"That's Not Food!"

Alex embraced a new hobby this past summer.  This one fits right into his overall 60 year old white man vibe of classic rock, bowling, and what appears to be moderate to severe psoriasis.  Actually, the doctor told us the disgusting rash he developed on both legs was most likely folliculitis aggravated by too much hot tubbing one weekend- yet another 60 year old white man pursuit. It's fishing.  His best friend Matthew got him into it because Matthew's grandma lives by a stocked lake in a bougier part of Lake County.  I've seen random kids fishing in the smaller ponds of our own non-bougie area, but all they ever seem to catch are Miller Lite bottles and the occasional patch of folliculitis.  Actually, it's nice where I live- we are minutes away from a plethora of beaches. I always tell my kids how lucky we are to live here.  When I was growing up, we went to the beach maybe once a summer, and it involved crossing over to the dark side (Indiana). ...

And in a flash, it's six years later.  I'm 44 years old, slathering enough retinol on my face each night to burn off the most amount of skin cell layers I can until I'm in danger of showing bone.  There's some hair dye involved, and my contact lenses are multi-focals.  That means that my eyes are more focalled than they were before, from near to intermediate to kind of far to way back in time to a less cruel decade.  Chris is doing fine, or at least that's what he likes to tell me in between back pain winces and handfuls of ibuprofen.  He's a reassuring sort, that Chris B.  Somebody has to be in a marriage. I'll flip out over the day to day snags and snarls along with the litany of things that could completely go wrong at any given moment and Chris, Chris will give a half shrug and go about his evening. What have we done in the six years since I've given up blogging?  Well let's see.  There was a pandemic; that was kind of awful.  Millions of...