I think therefore I yam

Occasionally I remember the 1980s. Life was much more relaxed back then. Actually 1981 was the worst year of my life. I was diagnosed with cancer. It wasn’t, but it did scare the crap out of me. I was selling apartment buildings in Long Beach and the prime hit 23%. You couldn’t sell ladders in a burning building if the cost of money was 23%. My dad died at age 69 and, oh yah, my marriage failed and it ended in a divorce.

But I got beyond it. I moved aboard my schooner and I started seeing a beautiful girl. By seeing I really mean we were together for over fifteen years. That is longer than I was married to any of my ex-wives. She was gorgeous and had a body to match. Above all, she was one of the nicest persons that I ever met. I had sold my Porsche and bought a new Cadillac.  

It, the Caddie, was like driving the Taj Mahal. Very comfy and spacious and it was a diesel. I almost bought a diesel Mercedes which cost $39,000 back then. I hesitated because I thought to myself  I can afford it but why would I want to throw away that much money? A friend of mine bought a Cadillac Coupe DeVille diesel for $13,000 and I thought, hell I can buy three Caddies for the price of one MB. So I took the KoolAid and for the first 30,000 miles it was wonderful. Then the warranty expired at 30,000 miles and the troubles began but that is for another story and another day.

Back to the girl. We were driving along one day when she offhandly mentioned something about how her Playboy pictures had been stolen a few years back. “Playboy pictures?” I asked. What Playboy pictures? She said “Didn’t you know that I used to be a Playboy Bunny?”  I felt like I had just won the lottery and in fact, I did. She was a bunny at the Playboy Club in Phoenix not a Playmate in the magazine but I thought, close enough for me. As I said, we were together for over fifteen years and rarely was a bad word exchanged between us. After the fifteen years, our love affair had run it’s course. I was a reader, she wasn’t. I was a news junkie, she wasn’t. She wanted to live in a white house with white carpeting and white furniture. We both knew that I would get dirt and grease stains on all of that white.

By now, I had started building and rebuilding plastics machinery and the very nature of my work was an ongoing source of dirt and grease. Both of my boys were  now living with me on the schooner which reduced our privacy to almost nonexistent. Pretty soon Miss D got an apartment at the Lafayette in downtown Long Beach and we saw each other mostly on weekends after that. Ever so slowly we eventually drifted apart. She married some other guy who I didn't much care for and then I found out she didn't warm up to the role of punching bag and left the guy. I resumed my hobby of carving notches on my bedpost for a few years and eventually married a TWA flight attendant. That is also another story.

A few years ago Dos Equis beer had a search for a new Most Interesting Man in the World and I thought that if I wasn’t the most interesting man in the whole, I must be pretty close, so I submitted my name. I was sent a questionnaire with about one hundred questions on it. All but maybe two of their questions were not at all germane to being anything but dull.

Sometimes when I have a buzz on, I think about what it would have been like to be recognized as The Most Interesting Man in the World. I then think I probably am in the top 1%.