts of chardonnay, I was fairly quickly able to formulate a condom-based rating system to help me gauge just how poorly my day might be going – starting, as usual, with burned toast.

I don’t know about you, but I absolutely require a couple of warm, perfectly buttered slices of toasted bread to get my day off to the right start. They’re kind of like comfy bedroom slippers, if you know what I mean. If you don’t know what I mean, try putting a pat of salted Land O Lakes™ between each of your toes when you wake up. It won’t come close to describing the satisfaction I get from warm toast and tea, but by God I don’t think I should have to be the only person on the planet who has to wash his feet in the morning.

The important thing to remember is this: If I have to start it with accidentally burned toast, I know right away the day most likely is going to hell and I need to immediately issue myself at least a partial condom. Yes, I understand how dangerous partial condoms can be, but at my age it’s not like I’m actually using them for their originally intended purpose. Just think of it as an obscure financial technique to balance accounts. After all, comparatively speaking, burned toast isn’t that bad, right?  Certainly not as bad as, say, having an uninsured car hit by a truck while it was positioned perfectly between the lines in a grocery store parking lot.

I’m not saying that actually happened to me, but I’m not saying it didn’t, either. All I’m saying is that, on my new sliding condom scale, an incident like that would be worth at least six and a half condoms – a full seven if the shock of seeing your late model Chevy in pieces caused you to drop the food and pharmaceuticals you just bought. By the way, you’d be allowed to credit yourself with a quarter condom if among those pharmaceuticals happened to be a bottle of aspirin you could take to help offset the immense suffering obviously awaiting you as the day progresses.

You can begin to see, then, the logic behind my new “Count Your Condoms” life-style rating system. I used to have a “Count Your Blessings” system, but that went to hell along with my day. Here are just a few other mishap milestones to help you gauge just how many prophylactics you ought to be reasonably accumulating as your day deteriorates:

• Your employer approaches you with a demonic smile and asks you to program everything you do into the company’s new AI software.  (21 condoms)
• The folks at HBO discover you’ve been piggy-backing on your neighbor’s account and shut you down just as the killer is about to be revealed.  (2 condoms)
• You’re on your hands and knees planting lilies in a freshly mulched garden and discover that your landscaper brought in a load contaminated with poison ivy.  (7 condoms)

These, of course, are only meant to serve as generalized examples. One of the nice things about my system is that you have the latitude to customize the condom count in accordance with your individualized pain and annoyance levels, as the moment requires. I would, however, recommend also taking into account psychological and emotional factors such as absurdity and irony.

Consider, for instance, this final, and perhaps most disturbing clue that you’re having a bad day:

• You unexpectedly find yourself in need of a condom and don’t have any.

That, I would suggest, calls for at least a dozen.