Herculodge

iNuke Boom: A Boombox That Weighs 700 Pounds and Costs $30,000

 

This morning Leo Laporte told Bill Handel about the iNuke Boom, a true beast of a boombox. 

On a different note, I'm flying out of town this morning and hope to resume with posts Sunday evening.

Are You Meta-Fighting with Your Partner? If So, Stop It Immediately

If you’re simply fighting with your girlfriend or wife, you don’t know what real fighting is. The type of fight when you are focused on the original source of your argument is a lightweight argument, one which can be resolved with relative ease. But when you and your partner elevate the fighting to a new level, in which the original subject of the argument deviates into newer, more toxic, more hostile territories, so much so that you can't even remember the original spark behind the acrimony, it’s called meta-fighting.

Meta-fighting is when you begin to argue about how you are arguing about the argument. You are bickering about style, tone, and methodology. And this argument, this meta-fight, about how you deliver your argument also spawns an argument about how you are scrutinizing and judging the analysis of the style of the argument over a topic that you most likely have forgotten, the original topic being obscured by layers and layers of analysis about the analysis about the analysis about the methodology of your arguing. By this time, the subject behind the original argument is beside the point. It’s as if the original controversy or hot-button was simply a springboard to vent deeper issues about your relationship.

Perhaps the next point is obvious: When you recognize that you are in the middle of a meta-fight, it’s important to stop it as soon as possible because the damage to your relationship can be beyond your understanding and control. So let us be clear. When you catch yourself in the middle of a meta-fight, you need to go into Damage Control Mode. Here’s what you do:

Abruptly stop arguing, clear your throat, and say you don’t feel well. Then disappear into the bathroom for at least a half hour and be resolved not to bring up the fight upon exiting your “cool-off cubicle.” Apologize for “getting carried away” and start cooking a meal, preferably comfort food. Start chopping onions, dicing carrots, peeling potatoes, and in general keep busy and pretend to be absorbed by your new task so that you don’t get sucked back into the meta-fight.

If you do not know how to cook, take on a outdoor or indoor project you’ve been putting off. Wash windows, clean the garage, vacuum, anything to distract both of you from the meta-argument.

Be adamant about not getting sucked back into the meta-argument. Remember this: A meta-argument is a black hole, a bottomless pit of pain, hurt, and suffering from which sometimes there is no return. So be warned. If you must fight with you’re partner, that is fine. But no meta-fighting, not ever.

Happy cooking. 

 

Marriage Rule #5. I Must Sleep on Two-Thirds of the King-Size Bed

 

I know this sounds unfair, making my wife Carrie and our dog Gretchen, a forty-pound Finnish Spitz, cram themselves on one-third of the bed while I splay myself on the other two-thirds, but this isn’t about me being a bed hog. This is about Carrie and Gretchen being protected from my flailing arms during my nightmares.

These horrific dreams tend to focus on Burt Lahr in his role as the Cowardly Lion. Since childhood, I have never been capable of looking at the Cowardly Lion directly in the eyes. Framed with forlorn pouches beneath and crenellated brows above, those eye slits are especially suggestive of Satan or some other tormented demon. The bald pate and ruffled hair, tied in parts with ribbons to mock the pampered grooming of a Shih-Tzu or some other cuddly lapdog, only add to the terror. Then there are Bert Lahr’s growls, not the feral sounds of a lion but of a soul writhing and languishing in hell. 

When I suffer my Cowardly Lion nightmares, Burt Lahr will chase me, getting closer and closer, until I wake myself up with my own growls that sound, eerily, like his. Carrie and Gretchen often endure my moving violently in bed while I growl, louder and louder, until Carrie or the barking Gretchen wakes me from my night terror.

Sometimes these Cowardly Lion dreams are especially bad and after awakening I feel an evil presence in the room and must turn the light on and watch TV for a while until I sense that the evil presence has departed. I have another measure that helps drown out the evil presence and this leads us to my next rule. 

Marriage Rule #4. The Twenty-Minute-Window

 

Unfortunately, my insomnia necessitates another consideration. Let’s call it The Twenty-Minute-Window Rule. What this means is that after my cereal, my reading, and the assimilation of my sublingual melatonin lozenge, I am sleepy for roughly twenty minutes. This is the only opportunity I have to get to sleep. If for any reason I am agitated and do not fall asleep during this Twenty-Minute Window, I am, once again, screwed. Therefore, it is imperative that my wife leave me alone during the Twenty-Minute Window.

Now many readers will look at the first four rules and say really they are all the same and can be boiled down to one rule, which is that I need quiet. Why, then, have I broken them down into four separate rules? The answer is simple. Clarity. It is my duty as my wife’s husband to provide clarity to my rules. Secondly, I must provide justification. If I arbitrarily dish out a bunch of rules with no rationale than I am no better than a tyrant or a despot and for me to become such a god-awful thing, dear readers, is the least of my wishes.

 

Marriage Rule #3. Quiet Time

 

As I fulfill my nightly reading goal and my wife wishes to talk to me at this time, she is more than free to do so. However, it must be stipulated that she must speak in a soft voice. There can be no commotion, no raising thorny, controversial issues, no raucous, no uncontrollable laughter, as she is sometimes prone to doing in a way that frequently hurts my eardrums.

It’s not that I don’t treasure my wife’s moments of intense engagement, hilarity and self-abandonment. It’s just that I am a chronic insomniac and a vital part of my sleeping strategy is to lower the volume before bedtime. Everything needs to get nice and soft. This part of the evening is called Quiet Time. The principle works on children. You don’t get them all wound-up and let them rough-house before bed. You put them through their nightly rituals, the warm milk and cookies, the brushing of the teeth, the bedtime story. My solitary cereal eating and bedtime reading constitute the bulk of my Quiet Time, which my wife must help to preserve. I don’t implement this rule because I’m a bossy husband. I do so because of necessity. Any glitches in my ritual, any heated discussion, any bothersome inquiries, any ticklish laughter, anything at all that disrupts Quiet Time and I’m screwed. Which is to say I’ll be in for a long, sleepless night. Worse, I’ll resent my wife for having ruined Quiet Time. Staring at the ceiling all night while resenting my wife is not the manner in which I wish to spend a huge chunk of my marriage. So let’s be clear. Quiet Time must be at all costs preserved. The harmony of the marriage depends on it. Yes, my strict before-bed ritual is burdensome, but it is necessitated by my insomnia, a condition my wife knew about me before we got married. 

Marriage Rule #2. Reading Time

 

Having finished my cereal and satisfied that I have reached my daily fiber quota, I am then ready to turn into bed while I  suck on a one-milligram melatonin lozenge and read a book for forty-five minutes. If I’m reading pop fiction, I can devour about a page a minute. If the writing is literary or a dense polemic, about half that. In either case, forty-five minutes is the rule for stimulating my intellect, for I look at reading as nourishment for the brain and consume books with the same diligence that I take my B-complex and fish liver capsules.

I not only read for my benefit, but my wife’s. After all, she is better served to have a husband who is well-read and intellectually curious rather than one who is complacent and willfully ignorant. It gives me great delight while my wife and I are reading in bed and she’ll turn to me and ask me the meaning of the word codicil and I will be able to tell her because my life of reading as made me a valuable resource with a rich vocabulary. Knowing that my wife relies on me as the ultimate authority on words gives me unspeakable satisfaction.  I therefore consider my steady reading to be an asset to the marriage and look at it as an important rule. 

Marriage Rule #1. Private Cereal Time

 

Firstly, it must be clear that every night at ten sharp when I retreat into the kitchen and have my high-fiber, low-sugar, high-soy-protein cereal, prunes, and crushed psyllium husks, which optimize the digestive process, my wife cannot talk to me. It’s not that I don’t crave my wife’s company. It’s just that during my bedtime feeding, I need to focus on my eating, the shimmering cereal nuggets staring at me like precious jewels, the soothing crunching sound of the cereal, the sacred drinking of the remaining milk from the bowl, which I hold to my lips like some ancient ceremonial vessel as I slurp its vestiges.

This is a private time for me, in which my cereal-eating is accompanied by peaceful introspection. I contemplate the day’s events.  I mull over what I did that was beneficial to my life and gently critique that which was not. I consider those forces of my childhood that determine the adult character that has been foisted upon me and I consider those areas of my life that are still open to change. Of course, the scales weigh heavier for the former more than they do for the latter. Nevertheless, I make this distinction every night as I feel it is my moral duty to change those areas of my life that I am capable of changing and resigning myself to those areas that are set in stone, as it were.

Some will denigrate my nightly ritual as being infantile. Indeed, I have been eating cereal before bed ever since I was a small boy. Feed the infant and the infant will fall asleep. As I am a man prone to insomnia, people in general, and my wife specifically, should indulge my ritual, however childish it might be. 

Rules for Marriage: Because Marriage Cannot Survive on Love Alone

I consider myself a modern man, sensitive to the ways women have been subjugated to various forms of exploitation and oppression in the history of the marriage contract, not the least of which are outlandish dowries foisted upon the woman’s family and “arranged” marriages with unscrupulous ogres who don’t want a wife so much as they desire an auxiliary functionary who will aid them in their pleasure seeking and self-aggrandizement. I am also aware of the staggering divorce rate in these modern times, with the odds against even the most well-intentioned couples to have a thriving, enduring marriage. Alas, we read every day in the gossip rags and entertainment websites about the decadent lives of celebrities who trade in their spouses with the turning of every season or who in engage in scandals so elaborate that they would not believed if they were presented in works of fiction. Saturated with the hedonistic scandals, we tragically feel entitled to experience the same “freedom,” the kind that results when we unfetter ourselves from a well ordered marriage with agreed-upon rules of conduct.

Indeed, it seems to me that one of the major reasons behind the collapse of today’s marriages is that they lack structure, definition, and rules. Without a clear definition of what a marriage should be, and what it should not be, and without rules and boundaries to protect the rights and the sanctity of each individual spouse, there is confusion, abandonment, and inevitable hurt. 

Another result of a marriage without a firm definition and rules is that it quickly degrades into the adolescent’s notion of a marriage—a Big Goody Box. Whenever you want a goody, you reach into the Goody Box and you keep taking and taking until the Goody Box is empty upon which you discard the Goody Box and find yourself a new one. Sadly, this is what marriage has become for too many of us and it accounts for our epidemic divorce rate. This Goody Box marriage is not the kind I want to have. I want one that is strongly defined and the strength of its definition lies in its firmly established policies.

Now let me make it clear that last thing I want to do is turn my marriage into a stifling prison wrought with countless rules and regulations. Therefore, as I consider the appropriate boundaries my marriage needs in order for me to function at my optimum level as a husband, I want to be sure to maintain a balance between order and freedom. Lean too heavily in one direction and the marital equilibrium will be thrown way off course. And how difficult it is to restore that balance.

Balance, of course, is the key to any healthy marriage. Husband and wife are lovers but not lovers at the expense of friendship. Otherwise, when their passion fizzles and there is no friendship to take up the slack they will shun each other. On the other hand, if they are friends, or “good buddies,” at the exclusion of passion, they will be less husband and wife and more like roommates and as such they will violate the marriage ideal. Therefore, my arduous task to lay down rules and regulations is not in the slightest about my need for control and power. Rather, it is about my hunger for balance.

Another compelling force behind my rule-making is my desire to be at my best, both mentally and physically. A healthy husband is in far better condition to serve the needs of his wife and his marriage in general. Therefore, with sober mind I wish to establish a few rules, gentle guidelines if you will, that will provide a counterpoint to our culture’s nebulous, sometimes hedonistic, definition of marriage, to give my wife a clear idea of what I need in order to serve her well as her husband, and to maximize my physical and mental health so that I can be at my best to fulfill her needs. If laying down the rules required to make a marriage run more smoothly strikes you as dictatorial, please consider that for a marriage to survive and thrive love alone is never enough. Love without bread will wither like a flower in the desert. And just as love needs bread, it also needs rules. If we agree with this principle, then we may proceed.