more normal than not

It’s three thirty-six AM…and guess where I am?

Paragliding!!!!

No, that’s not true…that is a bold-faced lie and a major improbability.

I wouldn’t do that in the dark.

Who knows what could happen?

Something could happen.

What is really going on is that I couldn’t sleep.

I could probably sleep…my eyes are tired….I don’t think that there’s anything physical going on that would keep me from sleeping.

I should sleep.

I can’t sleep.

My mind is running around inside my head.

It’s like something needs to bust out.

We are working our way towards buying another place …another chunk of “place”…down the road from us.

It’s a piece of land that has a lot going for it….trees, fields, streams…a pond…barn…old farm house that needs a total rehab….easy access…some good additional building sites.

It has a lot of potential.

But all I can think when I wake up at three in the morning and start my “staring at the ceiling routine” is….“WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS?!!!!”

WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS?!!!!WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS?!!!!!!WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS?!!!!!!

What if I can’t fix the electrical weirdness? What if the plumbing is weirdly inaccessible and I can’t even get to what I don’t know how to fix? What if there’s something living down in the “crawl space” and when I slither down into it to try and fix the plumbing something slithers up onto me? What if there is a bunch of Indians buried under the house and they get mad when I play my boombox too loud…or don’t like the sound of hammering? What if it takes me forever to figure out how to spell “inaccessible”? What if I “don’t know”? What if I “do know”…but can’t? What if I can’t?!! What if there is lead paint that I inhale or eat? What if the people around me eat lead paint? How would I deal with all this lead paint that people are eating? What if I stop caring about what’s happening to me after I eat all this lead paint?!! How about asbestos? How about that? Or the black mold? Or some guy who lives in the barn that I didn’t notice before who’s hard to evict?

WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS?!!

What if I get so tired that I can’t even function like a normal human man should?!!

That kind of thought process will keep you up at night, for sure.

That’s some crazy stuff to think about.

But, you know…something is going to happen. Something always does. I can’t avoid it…no matter how many videos I’ve rented…no matter how many ways I’ve tried to divert the ever-charging influx of life and it’s influence on my… life…something is always going to be happening.

Good…or maybe occasionally bad…something always happens.

Maybe a better question…an even more terrifying one to add to my portfolio of dread…is “WHAT IF NOTHING HAPPENS?!!!”

What if I get to the end and someone says, “Well? How did it go?” and all I can say is something like, “Well…I guess it all went OK….I can’t really remember anything happening, really…but I guess that it went OK. It was alright, I guess.”

I guess it’s better to be able to say that something happened.

I still can’t sleep…but I guess it’s better that something is happening.

I do need to check that barn more carefully next time I go out there, though.

Oh my goodness….the things we learn about if the television is on.

The television is on sometimes at my house.

You should see all the cartoons that Netflix says I might like.

I know that somebody is watching some cartoons in my house…and it’s not always me.

Netflix wouldn’t suggest all this children’s programming if it was just me watching the television.

I can’t see that happening.

Here’s a picture from one of the stories that came on the television.

(Netflix had nothing to do with this story.)

This guy’s a fat old white man who owns a professional basketball team.

I imagine that he’s pretty wealthy.

He got mad that his young Asian mistress was hanging out with some players who happened to be black.

He called her and told her not to hang out with the black dudes.

Now he’s in a whole lot of trouble.

And to top it all off, I think that his wife is mad at him, too.

HIS WIFE IS MAD AT HIM, TOO.

Imagine that.

His wife is mad at him because he made some private comments in a phone call to his young Asian mistress about not wanting his young Asian mistress to hang out with the virile professional athletes who happened to be black.

I imagine that she might be mad at him for other reasons…reasons that were subtle and that I couldn’t read into the situation….maybe reasons like HIS YOUNG ASIAN MISTRESS THAT SHE FINALLY NOTICED ON THE JUMBOTRON SCREEN ABOVE THE COURT?!!!! FINALLY NOTICED IN ALL THE NEWSPAPER PICTURES?!!!

(Jenny is a little more on the ball than that…she’d say, “Who is that Asian girl who sits next to you at the games?” pretty quickly. She might even say, “Who is that Asian girl who sits next to you at the games?” She might even say, “WHO IS THAT ASIAN GIRL WHO SITS NEXT TO YOU AT THE GAMES?!!!!” She probably will say, “Why do you keep mentioning that Asian girl?” …and I’d have to tell her that the blog post was about that fat rich white racist professional sports team owner…not the Asian woman who was his mistress.)

What did he think was going to happen? And how many white dudes play in the NBA? Would he have been mad if she’d been hanging out with the white dudes? Would he have said, “Why you gotta publicize…or promote…that you’re hanging out with the white dudes?”

If he’d said, “Why are you promoting that you’re hanging out with the little Norwegian man? I don’t like it…stop that…” MY WIFE would be mad.

She might ask me if I knew anything about it.

How many little Norwegian men play professional basketball? Not many, I can assure you.

We can ski our butts off…but we’re usually not tall enough to play pro b-ball.

What a pain in the rear that would be to get called out for being not only a cheating old fat (RICH!!) white man…but also a RACIST cheating old fat (RICH!!) white man.

Haha…(like in the Simpsons)…haha.

It’s kind of funny in a sick way. What a sleaze bag. What a jealous old rich white man.

What a racist old rich white man….

What a jealous old RACIST.

I think that he’s a jealous old dude before he’s a racist old dude, though…the jealous part prompted the racist comments, maybe.

He’s a rich old sleazy lizard of a man…using his power to attract the women who are attracted to that sort of thing…and he got jealous when she had more fun hanging out with the studly athletes.

Whatever.

Who knows what makes the world go round?

It takes all kinds.

Even rich old racist lizard men.

Jenny always said that she wanted a two bathroom house….but I could never figure out how to swing it.

Our house was too small after I’d crammed a couple of decades worth of books into it…(and these kids?!! What is going on? Where are all these kids coming from?)… figuring out how to fit another “water closet” in somewhere was something that was a little bit out of my pay grade.

So you can imagine my pleasure to discover that the old farmhouse that sits on the land we’re considering buying came with two potties.

Finally.

Of course, one looks a little different (actually, most things connected to that old house are a little different…the bathtub’s in a separate building and has a wood heater connected to the tub that heats the water…I would probably need to move a bathtub into the house…)….and the potty that looks a little different is kind of a walk down to the barn.

I don’t know how you wash your hands after you use this one…or even how you flush. I didn’t see any kind of lever or anything to pull when you’re done and want to flush.

And why would you put a potty down by the barn? Maybe it’s for the people who work for you on the little farm? Maybe that’s their potty?

I’m really only kidding.

I know what this machine does.

Outhouses are pretty efficient…pretty simple.

A little house with a seat over a hole.

How much simpler could it get?

Unless it was a fancy composting toilet, you would not want one to be a featured member of your household. You really can’t put one of these in your house and enjoy the rest of your occupancy.

It’s something about the hole…and proper ventilation.

That’s probably why they put it down by the barn.

A long walk in midnight snow is a small price to pay to avoid having your house fill with mysterious odors.

If I built an “alternative house”…full of building code bending innovation, and Jenny kept asking, “Do you smell anything weird? I mean, it’s a bad smell for the inside of a house…a really funky smell. Do you smell it? I don’t know where it’s coming from…it smells like it’s coming from around the bathroom. Which one? I think it’s the upstairs bathroom…it smells worse than the one downstairs….”…I’d panic a little.

If Jenny made that observation, and I knew what I’d done with my lack of engineering expertise, it would be a hard thing to cover my tracks and just say, “What smell?! I don’t smell anything…”

I think that’s why they put it by the barn.

That little house is easier to move than a big house, too.

Outhouses are pretty efficient…and probably pretty “earth friendly”, too….if they’re constructed properly and sited away from water sources.

The one on this property is right by the barn.

But think about it…what a jump to go from a one bathroom home to a two bathroom home.

We’re moving on up…for sure.

This is an old TV that’s in the barn….I don’t think it works…and I do know that it’s not a third toilet.

The latest issue of Bloomberg Business Week has an article about a guy who’s making millions reposting videos that he finds all over the web.

He has his own website that they described as being an “aggregate” website called Viral Nova that collects videos and pictures that he finds on other people’s sites…and then reposts on his own site.

He is making a ton of money doing this.

Millions might have been an overstatement…but maybe not.

I know that he gets millions of visitors to his website.

I know that my needs are simple…I don’t need a million yet…just a couple of hundred thousand…so we’ll see if this two-headed chicken pushes me over into the wealth zone.

The thing that was eye-opening to me this morning….more than the huge amount of money this guy is making just reposting weird stuff from all over…is what you come up with if you start looking for videos of freaks on YouTube.

I guess that “freaks” isn’t really a politically correct or kind term.

Maybe “visually challenging” or “excitingly unusual” are kinder?

I don’t really know what the right way to say something like that would be.

What I do know is that I’ve “googled” myself in the past…I think that most really normal people have google themselves at some point in their lives…it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

Of course, I didn’t come up with anything all that interesting. I didn’t learn anything new.

I guess the only thing that I learned was that I can be reasonably self-obsessed when I don’t have anything constructive going on to fill the minutes.

I’ve googled myself….but I’ve never “YouTubed” myself.

It’s never gotten that weird….and besides, why would there be a video of me on the internet? I didn’t sign any wavers…I didn’t give my permission for anyone to do that…

Hmmmmmmmm.

That would be a major drag to look up “freaks”…all the while laughing and playing, excited to see all the internet weirdness…and find a video of myself sitting at a desktop at 5:16 in the morning…type, type, typing away.

A video of myself in the “freak” category.

I’d rather not know…and that’s why I don’t want to search for myself on YouTube.

It would break my heart to think that someone in the world thought of me as a “freak”.

But I guess it would be kind of flattering that someone took the time to make a video of me…and then post it for millions to see.

Millions of people watching me do something embarrassing! Imagine how that would feel?

I remember that when I started high school, I dropped my tray in the lunch room coming out of the line.

I think we were having chili or spaghetti or something equally as messy if you dropped your tray on the new carpet.

When the yearbook came out, there was my picture…me, on my knees, trying to act like scraping up a tray of food in a crowded lunchroom was the most normal thing anyone ever did.

A quarter page picture of me…with the caption that was something like “Peter Rorvig tries to pick up the tray of food that he dropped…but the bell rings”.

At least it wasn’t a video.

At least it wasn’t a video that said something like “Lunchroom Freak”.

That would have really stunk.

That might have left a scar.

Bankers are such freaking realists.

I don’t think that they have a romantic bone in their bodies.

Nahhhhhh….that’s not fair. They just need to be careful after giving money away to everyone with a pulse for so long.

I had a friend who used to tell me, “If you don’t ask, the answer’s already no.”

I think that my revision would be, after never having a need to go to anyone for money, that “if you don’t ask, you never get a chance to learn that the answer is already no.”

So the reality is, no matter how much money you want to give them to “sweeten the pot”, that these guys don’t want to give money away.

Who would have figured that it would be so hard to get some expensive money?

I haven’t given up after 3 tries.

All the success stories that I’m aware of mention more effort than three tries.

“Three tries” isn’t a model of perseverance.

You would think that people who have a lot of money at their disposal would be freer with it, though.

I don’t want to be in debt, anyway.

Not even for a nice chunk of potential paradise….gardens, goats, chickens….maybe a couple of Great Pyrenees or Border Collies running around, the kids playing in the stream or fishing in the pond….big metal shop with a level concrete floor up on the hill, or a studio?!…big farmhouse…..lots of good stuff on this piece of ground.

And, you know what? Those realists at the bank don’t see any of that? All they seem to look at is what they can call collateral.

You can’t call dreams collateral, you bankers! You can’t put a price on blind optimism!!!

Maybe I should change my “law of attraction” tactics to include the phrase “I can handle what I’m given…debt is not an obstacle…” instead of “I don’t want to be in debt”.

Maybe the bankers are just helping me fulfill that wish by dragging their heels with giving me the money?

They’re protecting me from being in debt?

They’re just helping me manifest my wish to avoid debt.

We’ll get the money if we’re supposed to realize the desire.

And if we don’t get the money….well, that is certainly not the end of the world.

Maybe it’s just a way to get us to look at what we already have with some fresh eyes?

Maybe it’s just something to nudge us into realizing what we already knew…that we’re blessed and can do more where we are to make our lives even better?

But, really….who would have thought that you couldn’t just walk into the place where they keep all the money and get some when you needed it?

I must be living under a thrifty financial rock.

I didn’t know that you couldn’t get money when you finally asked for it.