(From this week’s New Yorker magazine, referencing the canine star of the original New York production of the musical Annie🙂
To leash a dog to the stage and make him build sets for a Broadway show — especially a nervous, previously abused dog — must bust some union rule, don’tcha think?
(No animals were harmed in the making of this post. The damage had already been done.)
You can tell it’s spring in Ipswich because of the vegetation. Almost everyone’s front yard has sprung up in lawn signs. The colors are delightful! Such a nice enhancement of our town’s sad lack of natural beauty. You almost wish that lawn sign season could go year-round.
Alas, Election Day, on Tuesday, May 21st, will devastate our lovely local landscape. Suddenly we’ll be back to nothing but grass, shrubs, trees, and the occasional shrink-wrapped boat.
Lawn signs don’t live forever. They serve — stoic, silent soldiers, standing straight, staunchly stating their sentiments — then they’re yanked out of the ground and stuffed somewhere at the back of the garage, scaffolding for spiderwebs.
People in Ipswich don’t throw out their lawn signs because those things cost money; plus, a losing candidate could come back later. You have to die to be truly out of the running. Or, if your candidate wins, your lawn sign can come in handy at re-election time, if you still like them after seeing what they did on the job.
If your lawn sign is about an issue rather than a candidate, that’s all the more reason to hang onto it. For example: Remove the Ipswich Mills Dam? Voters have been arguing about this forever. Some historians say Benjamin Franklin flourished as a printer by making “Save the Dam” and “Free the River” signs on alternating days.
Plus, the dam-removal debate won’t end with this election cycle, because the May 21st vote is non-binding. Only if we see an overwhelming “Free the River” majority will our cautious Select Board endorse dam removal, and even then, we can expect years of hostile legal proceedings. This question could drag on so long that herring have time to evolve into bipedal land animals, attending law school and arguing their own case in court.
From the looks of the lawn sign scene, I don’t foresee a slam-dunk majority on either side. So stick with your streetside showbill. Bequeath it to your descendants. Have your attorney put it in an irrevocable trust. Don’t let your great-grandchildren descend into poverty because they had to go buy a new lawn sign.
On the other hand, if a massive “Free the River” turnout on Election Day somehow inspires speedy dam removal, huge new questions will require fierce debate and extensive lawn-signization: how the dam is removed, where the dam is moved to, etc., etc.
One group will support simple demolition because it’s cheap and easy. Lawn sign: “Dynamite the Dam.” They’ll be opposed by those who revere the good old days and want the structure solemnly disassembled bit by bit: “Honor Our Dam History.”
(Election-deniers will try to incite an insurrection, using protesters as a human shield to keep the dam intact: “Barricade the Barricade!”)
One group will want to move the dam intact to the South Green, where it can serve as a monument to our glorious past that children aren’t allowed to climb on: “Remember the Restriction.”
Another group, inspired by the rich guy who bought London Bridge in 1968 and moved it to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, will campaign to move the dam to the Mexican border: “Todavía Podemos Prohibir los Arenques,” which translates “We Can Still Keep Out the Herrings.”
Those who think more locally will push to keep the dam right here in Ipswich, installing it lengthwise on Jeffreys Neck Road, where it can serve as a very tall footpath for stranded residents as ocean levels rise: “Don’t Cut Us Off at the Neck.” For the front lawns of supporters who don’t live on the Neck: “Let’s Give a Dam.”
In any case, North Shore sign-makers gearing up for all the new campaigns will do very well. I may switch careers just to get in on the action. Depends how things go on May 21st.
Doug Brendel, ever entrepreneurial, lives high and dry on outer Linebrook Road. Follow him at Outsidah.Substack.com, where he posts all his stuff first.
The Outsidah posts here about once a week.
Maybe that’s all you can stand. Who could blame you?
But on Substack, the Outsidah posts everything, immediately — fresh out of the brain.
If you can handle it, go to Outsidah.Substack.com and subscribe.
It won’t cost you anything but — possibly, your sanity.
There’s already more there, at Outsidah.Substack.com, than anybody has ever seen at Outsidah.com.
Some of it might be of interest to you. Like, if it’s subversive?
(Does anybody even do subversive anymore? Didn’t that go out with Richard Nixon?)
Questions, comments, complaints: email me. Unconventional@DougBrendel.com, as always.
We’re the smartest, here in Massachusetts, of all the 50 states.
It’s official, according to research by the free online education platform Guru99.com: Massachusetts residents have the highest average IQ.
But we knew that.
I have not lived here long, but I’ve been here long enough to detect a sense of intellectual superiority in my fellow Bay Staters. We have Harvard, after all. We have MIT. When muckety-mucks in Washington issue orders, we snicker. How can they know better than we? (Note the correct grammar there. Someone from a dumb state probably would have said “better than us,” right?)
Of course, our top IQ ranking must be protected. There is the danger of seepage. State borders are porous, thanks to a flaw in Article IV, Section 2, of our United States Constitution. The Founding Fathers mistakenly thought it would be good to just let people travel from state to state — no entry visa required, no intelligence test, not even a quick once-over with a deodorizing spray.
So people from other states can just show up here in Massachusetts whenever they want. They can get a job here and siphon money out of our economy, they can stride into our bars and shamelessly drink our liquor, they can brazenly buy a house or rent an apartment — wait, no, I take that back. It’s virtually impossible to find housing here. But there’s nothing stopping someone from charming a local person and luring them into marriage just so they have a place to stay. Suddenly, someone of inferior intelligence is claiming Massachusetts residency and bringing our numbers down.
The IQ survey reveals just how precarious our position is. The second-smartest state is New Hampshire, right next door. And third on the list is Vermont. Connecticut is ninth. New York is in the bottom half. Rhode Island is a dismal 33rd. Look at the map. Each of these states shares a border with us. Friends, our Commonwealth is at risk.
If we’re smart — and we know we are — we will take forceful cautionary measures to keep dumbness from leaking into our beloved Massachusetts.
A few ideas:
1. If you’re an owner or employee at a business frequented by out-of-staters — one of our world-class museums, for example, or a clam place — give each guest a dictionary, maybe a thesaurus too. People from clueless states won’t use them, but there’s a chance they’ll be intimidated.
So back in the RV, as they head home, one will say, “That was scary,” and the other will say, “Let’s not move here.”
2. A variation on the dictionary-and-thesaurus idea:
Whenever you encounter someone from another state, make it your habit to casually ask them, “How do you feel about Einstein’s theory of relativity?”
Or, if you prefer, “Weren’t you knocked out by the Battle of Maipú and the Chileans’ decisive victory over Spain in April of 1818?”
If they give you a strange look, or stammer incomprehensibly, just reply with a chuckle: “Oh, you’re so cute, you [insert state name here] people — feigning ignorance like that!”
3. California’s IQ ranking is a shocking 48th out of 50. So don’t let your daughter date a California boy.
I make this recommendation from personal experience. Our youngest is about to marry a barista from Long Beach.
As you might expect, this barista comes off as charming and intelligent. My wife and I have been hopelessly snookered; we love this person.
Even worse, the young couple will not live in #48 California; they plan to settle here on the North Shore, in #1 Massachusetts. There goes the neighborhood.
This admonition, in closing: Whatever you do, dear brilliant citizenry of Massachusetts, don’t ignore the intelligence issue. It’s only smart to preserve our smarts. If we’re not careful, it will take only a generation or two for our state to go all stupid.
What a tragedy if our grandchildren were to look back on the current era of history and say, “They made us what we am.”
This essay first appeared in early April on Substack, where all of Doug’s work is previewed. Follow Doug there for first dibs.
(From a commentary on Matthew 14, Jesus feeding the 5,000:)
“The loaves and the fishes were brought to him by the disciples, and he put them into baskets.”
The loaves and the fishes, not the disciples.
(From a March 13 Associated Press item:)
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Employees of the Richmond Wildlife Center in Virginia are doing their best to act like mother foxes as they feed and care for an orphaned kit that found her way into their care.
In a video posted to the center’s Facebook page Tuesday, Executive Director Melissa Stanley is shown wearing a red fox mask and rubber gloves while feeding the tiny kit from a syringe. The kit sits on top of a large stuffed animal fox that is supposed to look like her mother, Stanley said.
(The fox’s mother, not the executive director’s.)
The FBI has spoken, and I owe everyone an apology.
If my fellow Ipswich residents are embarrassed, I can only say, I don’t blame you, and it’s my fault.
The folks at SafeWise.com studied FBI stats for Massachusetts and released a listing of our top 20 safest cities and towns.
Ipswich came in fifth.
I’m sorry.
The moment I got the news, I knew immediately that we could have come in first if only I had lived differently.
Reviewing my behavior over the past year, I must confront the disturbing truth: I have broken laws, transgressed rules, and engaged in unsafe activities.
The only way I can cleanse my soul is to offer a full confession.
Here it is.
I have also participated in, and even encouraged, the unsafe activities of others. On the Fourth of July, my neighbor shot off illegal fireworks and I applauded. I have no excuse for this. Except it was awesome.
Doug Brendel lives dangerously on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. All his stuff appears first on Substack. If you wish, subscribe there.
We have a problem. It’s no secret. We have crabs.
Not just any crabs. Green crabs. Invasive crabs that gobble up our clams. In my view, anything that diminishes the volume of clams I might consume myself is a problem.
I love clams. So I hate green crabs.
Part of the problem is that the green crab has virtually no natural predators, or even competitors. (Red rock crabs will eat green crabs, but red rock crabs are so Hollywood. They only live on the West Coast.)
Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a column about green crabs, complete with amateur video demonstrating the green crab’s voracious appetite. (You can see it online at tinyurl.com/5n6hp4ym.) I called for action. A marshalling of our will and our resources to fight back and extinguish this evil.
In the decade since then, we’ve made progress. But we haven’t yet managed to eliminate the sad scourge of the green crab.
We need help.
And now, it seems, help may have arrived.
A local friend, who fancies herself something of a scientist, reports that she has seen loons eating green crabs at the edges of Ipswich Bay.
Loons!
If the common loon has actually acquired a taste for green crabs, we may have found our salvation — except for the fact that, as CambridgeDay.com reports, Massachusetts has only about 50 breeding pairs of loons.
On top of which, even though we humans have been shivering and cursing our miserably cold springtime weather, loons consider it insufferably warm. Too warm, in fact, to get hot — so they’ll head north soon for the breeding season. Many of them, I understand, have sexy little cottages up in Maine, perfect for doing what loons do when they get in the mood.
So our challenge becomes: how to keep every possible loon on the job here on our coastline.
The simplest answer, of course, is to attach a simple, inexpensive manacle to the loon’s leg, with the manacle attached to a simple, inexpensive chain, which connects to a simple, inexpensive spike driven deep into a rock or a tree or the base of a lifeguard station. The loon might not prefer this, but even a jailbird’s gotta eat. Prison menu: green crabs. All day every day.
If animal rights fans object to manacles, we could take a more humane approach: Erect an enormous screened cage over the whole family of Massachusetts loons, all 50 couples, right there at the water’s edge. A loony version of Club Med Cancún, with a 24-hour Green Crab Café — self-service, no tipping, no closing time.
I realize, however, that any loon-movement restriction whatsoever may run into opposition, because after all, loons are not house cats, or hamsters, or goldfish — all of which are on the “Okay to Incarcerate” list.
In which case, we may need to go high-tech.
No problem. We’ll deploy robo-loons.
A robo-loon will use basic artificial intelligence to recognize a green crab, snatch it out of the water, and crunch it to death.
The AI part will actually be easy — a minor tweak or two to a common face-recognition app, just adding a crustacean-identification button.
And the crunching part will be easier still: merely a miniature version of that wood chipper that the Ipswich landscapers use to wake you from your slumber on Saturday mornings.
Perhaps the most complicated component of the robo-loon will be its exterior design. But fear not.
You know all those pink plastic birds that show up from time to time in people’s front yards?
Yes, you guessed it: Robo-loons will be made from repurposed flamingos.
See? Complicated problems can be solved; you just have to know where to look for answers. If you have an animal-world problem, turn to the animal world for solutions.
Clams, crabs, loons, flamingos. Simple.
Lunchtime.
Doug Brendel, a resident of Ipswich Mass. and a relentless problem-solver, is of course available as a consultant, although nobody has hired him yet. Doug’s inventive exploits always appear first on Substack. You’re welcome to subscribe there.
I won’t be fooled anymore.
Never again will I leave my garbage and recycling curbside.
Why?
Because every week, on garbage- and recycling-pickup day, Mother Nature descends on us with gale force winds. And my stuff ends up scattered for a quarter-mile along outer Linebrook Road.
I don’t necessarily want my neighbors to know my cats indulge in Friskies “brie and salmon shreds in gravy.” Or how many bottles of Everclear I’ve emptied since last week.
And it can’t be much fun for the fellow three doors down to open his garage door and find a jar of Mrs. Renfro’s black bean salsa rolling across his driveway.
Thursdays. Why should Mother Nature fixate on Thursdays as the time to unleash the worst of her blustery gusts on helpless little Ipswich, Massachusetts?
In olden days, you could look up and down Linebrook Road any Thursday and see a neat line of green bins, squat soldiers standing guard at the roadside, overseen by mailboxes on their posts, like serene but watchful herons.
But then came — I don’t know what. Climate change? Some cosmic bad-luck vortex? Divine retribution for our failure to build affordable housing?
Whatever we’ve sown, we are reaping the whirlwind. On Thursdays, my neighborhood becomes a wasteland, emphasis on waste. Wrinkled “Good Housekeeping” magazines. Cast-off cards from candidates. Envelopes that bills came in. Yards of tangled dental floss. Shards of a cardboard box labeled “This Side Up.” Last week, after that massive nor’easter diabolically arrived just in time for garbage day, I found my urologist’s report two doors down, skewered on a forsythia.
I no longer even bother to check my weather app on Wednesday evenings. I know what it’s going to show me as the forecast for the following day: three cute little white squiggly lines — the deceptively pleasant international symbol for “tempest.”
(The National Weather Service is reportedly replacing this emoji; you’ll now see a tiny animated cartoon of a green garbage bin on its side, rolling erratically. Upgrade your smartphone software to see it bounce off the bumper of a BMW.)
God bless the valiant garbage and recycling workers who rumble into the neighborhood every Thursday. They arrive very early, heading east, emptying whatever bins are still standing, then return late in the day, heading west. If you didn’t get your bin out to the street in time for their initial swoop, the workers honorably take care of you on their way back.
So if the early-morning forecast is somewhere between “maelstrom” and “typhoon,” you can hedge your bets and put out your garbage and recycling midday. This reduces your risk; there’s less time for your Huggies to be hurled into the heavens.
But it’s not a perfect system. You can wait as long as possible, deep into the afternoon, then hustle out to the curb with your treasures, hoping for the best — and still, the garbage guys on their return route may run into your receptacles ricocheting toward Rowley.
Of course, you may wish to suspend your entire agenda for the day, sit in the front window of your house, watch for the truck to approach — and then dash like the devil to catch them at the curb.
That’s not for me. No. The tension of anticipation, the stress of the waiting, worrying whether you’re going to get your garbage out there on time — this will not be good for my heart. The sprinting alone might do me in.
The only alternative is the one I will now pursue. I’m going to set up a workspace at the end of my driveway. A concrete bunker. A comfy chair from Crate & Barrel. My laptop.
And of course, my garbage and recycling bins will be tucked in there with me, nice and cozy, safe from the savage storm. That won’t be my garbage flying in your face.
Come visit me, any Thursday. Just be careful on Linebrook Road. An airborne Brown Dog takeout box could take you out.
Avoid Doug’s garbage station by getting his stuff as soon as it’s written — which happens when you follow him on Substack.
I was totally prepared for the eclipse.
My home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, stood in the path of 93.9% totality, so I knew the eclipse would stagger us. Sudden darkness, children screaming for their parents, birds rocketing blindly into the side of the EBSCO clock tower, raccoons raiding South Main Street garbage cans because they think it’s time to shop.
The person I live with, who has a scientific mind, warned me that it would not “get really dark.”
But I wasn’t fooled.
For Y2K, I stocked a bunker full of canned food, so I was totally ready for all the computers in the world to shut down, and modern civilization to come to an abrupt and painful end. Look at me today. I sailed through that apocalypse.
I put money on Hillary winning by at least 2 million votes.
The moment I first heard about the Segway, I bought stock. My personal wealth today is largely the result of this brilliant foresight.
So I was not about to be blindsided by a simple solar eclipse. I was ready, baby.
I grant you, the backyard tiki torches may have been a bit much.
Perhaps I should not have invited my neighbors to my “midday midnight barbecue.”
And we ended up not needing the dozen L.L. Bean Trailblazer flashlights I bought for our “Historic Eclipse Tour” of the Linebrook Cemetery, to be hosted by town historian Gordon Harris wearing a glow-in-the-dark Pilgrim hat.
But as I always say, better safe than … whatever that other thing is; sorry, can’t remember it at the moment.
In the end, some may have been disappointed by the eclipse. Certainly there was a lot of buildup, a lot of media, a lot of excitement. CNN covered a woman who took her children on a 10-hour road trip just to experience the total eclipse without cloud cover. I hope they had a good day in Burlington, Vermont, and had no unfortunate encounters with moose on the way home.
For most of us, however, anticlimax is an everyday occurrence. We anticipate a thrill, and then comes reality. New Coke. Tiger Woods. The Crusades. 2001 Person of the Year Rudi Giuliani. Letdown happens. The Patriots lost to the Giants — twice.
Did we die? No, we did not. We lived to face another day. Another thrill. And, if necessary, another disappointment.
The next total solar eclipse will happen 20+ years from now, in August of 2044, but among residents of the USA, only those living in North Dakota or Montana will experience it fully without significant road trips and nights in a Motel 6.
But in the meantime, we can fixate on the next lunar eclipse.
The next lunar eclipse visible from the USA will happen in March of next year. Miss that, and there’s another the following year. And another in June of 2029. Lunar eclipses keep coming. They’re like rabbits.
Plus, the earth obscuring the moon is way safer than the moon obscuring the sun. A lunar eclipse is something you can actually look up into the sky and see, without frying your retinas.
March, next year. My backyard. See you then.
(This piece appeared first on Substack. Follow Doug on Substack to see everything first.)
Some people are just greedy, I guess.
I say: Be one of those people.
Here’s your personal invitation … a really good excuse for greed:
Subscribe to my new Substack page, right here. Just click, and ding! It’s magic.
(Wait — is it supposed to be called a Substack “feed”? — or just a “Substack”? — I don’t know the lingo. Bear with me. We can get through this together.)
Here’s why I’m inviting you: Because, like Inigo Montoya, I hate waiting. And this is an anti-waiting strategy.
Let me explain:
Yes, everything I write for Outsidah.com will continue to appear right here, where you’re reading it at the moment.
Many pieces are delayed, however, to sync with various media outlets’ schedules.
But everything I write as the Outsidah will appear here first — immediately.
If you ever wanted an inside track to the comical, the quizzical, and the accidentally provocative, this is it.
Subscribing to the Outsidah on Substack will give you beautiful feelings of superiority. When someone comments on an Outsidah item, you can pretend to stifle a yawn in their face and say,
“Oh yeah, I got that from Doug personally, a couple weeks ago.”
(And then you can add, silently of course, “You loser.”)
If you also hate waiting — if you agree with me that delayed gratification is way over-rated — subscribe here now.
Give it a try. If you don’t like it — if you find that delayed gratification was actually your preferred lifestyle — you can unsubscribe at any time.
Questions, comments, complaints? I look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks for reading.
Doug
P.S. Some of my stuff may appear only on Substack. FOMO is a terrible thing. Almost worse than waiting. Don’t die of FOMO. Subscribe, and survive!
A person suffering repeated bouts of plague should not go in to the office.
The major question on my mind today is this: How obligated will I feel to visit my wife in prison?
Behind the wheel of the family car, she is typically scrupulous about obeying the speed limit. When I’m her passenger, and we’re moving over a long, unfettered stretch of Linebrook Road, I often speak to her silently:
“Get going! There’s no ice! No snow! Rain? Fog? Nada! Other vehicles? None visible for miles. No pedestrians. No bicyclists. Not even the occasional errant squirrel. There’s nothing but our Chevy and the Ipswich sky! That 35 mph speed limit is meaningless! Can’t you at least go 37?”
She never does. Because she can’t hear my silent rant. And truth be told, even if she could hear it, she would probably ignore it. She is her own person. A good person. A law-abiding, safety-first driver.
Or at least she was.
Then came the “safety zone.”
It’s that little strip of Linebrook Road between the Catholic Church and the train tracks. That quaint, quiet little neighborhood where the Town fathers have decided to someday land a multi-million-dollar spaceship and call it the new public safety building.
Perhaps it was in anticipation of the new facility that they decided to deem this sector a “safety zone,” and reduce the speed limit to 20 mph.
For whatever reason, there are “safety zone” signs at either end of it, and the speed limit inside it is 20.
When I first saw the signs, I was shocked, of course. 20 mph is astonishingly slow for a modern-day vehicle. Even my very small car will hardly go that slow. Just taking my foot off the brake — kaboom, I’m going 22.
But then I looked around. I realized the importance of this change.
This is a stretch of roadway where small children wait for the school bus. Where weary school district employees maneuver to their vehicles after a long, hard day of educating. Where Catholics stagger across the street from church to recover at the Hart House bar. Frogs hop here.
20 mph will keep all of these innocent souls safe from untold tragedy.
If I restrict myself to going 20 through the safety zone, a child will get on the bus and get to school alive and study hard and grow up to be President of the United States.
A school district subordinate won’t go back to her SUV for that stress-relief squeeze-ball and be sideswiped by a Subaru.
A Catholic will recover.
Since the “safety zone” signs went up, I religiously slow to 20 as I approach Pineswamp Road, only re-accelerating at Lord’s Square.
But — how curious — when I’m heading into Ipswich Center as a passenger, with my wife at the wheel, we hurtle through the safety zone as if the new speed limit signs are invisible.
Finally, last week, I summoned the courage to ask her — with all the careful diplomacy I could muster — why she didn’t seem to be obeying the 20 mph “safety zone” signs.
She didn’t hesitate.
“It’s ridiculous,” she snapped.
I breathed a sigh of relief. THANK GOD someone is finally saying what we’re all thinking. From the moment I first saw the signs, I secretly thought 20 mph was ridiculous. But I needed someone — a certifiably careful driver — to state the obvious.
When you drive 20 mph, other drivers think you’re having a seizure. Drivers on Pineswamp sit waiting to get out onto Linebrook, and as I crawl toward them, they have enough time to dial 911 and report me as a medical emergency.
But my wife? She blazes through. She could bounce an unsuspecting amphibian into the hereafter and never know.
In Massachusetts, there are traffic “infractions,” traffic “misdemeanors,” and traffic “felonies.” We could discuss the relative merits. But why split hairs? Do you want to risk 20 years in prison?
I love my wife, but please, friends. Avoid the safety zone. It’s more dangerous than ever.
The full Doug Brendel, if you can stand it, is only available here at Outsidah.com. Go to the “Follow” button (at reasonable speed), look both ways, and proceed to click carefully.
(From a CNN.com post)
Don’t let the doors drive. Problem solved.
(From a Trump-era CNN.com post:)
U.S. forces always seem to be entering into hostilities because of that darn War Powers Act.
Repeal that Act, dudes. Lay off with the hostilities.
(From an old CBSSports.com post:)
Of course the producers had no recollection of the incident. DUH!
The producers denied any knowledge of the incident. They weren’t even there in 2017! Why are they harassing this person?
Oh, I get it now. Bad English.
(From a letter to the editor in the 3/8/21 edition of The New Yorker🙂
Welcome! It’s the perfect day to upgrade. We’re running a special today on tuberculosis and acute schizophrenia!
(from the Feb. 23rd issue of Alaska’s Skagway News)
Says Mayor Bass:
Withering is not an option.
For best results, tear down the housing you already have.
It would be fun, I think, to run for a position on the Ipswich Select Board. Making speeches, inspiring the masses with brilliant rhetoric, shaking hands, slapping backs, kissing babies.
The only trouble is, if you won, you’d have to do the job.
And it’s a terrible job to have. Monday night meetings, which during the NFL season means missing at least 17 games. During which, you’re subjected to the torture of citizens’ queries. Also, you have to study a wide range of subjects you don’t even remotely care about, which for me would be basically a rerun of the four colleges I dropped out of. Then you’re required to pass judgment on said subjects, after which, you’re a punching bag for the public.
And the pay is miserable.
No, Select Board is out. Also Town Manager. A lightning-rod job. Herding cats. Endless meetings and diplomatic explaining. (Even just the cerebral energy required for dumbing-down basic issues for clueless citizens must be exhausting.) And how annoying would I be if I were obligated to honorably take the rap when a Town employee mistakenly plows up delicate wetlands? Very.
So forget Town Manager.
None of these Town jobs are very palatable. ZBA, FinCom, School Committee, they’re all dreadful in their own way. I would drown on the Wastewater Subcommittee. People who serve our town are heroes just for surviving.
No, I think the only position for me would be Dictator. And not just on Day One, like a certain presidential candidate. I would be Dictator every day, and I would relish the job. No conferring, no negotiating, no navigating ancient townie tiffs. No rationalizing rulings. Just ruling. Sweet. Yes indeed: Dictator Dougie.
But Day One will certainly have special significance. You want to get your dictatorship off on the right foot, with meaningful orders of lofty symbolism and genuine value to your people. So here’s the plan: On Day One of my dictatorship, I will send out the crews who paint the lines on our roads, and I will have them erase all the double lines.
That’s right. The era of “No Passing” is over. Ipswich, Massachusetts — historically a backed-up burg of creeping conveyances, long lines of vehicles in sad, single-file hell — will be transformed.
The new Ipswich will quickly become beloved as a total free-passing zone, a sanctuary city for reasonable drivers like me, who just want to go the speed limit, gosh darn it.
That gray 1987 Coupe Deville that routinely pulls out in front of me on Linebrook Road and then goes 30 in the 35 mph zone? I’m blasting by that bozo.
There’s a rusty pickup in my neighborhood that I’ve followed for so many cumulative hours, I’ve memorized all its bumper stickers, starting with “Don’t blame me, I voted for….” But no more.
Those folks from out of town, crawling along Topsfield Road looking for their cousin’s place? Just lower your passenger-side window, pull up alongside them, yell “Use GPS!”, and step on it.
Under my dictatorship, life will be grand. You will no longer fear the farm tractor, the septic service tanker, the tree feller, the Amazon van, the Triad Driving School car putt-putting along with “Student Driver Please Be Patient” on its bumper. Whatever the holdup, I’ll pull on that steering wheel, roar around on the left, careen back into the right lane, and be on my way. That’s progress.
Of course, this will be a benevolent dictatorship. Children will be cared for, to a reasonable degree. I won’t let you pass a stopped school bus. But the moment that hinged stop sign swings back against the side of the bus, floor it, baby.
My friends, I’m taking over as your Dictator because I care deeply about your quality of life. A recent study revealed that Massachusetts has the second-best “mental well-being” of all the states in the Union. Why aren’t we Number One? Simply because so many of us are stuck behind the driver ahead of us.
I’m here to set you free.
On Day Two: the dam.
Don’t miss any of Doug’s deranged ravings. Click “Follow The Outsidah.”
The hot dog is a unique tubular food which smells like human sweat.
You can easily confirm this by going to Costco and walking from the front doors directly to the restrooms. This will take you through the lunch area, where the dogs are rotating on their little tanning beds.
Look around. Take a deep breath. You’re surrounded by the unwashed masses. Yet even at peak occupancy, there certainly aren’t enough sweaty human beings in the Costco lunch area to account for such an overpowering stench. Yes, it may be terribly crowded, but we must assume that most of these people have bathed in at least the past several days.
So what reeks? The hot dogs.
And we’re about to put them in our mouths.
I realize it’s wrong for me to have any hostility toward hot dogs. I am of German ethnicity, and hot dogs came from Germany. The original term frankfurter refers simply to Frankfurt, that big city you change planes in. Then the Austrians in Vienna — Wien, as they spell it — added beef to the original pork mixture. Hence another of our terms for the food, as well as the occasional member of Congress: wiener.
And how did we come to call them hot dogs, back in the 1800s? Maybe because of the rumor that sausage makers were using dog meat? Yeah, it’s true. Folks in parts of Germany gobbled canine meat pretty regularly, even into the 20th century.
(My dog-lover friends scorn me for not loving their pets, but given my German background, perhaps I can be forgiven. A dachshund, after all, is a wiener dog. What a meal that would be!)
It seems clear to me that human beings evolved for thousands of years and then somehow started regressing, as evidenced by our hot dog fixation. On the subject of hot dogs, Wikipedia is the source of all hot dog wisdom, offering 3,300+ words, plus 74 footnotes, a 13-item bibliography, a “further reading” section, and “external links” for a deeper dive into the subject. Any species so fanatic about such a lowly quasi-food is obviously in decline.
There are even big arguments about the bun the hot dog arrives in. Who first decided to put a frank in an almost-but-not-completely-split oblong of bread? There are several competing theories, most of which involve someone’s wife being smarter than her husband: “Das Wiener ist chaotisch! Serve it tidy — here! In a bun!”
One way to make a hot dog tolerable is to grill it in your backyard. I’ve found that conventional minimalist grilling is inadequate, however. You have to char the hot dog so thoroughly that it’s mostly carcinogens. Eating a well burned hot dog is like licking an ash tray, and almost as pleasant.
It’s a curious anomaly of American English that we use the term “hot dog” to refer to a skier or surfer who “hot dogs” — that is, who shows off. How the term came to be used in this way is a mystery, because the hot dog as a food item is not something you show off. It’s something you keep in the back of the fridge and pull out only when you have absolutely nothing else to eat.
I grew up in the Chicago area, which is to say, I grew up among hot dogs. A Chicago city ordinance makes it a felony to watch a Cubs game without consuming at least one hot dog. The Windy City is known for its “Chicago-style” hot dog, typically served on a poppy seed bun and topped with a plethora of condiments: mustard, tomatoes (never ketchup), onions, bright green sweet relish and dill pickles (a sweet-and-sour one-two punch), sport peppers (at least twice as hot as jalapeños), and celery salt.
I was never religious about this exact recipe — I might use ketchup and skip the peppers without significant guilt — but it was always essential to use a great volume of condiments, whatever the combination. Sauerkraut, cheese, chili, anything. (A place in Sacramento adds shallots, baby greens, dried cranberries, and cheese made from the milk of a moose. I salute them. Whatever it takes to smother the taste of the hot dog itself.)
However, as a sad side-effect, I developed a lifelong dependency on condiments. I’ve found that just about anything is improved if slathered in ketchup, mustard, and relish — sport peppers optional. A chunk of raw kohlrabi, a slab of tofu, a cast-off toilet paper tube, doesn’t matter what. Load up the condiments, and you’re instantly transported to the stands at Wrigley Field, rooting for the Cubbies.
The Cubs will open at home on April Fools’ Day, which seems appropriate. Forty thousand people eating hot dogs, cheering the nine hot dogs on the field.
Follow Doug Brendel’s culinary adventures by clicking “Follow the Outsidah.”
(from a post on X by Jennifer Greenberg)
But I’m totally addicted to chiffon, darling. Pray for me.
(from a long-ago issue of Time magazine)
It clearly wasn’t the last case to be argued there. Let’s keep our records straight, please, especially at the highest court in the land.
The most recent, perhaps. Not the last.
And probably (sigh) many more to come.
Here’s a safe bet: There are about 2,473 “MOOSE” signs on Massachusetts highways.
The Department of Transportation has posted a “Brake for Moose!” webpage, on which where they helpfully explain: “The signs are meant to alert drivers to slow down.”
Of course! I knew this. I grew up in the Chicago area, where the only moose is Bullwinkle. So I’m grateful for a sign announcing “MOOSE.” This way, I have ample notice to take my foot off the pedal and increase my chances of truly seeing a moose.
I understand that a “MOOSE” sign is something akin to those “ATTRACTIONS Exit 42” signs: It’s Father Massachusetts lovingly advising you, as you hurtle down the highway: Something special’s coming up; don’t miss it! If you want to experience the Museum of Forsythia, take Exit 42.
But truth be told, I’ve never actually seen a moose. I’ve driven a lot of Massachusetts miles, I’ve sincerelylonged to see a moose, I’ve slowed for innumerable “MOOSE” signs, but no moose has ever appeared.
So finally I decided to go straight to the source: I made an appointment to visit the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, Moose Department.
It was a bit weird, I admit, going into a typical cramped little government office, with a narrow window facing a brick wall, a metal file cabinet to one side, a threadbare visitor chair, a conventional desk — and behind the desk, a moose smoking a cigar.
I was so surprised, I couldn’t suppress my question: “You can smoke in here?”
The moose leaned back in his chair. “Smoke bother ya?” he replied, reaching back with one hoof to push the window open.
I pulled out my carefully prepared page of questions for the director of the Moose Dept., assuming that’s who this was. (And yes, as we conversed, he did sound quite a bit like Bullwinkle. Except intelligent.)
“Sure, I feel a little guilty,” he began. “It’s illegal to hunt moose in Massachusetts, while our deer cousins are getting whammied every year. On the other hand, however” — and he sucked on his cigar — “I’m not on the policy side. So yeah, whatever.”
It seemed impossible that he, an actual moose, was sitting behind a desk.
“We’re the biggest members of the deer family in North America,” he said. “I’m taller than you at my shoulder; I’m 800 pounds. And I’m just average. My wife — well, I mean, my wife this past rutting season — was 600 pounds. But again, ordinary. Not that she wasn’t cute. She was cute, believe me. But size-wise? Average.”
So what about all the “MOOSE” signs?
“What’s the #1 cause of moose death in Massachusetts?” he asked. “Historically, vehicle collisions. I’m so tall, your headlights don’t pick up the reflection in my eyes — until it’s too late. Before you know it, your Ferrari is fracturing my fibula.”
But with all the “MOOSE” signs, why I haven’t I seen a moose?
The moose snorted, punching his stogie into a leftover Dunkin cup. “Personally, I try to stay off the highways,” he said. “Plus, there’s less and less good stuff to eat out there — asphalt-adjacent, I mean. 95? Forget about it. I need about 50 pounds of leaves, twigs, and bark every day, just to keep my strength up. Massachusetts highways these days, they’re mostly concrete barriers, and billboards for cannabis.”
So what are my chances of seeing a moose on a Massachusetts highway?
He cocked his enormous head a bit, arched an eyebrow, sighed heavily, and then swiped an enormous hoof across the screen of his iPhone.
“Let’s see. I’m in meetings all day tomorrow. Then I got vacation. Then conferences till — looks like April. I’ll be on Route 3 in Billerica on the 16th. You know the Budget Truck Rental, off of Rangeway Road? Can you make that?”
I didn’t know how to respond.
Any other moose available?
“I’m all you got, bro,” the Mass. Moose Dept. director chuckled. “Lots of ‘MOOSE’ signs. One moose. That’s about it. This program is way underfunded.”
Doug Brendel thinks he lives in the heart of moose country. Follow his delusions by clicking “Follow the Outsidah” (at the top of this screen).
(from a recent New Yorker🙂
Why he had to use Zoom to talk to his kid is beyond me, especially with the kid in the same room. Some new fashion in parenting?
They invented email, more or less, in 1971, but it was pretty much a secret until Bill Clinton sent his first email in 1994, at which point email took off. Hard to imagine today, but back then, practically everybody wanted to be like Bill Clinton.
And then, within a few weeks, someone invented spam.
Today, my email inbox is inundated daily with messages which my Mac laptop identifies as “junk.” The machine is even smart enough to sequester this swill in a special “junk folder.” If I let it, it will auto-delete any bit of junk the moment it arrives.
But I can’t let it. I’m too paranoid about the Mac making a mistake, labeling something as junk when it’s really a heartfelt message from a theatrical agent pleading with me for performance rights to my new stage comedy; or a note from my mother about her latest triumph over my father at Scrabble, which I have to respond to or she’ll call 911 for fear I’ve had a stroke. Under no circumstances would I want to miss any such vitally important email.
Which means I have no choice but to scroll through my junk mail folder every day. It’s exhausting. I’m a mere human being, with limited strength, but spam comes from bots, who never have to eat, drink, sleep, or take a bathroom break; all they need is a bit of electrical current and steady WIFI, and they can swamp me with offers, warnings, “breaking news,” and Shocking Photos Taylor Swift Doesn’t Want You To See.
Furthermore, these offers recur, by the dozens if not the hundreds, day after week after month, until somehow the bot decides to retire “Train your puppy to go in the toilet” and instead try “Use your ordinary kitchen microwave to make solid gold commemorative Joe Biden coins.”
This can’t go on. I can’t live this way. Something must be done.
So now, finally, I’m going to deal with this endless spam-bombardment by trying the one thing I’ve never tried: I’m going to cave in. Surrender. Say yes to everything. And pray to high heaven they’ll call a ceasefire.
I’m going to “take one teaspoon of this Old World remedy” to eliminate my nerve pain.
I’m going to click to authenticate my account so my messages won’t be put on hold, despite the fact that the instructions aren’t exactly in English.
I’m going to take the quiz to find out which toxic meat Stanford doctors say can infect my urinary system and cause an agonizing UTI just three days after eating it. (Thank goodness it’s multiple choice: Will it be lamb, pork, liver, or jerky?)
I’m going to try the one easy stretch to fix back pain. And the recently discovered one-finger rub. Also the leaching vinegar.
I’m going to chip in $3 to ensure that extremist Republicans are kicked out of office permanently, and another $3 to do the same to the extremist Democrats. And I’m sending in for my free Trump hat.
I’m going to tap into my Genius Wave, which has been linked by NASA to my “Superbrain.”
I’m going to use some holistic glop to eliminate puffy, dark under-eye bags, and “miracle nectar” to help my skin regain its elasticity.
I’m going to take the advice of António Guterres from kpauto.jpr.srv5@marutidealers.com and send Mr. Adam Fletcher my full name, address, phone, occupation, age, driver’s license number, and passport number to collect the $10.5 million that the U.N. is holding for me after they rescued my money from corrupt bank officials.
I also have $10 million coming from Mrs. Juan Henry, director of the anti-fraud unit of the Financial Services Regulation Committee in Abuja, Nigeria, if I just confirm my bank account number.
Also, as soon as I secure a “legal stay of proceed” from the U.S. Supreme Court for just $285, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wants to send me an ATM card loaded with $1,155,000. This makes Blinken, relatively speaking, a cheapskate.
(I’m going to send $10,000 of it to Stephen Adams, who will make me $52,000 in bitcoin.)
I also understand I won the Euromillions Spanish Sweepstake International Lottery Program. And a brand-new free Makita six-piece Combo Kit.
I’m going to go through the three easy steps to earn a real concealed-carry permit.
I’m going to follow the step-by-step “Fatty Liver No More” program to protect my second-most important organ.
I’m going to crush heart attack risk by 51% with purple powder! And lose weight by chewing on the petals of an amazing purple flower.
Also I’m going to try the mysterious mountain tonic made from the “wonder fruit” that burns four times more calories and fat than any exercise.
And just for good measure, I’m going to try the 20-second Costa Rican ritual to lower my blood sugar and burn off 15 unwanted pounds without diets, exercise, or drugs. And the unusual rice method that liquefies fat while you sleep.
Also the forgotten sacred Viking warriors’ “fierce teeth” ritual to shield myself from cavities, decay, rotting, gingivitis, periodontitis, and more.
I’m going to beat the terrifying parasite that’s keeping me from pooping. I’ll also be looking into the “new 10-second bladder fix.”
To avoid poisoning myself, I’m going to “Click here to discover 10 foods you must never stockpile!”
I’m going to add 7.2 inches. I’m going to get rock hard. I’m going to watch the Miracle Shake video today and, as recommended, not show it to my wife.
I’m also going to watch the mysterious 12-second video that gives you 20/20 vision.
And I’m going to check out the prostate-shrinking discovery that left doctors speechless.
I’m getting sticky beans to reverse memory loss.
I’m going to prevent 99.9% of bacteria on my sheets.
I’m going to get 20% off at Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and a $50 gift card. And a $90 AARP gift card. And a $100 Nike gift card. I can also get an iPad Pro from Walmart!
I’m going to try the ingenious new way to learn piano and keyboard.
I’m going to get a portable camping lantern for free. And a legal, reinforced steel tomahawk.
I’m going to activate the “cashew gland” to unlock my brain.
I’m going to Get Rid of Body Odor for Good With the Long-Lasting Power of Lume Deodorant.
The Pope prayed a Divine Prayer to manifest a Lamborghini, and now I’m going to pray it too.
Free plumbing inspection? Or free electrical safety inspection? It’s a Limited-Time Special! I’m going to Choose One!
I’m going to check out the ancient Mystery School secret, a sign from God kept hidden for 5,000 years, the key to the Jesus frequency.
I’m also going to check out affordable burial policies.
I’m going to Complete a Survey for a Chance to Win Big!
I’m going to see if I qualify for a $1,000 line of credit today. No, wait: Some other guys have pre-approved me for $350,000.
I’m going to claim my 36-piece Tupperware set, my portable jump starter, and my chainsaw.
I’m going to assure Harbor Freight, yes, I did receive my package.
I’m ordering me some new legal Cheech & Chong Hemp Gummies, bro.
I’m going to date English-speaking Russian and Ukrainian women.
I’m going to regrow thicker and fuller hair.
I’m going to order the new survival hiking stick that’s flying off the shelves. And the brightest tactical flashlight on the market.
I’m going to drop my blood pressure below 120/80 in just nine minutes.
I’m redeeming, renewing, and extending my Peacock account free of charge.
I’m going to view the short independent documentary about the terrifying reality of the effect of artificial intelligence on Christian society before the video is taken down permanently!
I’m going to pay the $2.64 I owe to “Lowe’s Department.”
I’m sending $1,800 to 1LJsS3xXPx6Qsp9W2Vt9io3wAn5NmCcqbp to keep him from sharing sexy videos of me.
And now, after blithely ignoring 7,428 requests, I’m finally going to get a window consultation from Renewal by Anderson.
Also, regarding the fact that “We Are Only Days Away From A MAJOR TERROR ATTACK,” I’m going to do the only sensible thing: I’m going to click the “Read More” button.
And maybe most important of all, I’m going to お客様のアカウントを維持するため Аmazon アカウントの 情報を確認する必要があります.
Wish me luck.
Doug Brendel lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts, mostly in his junk mail folder. Click “Follow the Outsidah” to track all his adventures.
(from a CNN.com item)
My own parents were always childish too.
(From the Letters section of this week’s New Yorker magazine)
Hi Viv just arrived for grad school can’t find dorm just a burger joint please advise Love Doug
(From a local newspaper)
Be On the LookOut for a 21-year-old man crazy enough to threaten a machete-wielding individual!
This limp, this hunch, this intermittent groaning? That’s pickleball.
I resisted as long as I could. I generally resist the new. I’m progressive politically but conservative technologically. I was nervous about 8-tracks. I didn’t want a Mac. I was the last liberal to get a cell phone. Texting still makes me a little uneasy.
So pickleball — this outlandish craze — was not for me.
Especially because I grew up on ping-pong. My mother is still a mean ping-pong player. If I can be humiliated by a 92-year-old woman at ping-pong, I was certainly not going to let myself be humiliated by people my own age playing on a court only slightly bigger than a ping-pong table.
In high school, I tried to impress the girls by joining the tennis team. This was an error in judgment. I was relegated to serving as team manager — in street clothes. And no letter jacket.
As an adult, I spent 15 years as clergy, and 15 years playing racquetball trying to work off the stress of being clergy. Racquetball is one of the few things in life that I’ve enjoyed even while failing at it. I also failed at being clergy but I didn’t enjoy that near as much.
Racquetball requires goggles, which should be a clue that you shouldn’t do it. If you look up “racquetball” in the dictionary, there’s a picture of your mother saying “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.” I never lost an eye. Just a knee, an elbow, and ultimately a rotator cuff. The day the physical therapist gave up on me, he said, “Don’t despair, it might grow back.”
So then comes pickleball. A sport, if you can call it that, with the silliest of names. “Ping-pong” wasn’t a goofy enough name; they had to come up with “pickleball.” A pickle isn’t even its own vegetable; it needs a cucumber to get started. Any self-respecting sport should at least be called “cukeball.” How can you look your wife in the eye and say “I’m going out to play pickleball” and expect her to still respect you when you get home?
I might never have ventured onto a pickleball court if my church hadn’t gone there. When your priest says “Come play pickleball,” it somehow carries the weight of divinity. You can’t just say “no” to your priest without wondering if this will show up on your permanent record. “Come play pickleball” is not quite “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,” but it’s in the same grocery aisle.
My church has a gym, where they’ve taped off a regulation-sized pickleball court. It’s like a tennis court they left in the dryer too long, shrunk to about a third its normal size. Pickleball is designed for simpletons, and the elderly, and the physically awkward. In other words, me.
I think the pickleball gods basically said, Let’s do tennis, but smaller, and let’s lower the net — to make it easier. Let’s do racquetball, but with a slower ball, and no goggles — to make it safer. Let’s do ping-pong, but with a bigger paddle — to make the ping-pong players feel like fools when they miss the ball.
So I dragged myself to the church on the appointed evening and proceeded to flail about. I wiggled and waggled, swung and swooped, and did more than my share of cussing. (Pay no mind to the proximate pickleball priest.)
And of course, like more than five million other Americans, I was immediately, thoroughly, shamelessly addicted.
It is a game, and it is silly. Maybe that’s its draw. I am wretched at it, but nobody scowls at me for being wretched at it. There’s lots of laughter, but it’s not the laughter of scorn.
In this very serious world, in this era of very serious issues, it rejuvenates my spirit to unhitch for two hours and descend into silliness, and laughter, without scorn.
The limp, the hunch, the groaning? Small price to pay for non-religious spirit-rejuvenation.
Game point, suckers! The dweeb is up!
Follow Doug Brendel by clicking “Follow the Outsidah.” It’s the only way to get all of this nonsense.
(From the 2/17/24 edition of OnThisDay.com, the daily history blog)
For you history buffs:
I knew a lot of folks in Britain wanted rid of her, but Europe wanted her off the continent too?
(On the lobby wall of an office building in Newbury, Mass.)
I was going to drink my coffee in the nice warm lobby, but noooo…. They insisted I dump it. They don’t seem to make an exception for people who want to finish their drink.
Gulp down your decaf on the sidewalk, I guess, out there with the smokers. And then bring your empty cup inside and throw it in the trash. Maybe they get a commission or something.
Regulations. Sheesh.
(From an old Twitter post by Johnny Knoxville)
Please don’t. No rapist deserves a massage.
It’s been a few weeks since the end of Massachusetts’s deer hunting season, long enough that the survivors are partying.
I spend quite a number of hours every week on Massachusetts roadways, and I can go months without seeing a deer, but in the past week I’ve dodged four of the rascals — four! — in the midst of their frolicking.
There’s certainly no question why such revelry is occurring. I can explain it very simply.
Every year from October 7th to the end of November, during the state’s “archery season,” the entire Massachusetts deer population hunkers down. That’s an estimated 100,000+ animals grimly assessing their losses day by day.
Then there’s a single day of respite, December 1st, which the Commonwealth mercifully allocates so that devastated deer families can hold funerals.
Next, the remaining deer batten down the hatches for the 13 bloody days of “shotgun season.”
Another official day of respite occurs on December 15th — more funerals, I guess — before the deer are subjected to “primitive firearms season,” which runs through the final day of the year.
As a newcomer to New England, I was troubled to hear of state-approved “primitive firearms,” until I came to understand that this term doesn’t actually refer to the handguns we used to carry as kids in Chicago. Officially, under Massachusetts law, so-called “primitive firearms” are defined as “shoulder-fired muzzleloaders” — some of which actually have scopes (which doesn’t seem very primitive to me, but what do I know?).
Finally, on New Year’s Day, the deer can come out of hiding, don their black legbands, weep for their dead, and then get on about the business of destroying our landscaping.
Clearly, deer PTSD doesn’t last as long as human PTSD, because pretty soon, the deer are cavorting as if nothing really terrible ever happened. I’m pretty sure they gather in the woods and drink themselves silly, until one says, “Hey! Let’s wait for a car to come up Linebrook Road and then jump out in front of it!” For a deer whose cousin just got taken down by a shoulder-fired muzzleloader, the world is a hopeless place anyway, so why not have some crazy fun?
But we are human beings, with a capacity for rational thought and, more importantly, compassion, so I feel we must intervene. We must not despise these misguided cervine delinquents; we must help them. Not just because they are helpless fools, but because they have the capacity to total a Toyota and send the driver mangled to Mass General.
So I suggest we set up a deer-reflector program. It’s free of charge to participating deer. This program will make use of simple reflectors, similar to the ones you mount on sticks in the wintertime to show snowplow drivers what to aim for.
The reflectors will be attached to the sides of the deer. Attaching the reflector doesn’t have to hurt the deer, any more than it hurts a whale to be tagged for research purposes. A quick stapling operation — ka-chunk! — and the deer is on its way. More than a vaccination, less than a vasectomy.
To get the deer to enroll in the program, we set up an incentive plan: Get your reflector, and you earn a great big bag of birdseed. This will be a huge draw for a deer, because they won’t have the hassle of traipsing all the way into my backyard and sticking their tongue into my birdfeeder. The hygiene advantage alone will be compelling.
On the other hand, deer who refuse to cooperate will encounter negative incentives. Unreflectored deer will be fair game year-round, and designated as “venison.”
Hunters, ready your muzzleloaders!
Doug Brendel writes from his home on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and aspires to be like John Updike, who reportedly “never had an unpublished thought.” For access to all of Doug’s particularly unpublishable thoughts, click “Follow the Outsidah.”
(From my friend Carlene White’s column in the Ipswich Local News)
That was a very long parade.
(From the 1/15/24 issue of the New Yorker)
I’ve been growing horizontally myself, for way too long.
Transitions can be hard. Transitions can be good. Transitions can turn out to be good even after at first they were hard.
I don’t prefer transitions. I depend on my routines. The morning bathroom sequence must not be messed with. At my age, I wake up on auto-pilot. There’s no bandwidth left for calculating these mundane start-of-day activities. Heaven forbid a phone call interrupts me between the razor and the thyroid pill; I’ll never get back to the thyroid pill. According to the Mayo Clinic symptoms list, I could wind up with a puffy face, constipation, or possibly irregular menstrual cycles.
The domestic cat is a creature of routine. The humans keep a certain schedule, move in a certain pattern. The cat learns that as the sun goes down, it’s time for the bedtime meal. But that’s July. As the days grow shorter, the cat’s evening meal is inexplicably delayed. The cat prowls, scowls, meows.
Then comes November, and the end of Daylight Saving Time. Suddenly, nighttime falls a full hour earlier. The cat is furious with the humans. You there! Where is my Purina Friskies Mariner’s Catch Paté?
We grow comfortable with our status quo. Longtime Ipswich residents will tell you how terrible it was to lose the routine of moviegoing at the Strand. It was heartbreaking to see that liquor store torn down on Depot Square, forcing people to do their banking there instead. Building a stone-arch bridge across the river absolutely demolished our forebears’ well-established ferrying routine.
Likewise, removing the Ipswich Mills dam will upset the generations-old tradition of herring bumping into a wall and saying “What the heck?”
Change happens. Life is a constant swirl. The question isn’t whether change will happen, but what we do about it — whether we adapt to change wisely, or squander time and energy fighting back.
Bill Belichick was never going to last forever. Some of our town officials may wish they’d sat down sooner than they did. Who knows when it’s time to sit down and shut up?
Four hundred and fifty times, I’ve inflicted my commentary on readers as “the Outsidah,” an average of more than once every 10 days for nearly 13 years. I’m grateful to have been welcomed by the old Ipswich Chronicle and its Chronicle & Transcript successor, and by the Ipswich Local News, and more recently by the Salem News and other outlets.
But change happens. Perhaps it’s time for a transition. Time to sit down. And say less. If anything.
My plate has gotten quite full. I have my professional writing to keep up with, and my volunteer work with NewThing.net. Meanwhile, I have a stage play to rewrite, and another in the works, and parts of a third, and maybe another novel to produce, and who knows what else.
Maybe from time to time, I’ll have something to say that a newspaper wants to pick up. If so, lovely. If not, I’ll be posting anyway, as always, at Outsidah.com.
I’ve always tried to write amusingly about life in smalltown New England from the standpoint of a newcomer. In the past year or so, however, I’ve often felt less amused, and less amusing. I’d like to navigate this change with some measure of grace.
This past weekend, my wife and I were away from the house — plus, Daylight Saving Time ended — and the cats did not navigate these changes of routine with grace. I came home to a dead mouse, positioned in the middle of our bedroom floor.
A totem of annoyance? Animosity?
I want to go out better. Better than the mouse, of course. But also better than these wretched cats. They got no class.
(P.S. After a hundred-day hiatus, I was back at it, posting columns.)
Doug Brendel lives online at DougBrendel.com, Outsidah.com, and NewThing.net.
The fancy phone my wife bought me is so smart, even tucked in my pocket it can detect when I’m driving, and if anyone texts me, the phone becomes my guardian, refusing to allow the dinger to ding, so I don’t even know the text has come in.
This keeps me from breaking Massachusetts state law, which bans the use of handheld devices while driving, for which I should be grateful, because (a) it’s extremely dangerous to text while driving, and (b) I would do very badly in prison, especially if my ax-murderer cellmate asked me what I was in for.
But my fancy phone doesn’t stop with disarming my dinger. When I arrive at my destination and look at my phone, I see that it has proceeded to act as my alter-ego, automatically replying on my behalf — as if it’s me — to the person who’s texting me: “I’m not receiving notifications. I’m driving,” it scolds. “I’ll see your message soon.”
This makes me somewhat uneasy. I’m not sure I necessarily want anyone and everyone knowing that I’m driving at that precise moment.
What if I’ve told a friend I can’t take them to Town Hall for ping-pong on Monday evening because my car is in the shop? And then they text me to say Never mind, they hitched a ride with a member of the Ipswich School Committee who loves ping-pong (because, yeah, School Committee).
But then my friend gets that instant text from me in reply? “I’m driving.” Gah! I’m busted!
A smartphone keeps you honest. Which is exhausting if you’re not already in the habit of being honest.
How does this very smart phone know I’m driving? It senses my speed. Accordingly, it can also tell when I’ve stopped driving, at which point it again allows the dinger to ding.
On the other hand, it’s not a perfect system. Take last week, for example, at Market Basket.
I like to take my time at Market Basket, because it’s the main social center of my otherwise cloistered life. It’s the place where I encounter neighbors and friends I rarely see any other way. So I amble, in hopes of seeing someone I know, and catching up on the latest local gossip.
Last week, however, I was in a huge hurry, running late, racing through the store. As I rushed my shopping cart up Nuts and down Noodles, I was moving so fast, my dinger was disabled. So I had no idea my wife was texting me to add something to the grocery list. But she certainly did hear back from me instantly: “I’m not receiving notifications,” I sniffed. “I’m driving. I’ll see your message soon.”
The not-so-smartphone can also be fooled into thinking you’re not driving when you technically still are. On High Street in Ipswich, for instance, which now seems to feature at least one traffic accident per day. While you’re sitting there stranded, you’re technically not legal to use your handheld device, but the smartphone yawns and says Go right ahead!
There is hope, however. Technology continues to advance. For a small upgrade fee, my smartphone will check not only my speed but also my location and other details. So when someone texts me, they’ll get a more detailed message in return:
“I’m not receiving notifications. My dinger’s been disabled. But it’s not because I’m driving. It’s because I’m on High Street. It was a Toyota T-boned by a Ford F-150. I won’t see your message anytime soon.”
Doug Brendel receives notifications at his home on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and online at DougBrendel.com.
We Massachusetts residents have dreams about teeth more than dreams about anything else. Mostly we dream about losing our teeth. More than we dream about sex, or pregnancy, or snakes.
JournoResearch.org reported this tasty tidbit just last week.
They also say we’re the most sleep-deprived state in New England, ninth in the nation — and top-tier for anxiety. Which makes sense, I guess, because we can’t sleep, and we can’t sleep because we’re dreaming about losing our teeth.
I have not lived here long, and perhaps I don’t entirely fit in with Massachusetts people for this very reason: I don’t dream about losing my teeth. At least not yet. Will it happen eventually? How long do you live here before you start dreaming about losing your teeth?
My parents did well by me, as I was growing up in the Chicago area; they provided me with consistent medical and dental care. They dutifully took me to the kindly Dr. Downing to keep me up on my shots and put a cast on my broken arm in second grade.
But for dentistry, the neighborhood option was a cruel elderly fellow. This evil plyer of drill pliers made me scream and seemed to enjoy it, and I have blotted his name from my memory.
One apparent side-effect of this childhood trauma: After I left home for college, I was diligent about the doctor, but ducked the dentist.
My first job out of college was three blocks from my apartment, but to walk to work in a straight line meant walking past a dentist’s office. I did a daily mile of sidewalks to avoid that place of torture, and a mile back.
Some years later, due to the inevitable crisis occurring in my mouth, I had no choice but to visit a dentist, and there I learned that my mouth had become a vast dental nightmare.
So it began: a grievous journey through crowns and fillings and extractions and not in that particular order, but they all happened. And kept happening. The damage I had done by ignoring my teeth kept needing to be corrected, year after year, one miserable tooth after another.
Meanwhile, the technology of fillings advanced, decade by decade — from porcelain to gold to silver, to composite resins, to amalgam (whatever that is) — so that over time, my mouth has become a sort of museum of dentistry. If I open my mouth and say ah, dental students can peer in and find fillings representing every decade since Richard Nixon. I could charge admission.
Along the way, I acquired — the hard way, via pain and copays — a good habit. It’s called flossing. I hate it, but I do it. I do it faithfully, at least once a day. Except on Saturday, when I afford myself a flossing sabbath: I spitefully reward myself on Saturday for grumpily flossing every other day of the week.
Result: As I prepared to move to New England, my Arizona dentist gave me a final once-over and offered this benediction:
“You are a poster child for periodontal health!”
Periodontal: that’s gums. My teeth may be appalling, but my gums are awesome!
Long later, when my Ipswich dentist hired a new hygienist and she suggested I employ a better flossing technique, I was silently outraged. I came home and stormed about the insult to my wife:
“Doesn’t she know I’m a poster child for periodontal health!?”
My wife responded in her usual gentle, rational way: “Darling,” she said, touching my arm lightly, “you really need to find something else to take pride in.”
But I’ve never been called a poster child for anything else, so I’m sticking with this.
I’ll floss however I want, six days a week, and I’ll sleep easy every night, with a mouthful of healthy gums and heavily fortified teeth.
The rest of you Massachusetts residents? Dream on.
In his home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Doug Brendel is sharpening his fangs for Halloween. Find him at DougBrendel.com.
It was Sebastian. It was Sebastian all along.
Time and time again, I’ve found a shopping cart — a “carriage,” as you New Englanders say — parked at the end of an aisle in Market Basket, with an ordinary assortment of items collected … but no human shopper to be found.
It’s eerie, in a way. What could make someone abandon their shopping mid-visit? What crisis befell them? They fell mortally ill without warning and couldn’t face the prospect of spending their final moments in the grocery store restroom? They suddenly realized they’d left home without their cash, their cards, their smartphone, and every other conceivable form of payment? They got the dreaded text from their kid and dashed for the parking lot to race home and put out the Xbox fire or peel the duct tape off the guinea pig?
I thought it was a ghost, maybe, doing its weekly shopping at Market Basket, and if I stood there long enough, watching the cart, I would finally see it slowly moving along, the occasional product floating silently off a shelf and into the basket.
But no. It wasn’t a ghost. It wasn’t a crisis. It was my Ipswich friend Sebastian, from Leslie Road.
The mystery was solved this past week when I found him someplace between Sardines and Salsa. Like any responsible shopper, he was eyeing the products and prices and making prudent selections. But he was gathering his goods in his arms.
“Hi, Sebastian!” I said. “You don’t have a cart? Not even a bag? Did you leave home thinking you just needed to pick up one thing and then got here and started thinking of other things you needed?”
“No,” he replied, “my cart is down there.” He nodded toward Frozen Shrimp.
“It’s you!” I exclaimed. “You’re the one who abandons a cart in front of Oat Flax Wheat Pitas!”
Then he explained. He has retreated from shopping-cart warfare in the claustrophobic aisles of Market Basket. Maybe retreat is the wrong term. Sebastian has defiantly launched a counter-offensive.
Why? Because no matter where he pauses to pull something off a shelf, someone inevitably wants something from whatever shelf Sebastian’s cart is blocking. And whatever he wants from a shelf, it’s between two other people’s carts with too small a space for Sebastian’s cart.
And passing? There are no “no passing” lanes in Market Basket. No double yellow line painted down the center of the lane. Gone are those lovely pandemic days of “one way only,” when everyone flowed in the same direction, on a grocery-store version of a Massachusetts freeway. So now, if you’re at Oatmeal trying to pass a patron pondering Pop Tarts, you’re sure to run head-on into a Maple Syrup shopper coming the other way.
“And it was even worse when I lived in Danvers,” Sebastian snarled. “I had to shop at Stop & Shop there, and the aisles were only two-thirds as wide as they are here!”
So Sebastian parks his cart, zips up the aisle, gliding like an octopus around other people’s hardware, wrapping his Ramen and Raisins and Right Guard and Reynolds Wrap in his tentacles.
“Of course you run the risk of your cart being stolen,” Sebastian admitted. “Someone decides they like what you’ve chosen more than the stuff in their own cart, and then you’re stuck with their stuff.”
“Or maybe it’s an honest mistake?” I offered.
Sebastian arched a skeptical eyebrow.
I bid my fraught friend a fond farewell and headed toward Foils & Wrap. Later in my excursion, I found Sebastian in Jams & Jellies.
“It happened!” he cried.
“Someone stole your cart?” I asked.
“No, I got trapped in Ziploc Bags! I felt like I was being smothered to death!”
He shouldn’t have worried. His ghost could have finished his shopping.
Doug Brendel lives in Ipswich, 6 minutes from an amusing grocery store. Check out Doug’s complicated life at DougBrendel.com.
It is unwise to admit that you don’t like dogs. Maybe even dangerous.
People consider you somehow subhuman, or inherently hateful, or morally misshapen, if you don’t like dogs.
It’s not a dog-vs.-cat thing with me. I have cats now, but I don’t really like them either. But I’ve had dogs. When I was a kid, we had dogs. I think we probably had dogs because in suburban Chicago in the 1960s you were supposed to have dogs.
I liked the idea of having a dog. I just didn’t like having a dog. Because I didn’t really like dogs.
We had a large brown poodle, Tony, barred from competing as a show dog because his tail went down instead of up, so the breeder dumped him off on us. Tony may have needed a therapist even more than me, because one day he seems to have flung himself into traffic. Rest in peace, Tony. I’m glad it was quick for you.
My little brother, in grade school, had a female miniature dachshund whom he named after a somewhat larger female human he had a crush on. The human female was delighted, but she still declined to marry him, perhaps because of the 20-year difference in their ages. Or maybe it was the dog thing. Not every human loves canines. And I think it’s safe to say, an even smaller subset of humans love having a dog named after them.
Over the course of my youth, other dogs came and went, like actors with bit parts in a stage play. I always enjoyed their entrances — I’ve always liked making new friends — but I was always okay with it when their scene was over. Applause. Next? A hamster, maybe?
No, this isn’t the result of childhood trauma. I never had an ugly experience with a dog (unless you count Tony’s sudden finale on Broad Street); no dog ever bit me or chased me or took me hostage during a bank robbery.
I somehow just never came to appreciate a dog’s dogginess.
Last week I had an unpleasant squabble with one of my dearest friends here in Ipswich, who is, sad to say, a massive dog-advocate. I felt it necessary to point out to my friend that no amount of advocacy was going to change my feeling, or non-feeling, about dogs.
Then came a seeming non sequitur:
My work took me far away, on an airline I’d never flown before, to a foreign city I’d never visited before. A balmy clime.
My host took me on a walk through the tourists’ part of town. Thousands of people were enjoying drinks and meals in outdoor café settings.
And also, cats. Hundreds of cats. Cats everywhere. More cats than I had ever seen in one place at one time, other than the Internet.
“Nobody has cats here,” my host said.
I must have looked quizzical. My host continued:
“No one keeps ‘pets.’ There’s no need.”
At a fancy dinner, I saw people casually tossing bits of their meals to the cats. The cats have become connoisseurs. I witnessed it. A cat will greedily chow down on porchetta à la sauce vierge, but throw it a chunk of burger and it turns up its nose and walks away.
Now I’m terrified that I’ve glimpsed the future. We’re the butlers, the valets, the help. We’re here for the cats.
If this keeps going, a calico Persian will be Ipswich town manager. No such thing could happen with a labradoodle.
Is this karma? Heaven forbid I was too resistant to dogs, too tolerant of cats, and because of me we’re doomed. I’m so sorry I ever admitted anything!
God, no, please: Republicans, anything, but not cats. PLEASE FORGIVE ME!
We must bring back the dogs.
Hug a dog today!
Give dogs the vote!
Doug Brendel lives in a constant state of crisis with an array of cats and humans on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. His latest mercifully-non-animal-related project can be explored at www.BestIfUsedBy.show.
My mailbox is out there. I can see it, from my front window.
Once a day, Monday through Saturday, my mail carrier pauses, does some business there, and moves on.
After that, if I go out there and look into the mailbox, my mail magically appears.
I have not lived in Ipswich long, but I have outlived two of my three Postal Service mail carriers. One died, the other retired.
I love my current mail carrier; I’ll protect his privacy by referring to him as Paul.
Paul’s daily arrival is a welcome moment for me, especially because I work from home. The Internet is all well and good, but what a treat to find anything coming to me via the USPS, thanks to Paul — or if Paul is off-duty, then Leslie, or Vaslav, or whomever. The arrival of the mail is my six-out-of-seven-days opportunity to experience actual tactile communication with the outside world.
This week, I thought I’d have to go downtown to deal with a certain international delivery problem, but my beloved mail carrier Paul paused in his rounds, pulled out his official smartphone, and helped me, at great length, to sort through it. Paul is my hero.
Certainly the United States Postal Service is not perfect. They’re humans, after all. It’s not as if a pre-programmed robot clunks your stuff into your mailbox at 14:04:37 every day. No. Paul and his colleagues are actual people. In their own lives, they’re dealing with spouses, ex-spouses, children, stepchildren, grown children who can’t seem to move out, pets, mortgages, taxes, plumbers, exterminators, all the stuff that you and I deal with — but we never imagine our mail carrier is dealing with this stuff. They are. So maybe Paul has to pull off the road to take a phone call and talk his daughter off the ledge about her loser of a boyfriend. So no, the mail doesn’t arrive at exactly the same time every day.
The daily question, then, is: When will, or when did, the mail arrive?
To tell you the truth, this issue has turned it into something of a superstition for me. An almost-religious “twinge.”
I could not have developed such a twinge in my youth, in suburban Chicago. We had little mailboxes attached to our houses, mounted adjacent to our front door, so you simply reached out and grabbed the mail without a second thought.
Not so, here. With the mailbox standing roadside, you have to hike out there to retrieve your mail. It’s a certain investment of time and energy. Back here, in my house, I think about it:
What’s out there, in the box?
Anything, or nothing?
Is it too early in the day?
Did I hear the mail carrier come and go, or was I flushing the toilet and missed it?
Do I feel the “twinge”?
When I think I feel the twinge, I go out to the mailbox, and if there’s mail, I rejoice. My superstition was true!
But if the mailbox is empty, I’m abject. Humiliated. I look around furtively to see if any of my neighbors are smirking because they caught me peeking into an empty mailbox.
On the other hand, if I don’t have the twinge, and then it suddenly occurs to me that it’s late in the day, and I go out to the mailbox, and it’s full of mail … how did I miss the twinge?
This is how religions get started.
Sure, it would be relatively easy for someone to manufacture a mailbox with a see-through rear end, so I could look out my front window and see whether there’s mail in the box or not.
But then, of course, someone would start a religion that makes a see-through mailbox a sin. So forget that idea.
Doug Brendel is hopeless. His demise is inevitable. Follow his real-life work at DougBrendel.com.
Visit www.BestIfUsedBy.show for news and tickets!
I hope you receive this message.
I’m in here, I assure you. Please find a way to reach me.
God help you getting through the thicket. But try!
If you need tools to hack your way in, I plead with you to find them, because I need you.
(Remember Disney’s Sleeping Beauty? Prince Phillip slashing his way through Maleficent’s forest of giant thorns, struggling to reach his beloved? Be like him.)
Please understand: I did not ask for this trouble. I did not cause this trouble. But I am in this trouble now, because honey locust trees — Gleditsia triacanthos, also known as “thorny locust” — are growing, crawling, spreading, sprawling, all across the front of my house.
THORNY LOCUST, people! Please take action!
When I arrived in Ipswich, longing for the quiet, simple life in a quaint New England town, I never anticipated such an onslaught: hordes of vicious honey locust trees rising up to assault me, in my very own front yard.
And yet, here we are.
There was just one tree, in the beginning: a beautiful, glorious hundred-year-old honey locust, standing as a majestic sentinel between the front of my James-Madison-era house and the even more historic outer Linebrook Road, a few feet away. I have written repeatedly about this wonderful tree, and its breathtaking legacy.
My downwind neighbor didn’t really like raking the zillions of honey locust leaves that blew into his front yard every year, but he was gracious about it. Honorable. A nice neighbor. When I cut down the tree, I wasn’t doing it for him. I cut down the tree because it was shading our roof, and when we put solar panels up there to convert our household to sun power, the tree had to come down.
I wept, literally, the day we felled that old friend. I insisted on leaving the stump of the trunk in the middle of the front yard, as a totem of our affection. (Meanwhile, my neighbor was delighted. He’d save an estimated 77 hours a year in raking time.)
Then came the mischief.
The tree began reconstituting itself — new trunks, up from the roots, pushing into the sky. Our front yard began filling up with vegetation. On a sunny day, I could open the blinds to the front windows, and the house was still draped in darkness. A zillion gazillion honey locust leaves were blocking all life-giving light from the front of my house.
I think the official count is seven new honey locust trees out there — but if I could force my front door open against the encroaching undergrowth, cut my way through the brush, and count how many honey locust trunks are actually pushing up from my front yard, I bet it would be double digits. Maybe triple.
I can’t make that assessment, however, because I’m stuck in here. Trapped. Food is running low. It’s dark. And winter is coming.
My neighbor is a good person; I am really sorry he’s had to rake my honey locust leaves for lo these many years. But I CAN’T WORRY ABOUT THAT NOW! If someone will just please lay hold of an old-fashioned scythe and get me out of here, I promise to do all I can to rid us of this plague of locusts — and make things right with my neighbor.
You thought the big problem was global warming. Or fascism. No. It’s honey locusts.
Ipswich friends, please take note! The honey locust crisis must take priority over all those other issues you thought were so pressing. Long-term, we may need new honey locust bylaw — and a task force. A new committee. And a board.
And hearings. Yes. Hearings.
Whatever. In the meantime, please, find me.
I’m leaving a front window open, so when you’ve hacked for a while and you feel you might getting close to the front of my house, start shouting “Honey locust liberation response!” and I’ll know it’s you.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road, if you can find him. Oh, never mind. He’s probably already been consumed by the jungle animals. Just visit DougBrendel.com.
Everyone is screaming about AI — artificial intelligence — and the ability of the AI bot known as ChatGPT to write high schoolers’ term papers in 20 seconds. ChatGPT is now writing photo captions for lazy magazine editors. Crafting entire grant proposals while non-prof development directors sip lunchtime martinis. Jazzing up the stuff you read on your favorite conspiracy-theory website. ChatGPT can write any number of words you want, in any style you want, entirely free of charge, instantly, with the click of a button.
Personally, I’m all for it. A bot’s term paper is going to be way easier reading for any high school English teacher.
Now comes word that AI is writing entire books. Amazon is being flooded with them.
Trouble is, The Guardian reports, bots have now written books about mushroom foraging. And ChatGPT has no fear of dying an agonizing death as a result of consuming poisonous wild mushrooms.
“Mushroom pickers urged to avoid foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI,” the September 1 Guardian headline says. Why? Because these books advise, for example, identifying poisonous varieties by taste. (“This one looks good, Ethel!” “Smell it.” “Smells good too!” “Take a nibble.” “Tastes goo— gahrk— gah—” “Hank? Hank, you okay? Hank, you don’t look so good.”)
We need to know when we’re reading something that’s been written by a heartless, soulless bot. What tragedies may befall us if we unwittingly follow ChatGPT’s lead down a path to destruction? Murdering mushroom-pickers may not be a big deal, but what else will AI get wrong?
Just about every Friday morning, I look at that specials board in the Ipswich Inn dining room. “Quiche Lorraine With Fruit.” “Asparagus and Tomato Eggs Benedict.” “Homemade Blueberry Cranberry Scones and Peach Cobbler Coffee Cake.” Is this true? Is this stuff safe to consume? Who wrote this menu?
The official Town of Ipswich website: Is this for real? When it says “Ipswich Mills Dam Public Comment Period Currently Open,” can it be trusted? “Click the link,” it says, “to learn the three ways to submit a comment and take a look at the full MEPA filing.” Doesn’t “three ways to submit a comment” sound like some kind of hustle? Don’t click that link! And who knows for sure that “taking a look at the full MEPA filing” won’t burn holes in your retinas? What’s a MEPA, anyway? Something the bot made up, just to lure us in?
I see AI’s machine-drawn fingerprints everywhere I look. I’m not fooled. The sign says “Global War on Terror Memorial Bridge.” Who would make up such a name? Clearly someone fed the old name, “High Street Bridge, Bridge No. I-01-007,” into ChatGPT and asked it for something more emotional. And without numbers.
My wife texts me from work — at least it appears to come from her. “Can you pick up eggs?” she seems to have written. But any human being would have known the answer. Of course I can pick up eggs. They’re not that heavy. Assuming they’re chicken eggs. But even ostrich eggs are only about three pounds. “Can you pick up eggs?” I’m not falling for that.
The answer to the AI dilemma, they say, is to accept information only from “trusted sources.”
Yes, it’s exhausting to deal with life in an AI-dominated world. But we have no choice. And maybe it’s not too late to turn this evil into something good.
This column, for example, took ChatGPT only 15 seconds to write.
Doug Brendel forages for fungus at his house on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Follow him fearlessly at DougBrendel.com.
The howling, the cursing, the moaning and weeping and gnashing of teeth, all of this can cease. The pain can subside. The major nagging issues that have bedeviled Ipswich for so long can finally be resolved. And almost simultaneously. Trust me.
The removal of the Ipswich River dam. The design of the public safety spaceship, er, facility. The need for reasonably priced housing. These are not independent, intractable problems, solvable only by fisticuffs and bloodshed and, even worse, more hearings. We need to see these matters as pieces of a large civic jigsaw puzzle, each one interlocking another, with the very real potential of leading to peace, harmony, and fewer hearings.
Jigsaw puzzles are not impossible. They simply require patience, insight, and a large kitchen table. Also, self-medicating may help. Spread out all the pieces, look for straight edges, and eventually everything fits: dam, public safety, housing. Ipswich beautifully restored to full function and civil discourse.
We begin with the dam. The dam must come down. It has a place in our history, yes, but it’s messing with the sex lives of smelt. So the question is not whether to dismantle the dam; the question is what to do with those tons and tons of historic concrete.
Answer: Use the historic concrete to build the public safety building. So the public safety building won’t look like a UFO that lost its way. It will look historic. It will be the very essence of Ipswich. It will be reminiscent of the beloved Ipswich Mills Dam. Every time a hooligan is hauled into a jail cell in the new public safety building, it will be like the smelt of yore being trapped in the old fish ladder.
Meanwhile, upriver from the now-absent dam, water levels may drop. And yes, as the present-day riverfront properties become mudfront properties, property values and water levels may recede in tandem. But let me assure you, this is just another piece of the puzzle!
What to do with these homes once they can only command lower prices? These fine places can become low-income housing. Superb low-income housing. Low-income housing so nice, you’ll want to take a pay cut so you can live in one.
The former owners, of course, will still need places to live. But this is why Ipswich has realtors and contractors. Here, fortunately, is yet another piece of the puzzle.
The police and fire departments won’t need their old buildings anymore; our law enforcers and firefighters will be happily ensconced in the new historic Ipswich Mills Dam Memorial Public Safety Center at the corner of Linebrook and Pineswamp. At the same time, barely a mile to the east, we can expect to Ed Dick to convert the old police and fire stations into condos.
And here’s the cool part: The people who used to live in riverfront properties get first dibs — at a discount! Those who act quickly but don’t want to live downtown can rent out their newly converted police or fire station condos at astronomical prices, and invest their proceeds in even finer riverfront properties on other rivers in the area, rivers that never got dammed, or damned.
Another puzzle piece in place!
As you can see, we don’t really have problems; what we have are solutions waiting to be discovered.
And every solution gives birth to another solution. Once we observe how smoothly the dam-riverfront-public-safety-police-and-fire-station puzzle is resolved, we can happily move on to other pesky issues.
At the moment, I’m working on a fascinating plan involving the Rowley rooster feud, Castle Hill concert dancing, the Electric Light manager search, and plovers.
Stay tuned!
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road, where he spends his days imagining the unimaginable. Visit DougBrendel.com at your own risk.
Hello? Golda?
Terrible connection! Fort Lauderdale to Ipswich, it’s like I’m calling Mars.
How are you, my darling sister? You’ve been through so much!
Heard? Yes, of course I’ve heard. We have Internet in Florida, you know. We’re not some primitive backwater! Except politically, of course, but still. So yes, I heard the news. The awful news. How are you holding up, Golda? Losing your Avram. And so young! Only 10 feet long. In his prime. It was shocking to me — me, his favorite auntie. I still think of him as that little pup, wagging his little thresher tail as if he owned the whole Atlantic!
Yes, dear Golda, yes. I was devastated, I’m telling you. Just thinking about it, I’m crying right now, although who would know, because I’m underwater.
Yes, of course I saw the photos. I still follow the North Shore news online. When I moved to Florida, I wasn’t rejecting everything about New England, Golda, you must know this. I’m still interested in the world you’re living in, even with your dreadfully cold ocean temperatures.
No, of course I know they’re not “your” ocean temperatures personally, Golda! I’m just saying if you insist on living off Crane Beach, you’re going to have to put up with your cold water temperatures. And your pollution.
Yes, pollution! I see in the news they’re closing the beaches because of pollution! It’s bad enough that humans can’t swim for days at a time. But I hear from our great white cousins they’re going weeks at a time without a decent meal. I must tell you, Golda, I’ve never regretted moving to Florida, not once.
Yes, the waters here are warmer this year. So, what? You’re against comfortable?
Yes, near 100 here, but I like it! It’s like taking a bath. Or a sauna. Or if I get caught, God forbid, at least I’m already cooked. I try to look on the bright side, Golda!
Oh, I know, dear sister, I know. It’s hard to look on the bright side when you see your precious boy’s carcass on the beach, and a human boy in the photo next to him, and the human boy is still alive. Journalists have no shame! But I must say to you, Golda, your little Avram did look good. Even the human boy’s father said Avram had phenomenal color! The rainbow hue of spilled gasoline, he called it! “Gorgeous,” he said!
Well, I know it doesn’t count for much, darling, since yes, he’s still dead. But whatever.
No, I’m just trying to cheer you up, darling. This is a hard time, I know. But let me tell you, Golda, it’s even harder for me, in a way.
Yes, harder for me! Because I was his beloved auntie, and I can’t count how many times I said to that boy, “Get out of New England. Come south! Come to Florida!” But did he listen? No. “Herring,” he said to me. “You can’t get herring like this in Florida, auntie!” I said, “Avram, listen to me! We have herring here!” “Mackerel!” he said. He was crazy for mackerel. I tried to get him to hear me, Golda, I really tried. “Spanish mackerel,” I told him. “We have Spanish mackerel down here! You’re only getting Atlantic mackerel up there! Come to Fort Lauderdale, my little Avram! We’ll feed you mackerel!” But no. He was so stubborn.
No, I’m not blaming you, Golda. God knows I would never blame my sister for how she raised her children. Especially since all our shark-children swim away from us the moment they’re born.
Oh please, Golda, don’t say such a thing. It’s not your fault. I’m sure he just got too close to the beach at high tide, and when the tide went out, the sandbar trapped him. Kids these days! What do they know? All we can do is give them birth, and watch their little thresher tails wag away into the briny depths, and say a little prayer for them, and hope not to see them in the local news. Such is the life of Alopias vulpinus. We suffer, we suffer, we suffer in silence.
I have to go, darling. The girls and I are playing “Go Fish” at two o’clock.
Doug Brendel lives a safe 9.7 miles from Crane Beach. Check out the landlubber’s latest terrestrial doings at DougBrendel.com.
Visit the new Best If Used By website to explore the upcoming stage comedy written by Doug Brendel: http://www.BestIfUsedBy.show
Life is a mystery. No, it isn’t. Most of life is obvious. But once in a while, you encounter a mystery. Sometimes, in your own mouth.
So I broke a tooth. How? I wasn’t chomping on something hard. I was only halfway through a martini, and olives don’t break teeth. But suddenly a chunk of my tooth was gone.
My beloved dentist, Dr. Jason Robillard of Hammatt Street, built me a new tooth, in about 20 minutes, without anesthetic. It’s a smart-tooth. I click it twice, it opens my garage door. Not really. But it’s a fine fake tooth.
If your dentist has ever given you a new tooth, you know what you do. You run your tongue over it, and it feels weird. Smooth, maybe, but different. I was grateful for my new fake tooth, but it was going to take some getting used to.
On my way home, I stopped at the terrific farmer’s market on South Main Street. It pops up on the green every Thursday afternoon, all summer long. As a bonus, it’s adjacent to a two-vehicle station for charging electric vehicles, like mine.
But there, parked in one of the two EV-only positions, was a white VW Golf, brazenly violating the law in the shadow of the Ipswich police station.
The signs clearly say “EV PARKING ONLY.” And the white VW Golf was clearly not an electric vehicle. Electrive.com reports that electric Golfs will not arrive till 2028 at the earliest.
So my first thought was: This gas-sucking, smoke-spewing VW Golf parked in the EV-charging spot at the farmers market is five years early!
In that moment, in my rage and frustration, I clenched my teeth — and experienced an epiphany.
This is how I broke my tooth.
When I’m angry, I clench my teeth — automatically, in one certain way — always crunching down primarily on the same tooth. I’ve been doing it my entire adult life, without ever realizing it. No wonder that tooth finally gave way!
So what have I learned? I need to manage my anger. Lighten up, Doug. And I need to learn a new habit in response to my anger. No more clenching my teeth.
But it would also really help if drivers of gasoline-powered vehicles would observe the signs, obey the law, and stay out of the precious few parking spots designated for charging electric cars.
I realize mistakes happen. The driver of the VW Golf may have misinterpreted the sign. Maybe they thought “EV” stood for “Every Volkswagen.” Maybe they mistook the charging cable and connector for a gas pump. Imagine their disappointment when no gasoline came out.
So as a public service, I humbly offer these insights: “EV” means “electric vehicles.” “Only” means “not you.” And that gas-pump-looking contraption is never going to give you satisfaction.
I confess, I took a photo of the license plate on that white VW polluter. (Drive a VW Golf just 3 miles and it spews a kilogram of CO2 into the atmosphere.) I confess, I called the Ipswich cops. I confess, I hoped for retribution. What’s the fine for parking a non-EV in an EV-only charging spot? I want jail time. Okay, just kidding. Just handcuffs, and fingerprinting. And then probation.
This is not just about our environment, people! This is not just about liberals parking at the farmers market.
This is about my teeth.
Don’t make me clench at you again, white VW Golf. Dentistry is expensive.
If I have to get another smart-tooth, who knows what damage I’ll do? Your “Super Duty® F-450® Platinum” with its 6.7-liter turbo diesel engine could be zapped by a superpowered incisor — and wouldn’t that be embarrassing!
Taken out by a tooth. What a loser.
Stay out of the EV spots, bro.
Doug Brendel manages his rage in a quiet, rubber-lined room on outer Linebrook Road. Check in on him from time to time at DougBrendel.com, and offer soothing words. Good luck.
If you’re reading this in the vicinity of Ipswich, Massachusetts, it means you survived last week’s historic heat and life-threatening humidity. Congratulations.
(If you’re among the bereaved, having lost loved ones to the climate-change conflagration, you have my sincerest sympathy.)
But the reality is, we’ve had it easier here in New England than much of the rest of the country — or the world.
But still, yes, here in lovely Ipswich, Massachusetts, it was hot last week.
I attest to this because I was out in the heat myself.
Organizers behind Olde Ipswich Days, the beloved annual arts-and-crafts fair on the South Green, graciously gave me their blessing to stand at the entry point to the parking area and hand out free copies of my ridiculous book, Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Silliness.
The book offers more than 20 of the (supposedly) funniest “Outsidah” columns, plus bad cartoons (my own wretched drawings), and a brief promo at the end for NewThing.net, a humanitarian charity my wife and I have led in the former USSR for 20+ years. (Institution for Savings at Depot Square in Ipswich also provided superb complimentary thermal bags for the first 100 recipients of the book.)
So on Friday, the first day of Olde Ipswich Days, from the opening bell at 10 a.m., I began meeting every vehicle.
“Hi! Everybody gets a free gift today!”
And I handed the driver a book.
People were delighted. Most looked at the cover immediately. Some recognized the “Outsidah.” A few offered compliments: “Oh! The Outsidah! We love your column in the paper!”
(Actually, most of them said “We love yah column in the paypah,” but I knew exactly what they meant.)
In many cases, people proceeded to park, then on the footpath from the parking lot to the fair, stopped to chat amiably with me. Quite a few, after shopping at the fair, chatted me up on their way back to their vehicle.
Some, however, had a different agenda.
It was Friday, it was hot, it was humid, and some folks needed to let off some steam. Literally.
“Gawd, it was hot!”
“Oh my gawd, that was hot!”
“That was awful! Gawd, the sun! The heeeeeat!”
One lovely individual marched up to me and demanded to know if I was “the one in charge of all this.”
No, I assured them.
But it was like I’d failed to answer. This person proceeded with what seemed to be a pre-mixed, ready-to-serve rant.
“You need to move those tents! Those vendors are out in the sun! People will collapse in the heat! People will die! There will be lawyers!”
Another lovely individual — well, they’d been lovely heading from their vehicle to the fair — returned to the parking lot haggard, wilted, staggering, pale, beslimed. I was inclined to feel badly for them till they opened their mouth and roared:
“They should shut down Olde Ipswich Days whenever it gets over 70 degrees!”
This was the point where I checked out, emotionally. I grew up in the Chicago area, I spent nearly a quarter-century in the Arizona desert, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, 70 degrees is survivable.
Many of us humans might even consider it delightful.
Climate change is real. Global warming is horrible. But much of it may be caused by hot air. Our own.
Olde Ipswich Days turned out great. I ran out of books. (Get one on Amazon or, if you live in Ipswich, contact me and I’ll bring you one.) Something in the neighborhood of a gazillion people attended and enjoyed and survived Olde Ipswich Days.
Fun can still be had, people.
Ipswich! We’re proof!
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in a largely solar-powered 206-year-old house. See? It can be done. Check out the Outsidah at DougBrendel.com.
Last week, we ate bugs.
At least that’s how Jody Belinda would put it.
Jody Belinda is one of our favorite houseguests, which is fortunate because she’s one of our most frequent houseguests. She’s a longtime friend from our 20+ years in Arizona. As a retired flight attendant, she flies free on her old airline, on any flight with a seat available. Living in the vast Sonoran Desert, with temps predicted to exceed 110º F for weeks, Jody Belinda found an empty seat on a Boston flight.
She bought a one-way ticket.
She is a foodie. She will tell you unapologetically that she is crazed for the taste of bugs. When she visits us, she takes over our kitchen. I drove her to Market Basket. She marched straight back to the seafood department, frowned into the lobster tank, and demanded of the man behind the counter: “Don’t you have any bigger bugs?”
The man obviously spoke Arizonan; he required no translator. He answered in perfect Massachusetts English — “No one’s gawt lahgah lawbstahs” — which Jody Belinda also understood. So we brought home six meager-sized crustaceans.
That evening, Jody Belinda prepared dinner. Eventually I heard her call from the kitchen: “Bugs!”
We ate sumptuously.
Jody Belinda is fanatic about bug-eating. She doesn’t just eat tail, claws, knuckles. She sucks the meat out of those skinny legs, and uses a crab-knife to excavate the bodies. She likes us Brendels, and she appreciates the delightful New England weather, but the real draw is bugs for $7.99 a pound at the grocery store. In Arizona, there are no lobster tanks in grocery stores. They have to airlift the bugs in; and unlike Jody Belinda, bugs don’t fly for free. In Arizona, a fanatical bug-eater pays a heavy price.
Of course lobsters aren’t bugs. Any scientist will tell you, arthropods are a big family (actually, in scientist-speak, a big phylum), with some members aquatic (lobsters) and others terrestrial (insects). Stuart Rawson of Quora.com says technically, bugs are insects that “pierce and suck.” No respectable lobster would do such things. Plus, lobsters have 10 legs, insects only 6. Call a lobster a bug to its face, and the lobster will be offended that you’ve compared it to one of its lame land-bound cousins.
As the already-killing temperatures kept intensifying in Arizona, Jody Belinda declined to find an empty seat on a flight back to hell. Days went by. One evening after dark, I heard her call again: “Bugs!”
I was puzzled. We’d already had dinner. I went to the kitchen. She was absent.
I found her sitting in the dark on the screen porch, peering into the backyard. The air was dancing with the blinking of fireflies — otherwise known as lightning bugs.
She wasn’t speaking Arizonan again. She was attempting to speak Massachusettsan. A map in Josh Katz’s book Speaking American demonstrates clearly that here in coastal Massachusetts, it’s fireflies, not lightning bugs. YouGov.com says lightning bugs is a term used by only a pitiful 31% of New Englanders; I figure these must be transplants from distant godforsaken lands.
Jody Belinda is fanatic about fireflies. She doesn’t get them in the parched Sonoran Desert. Fireflies spend their daylight hours in moist, tall grasses. There is no such thing as moist in Phoenix, Arizona. And any grasses that have aspired to grow tall are now commemorated by tiny, very narrow gravestones propped up in the sand.
A couple evenings later — 118º F in Arizona at the time — Jody Belinda was still quietly avoiding any online review of available seating on flights back to Phoenix. By this time nearly two weeks into her visit, we had settled into a happy sort of extended-family routine.
“Bugs!” I heard her yell.
I raced to the kitchen. No lobsters, no Jody Belinda.
I rushed to the screen porch. No fireflies, no Jody Belinda.
I found her in the TV room. On the big flat screen was a gray-and-white cartoon bunny.
Doug Brendel lives in a house on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, where his houseguest now appears to be stockpiling winterwear. Follow the beleaguered host at DougBrendel.com.
I complained for a solid year about my old iPhone 7. It’s old.
My wife is intelligent and hard-working and she delights me in many ways, but she came from a household where people used stuff till it died. When I first visited her family homestead, they had vehicles they’d been driving since Eisenhower. This is a serious character flaw, in my view.
My own childhood was somewhat opposite. I believe my father will agree: We considered automobiles to be basically disposable. When something new came on the market — remember that Chevy Vega, Dad? — we traded whatever we were driving and got the cool new thing. (Our Vega was banana yellow.)
This difference of worldview has become part and parcel of my marriage for 3.6+ decades. The toaster rattles? It still works, doesn’t it? Those jeans aren’t ragged enough to give up on, are they? They still cover all the essential body parts!
I have an iPhone 7, but Apple is selling the iPhone 14. This means I’m half a century behind, in Apple years.
The practical ramifications are as follows:
On any smartphone, iPhone included, the apps (which now guide my every waking moment) update from time to time, and they reload automatically on every smartphone that carries the app.
(For you Luddites reading this right now, I’ll translate:)
The iPhone isn’t just a phone. It’s a mini-computer that carries a zillion apps which enable you to do any online thing from your phone rather than waiting to go home and sit by the telephone, like in the olden days. (I remember those days fondly.)
But if you have an iPhone 7, when they’re already selling iPhone 14 — and they are already surely developing iPhone 15-21 — you are a million miles behind.
So — of the quadrillion apps loaded onto my iPhone, almost ZERO of them will auto-update.
This means my “ancient” iPhone 7 became more and more of a dinosaur, and I focused much if not all of my energy, this past year, into complaining about my primeval iPhone. I felt that complaining was my only hope of getting a new phone. And a slim hope, at that. When my current cracked-screen iPhone 7 would actually die, I might be able to hope for a new iPhone.
And then: THE MIRACLE.
For Father’s Day, my wife presented me with a new iPhone.
It’s not quite a 14. It’s only a 12. But it’s WAY BETTER than a 7.
I cannot begin to describe my delight.
And Apple has a great system, where you lay your old iPhone on a table next to your new iPhone, and you click something, and the new phone pulls all your stuff from the old phone, and two hours later, you’re on your way.
Watching this process, two little screens on my kitchen counter, I was thrilled to live in the 21st century, instead of, say, that century where Sir Thomas More got beheaded. I’m just afraid I might have been him.
So the auto-transfer happened, and boxed up my old iPhone for return shipment (box and label provided by Apple with the purchase!), and set out on my new life of joy, freedom, auto-updated apps, everything everyone else has been enjoying without me all these years because I only had an iPhone 7.
The new phone was awesome. It worked perfectly in every way — except one: It wouldn’t make or take phone calls.
I spent one long evening talking with AT&T (not by phone, because my new phone didn’t work that way), by online chat, on my laptop, wrangling the tech details with a tech-support person who might have been in Sweden, or India, or Australia, I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite figure it out.
I love these people, who are giving their lives to the cause of helping us sort out our smartphone crises.
But now, as Kristina reads this, before I post it, says:
“Let’s go back to that part where you said ‘apps which now guide my every waking moment.’ That was a mistake.”
She’s right, of course.
Doug Brendel, clueless husband, can be followed at DougBrendel.com, but why bother?
We Massachusetts residents are fortunate because we enjoy the care of The Trustees (TheTrustees.org), who care for more than 100 special places all over the state, a total of some 47,000 acres. The Trustees have been at it for more than a century, protecting “reservations” (some with buildings, some without) and sharing this wondrous array of sites with Bay Staters and the world. It’s a membership organization, and members get special benefits. I’m a member, and I strongly and repeatedly recommend joining in order to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities The Trustees offer.
Even though recently, they sort of ruined my life.
They did me dirty by hiring my wife Kristina full-time to coordinate Castle Hill’s cultural programs at the Crane Estate — theatre, tours, and special events. She loves the work, and I love seeing her so happy, but I don’t feel good asking her to prepare dinner after a long workday.
On the other hand, if my wife doesn’t cook, who will feed me?
I’ve lived my entire adult life as a stereotypical helpless straight male husband, with not a single clue about what happens in the kitchen. I have only rarely set foot in there, for the safety of all concerned. (I’m also barred from using Kristina’s power tools.)
In order to ease me into this scary new realm, Kristina began ordering “meal kits” complete with ingredients and photo-assisted step-by-step recipes. This approach should be simple enough even for me, right?
Uh, not exactly.
People who write recipes assume the reader — the cook — has at least some modicum of experience, some smidgen of a frame of reference, some basic minimum understanding of the terms they’re using.
Also, when they say “sugar,” where do we keep the sugar?
For the overwhelmingly under-informed, a recipe is an intimidating thing. The headline alone can be scary: “Vegan Turkish-spiced chickpea bowls with pistachio basmati rice and lemon-herb hummus sauce.” The subhead offers no comfort: “A warm and savory blend of cumin, garlic, coriander, and chili.” I wouldn’t know a cumin if it cumed me in the behind. Wait — it says chili. I’ve had chili, I remember it distinctly. We’re making chili?
Equipment is a challenge. I’ll need a “small pot” and a “large pan.” How small? How large? I’ll need a zester. What’s a zester? Fortunately, there’s Google, and Google has pictures. I was surprised to recognize a zester as that thingy in that drawer full of thingies; it looks like a little metal claw. How do you use this thingy? When the recipe says “zest the lemon,” I put 2 and 2 together and figure that the zester is the thing to zest with. As for how to use this little claw, thank heaven there’s YouTube.
“Mince the garlic.” I’ve minced words, but never garlic. And which of these ingredients is the garlic? Back to Google. Back to YouTube. “Roughly chop the pistachios.” This sounds violent. I’m frightened.
“Add a pinch of salt.” “Add a drizzle of oil.” Pinches and drizzles! These don’t seem to be technical units of measure. “If there’s excess grease in your pan, carefully pour it out.” I’m often accused of being excessive. How much grease does it take to be “excess” grease?
With enormous anxiety, I completed my first cooking assignment. When Kristina came home, I had dinner on the table. She had assured me, before leaving for work, that cooking is all about experimentation, flexibility, and adventure. So I felt okay about what I ended up serving: vegan Turkish-spiced chickpea sludge with pistachio basmati ash and lemon-herb hummus muck. Delicious! And such a satisfying victory over ignorance. Thank you, Trustees!
Tomorrow I’m going for Thai rice-noodle stir-burn with bell pepper mash and red cabbage residue. Can’t wait!
Doug Brendel lives mostly in the kitchen now, fire extinguisher at the ready, in his house on outer Linebrook Road. Pursue him at your own risk at DougBrendel.com.
In the far-distant future, archeologists arrive. They’re uncovering stuff from decades or even centuries earlier.
(Transcript excerpts:)
What’s this!
Looks like it might be a church.
What kind of church?
A-frame.
No, dope, I mean which faith?
Look! There’s a sign out front.
Ah, scrape at it, see what it says.
“Hope.” Old English font. I’m guessing Catholic or Episcopal.
Keep scraping.
The top of the sign says “Our Lady.”
Catholic.
I’d say late-20th Century architecture.
Beautiful design.
This road that goes by … looks like it was a pretty major thoroughfare. So many squirrel corpses!
Hey, look over here. Far corner of the parking lot.
The rusted-out body of an old police car, nestled against an area of heavy vegetation.
Speed trap.
Yup.
Scrape at the rust a little on the side of the cruiser, see if we can read the name of a town or anything.
I’ve got something! It says “LICE.”
That’s “POLICE,” dope. Scrape above that, or below.
Here it is! We’re in a place called “SWIC.”
That’s odd. We’ve never found any ancient records of a place around here called “SWIC.”
Oh, wait. I didn’t scrape enough. It says “IPSWICH.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. My data screen says this town was known for having so many historic buildings.
That would explain this! Come over here, across the road. Seems like this must have been a road sign.
Maybe for a business of some kind. Scrape it. See what it says.
“Scrape it.” “Scrape it.” Why do I always have to scrape?
Just scrape it, dope. Stop complaining.
It says “1640 Hart House.”
Wow. It’s nice when they put the year right there on it for you.
Look at it. Perfect early-colonial architecture.
What’s down the road here? Looks like maybe a house.
This one has a sign too! I know, I know. “Scrape it.”
You’re catching on, dope.
Wow! It says “Old Cross Farm. 1716-1725.”
I believe it. Look at this house. Classic design for that era.
This must have been a great-looking neighborhood.
Wait — there’s a side-street.
The church must have sat on a corner.
What’s on the other corner, across the street?
I’ll start scraping.
It’s too big. Scraping won’t be enough.
We’re gonna need the shovel.
And the pick-axe.
[grunting, groaning]
Holy cow. I’m exhausted.
Me too.
What is it?
I don’t know. It’s massive.
Just look at this! These huge rectangular sides!
Over on this end, it’s like three stories tall! I’m tellin’ ya, this thing was 25,000 square feet, maybe more.
Who do you think lived here?
Lived here? This is no house, dope.
A hotel then? A resort? Factory? Indoor theme park?
You’re a dope and an idiot.
Oh, gosh. Please don’t tell me it’s a Wal-Mart.
No, dope. Step back. Take a good look at this gargantuan monstrosity. This clearly wasn’t built here. It’s like nothing else in the neighborhood! This is obviously an alien spacecraft.
No.
Yes. It came from outer space. How else do you explain its strange, inscrutably ugly design?
Well, it is strange, and it’s certainly ugly. I’m not sure what “inscrutably” means. But golly, an alien spacecraft! That explains its huge observation deck.
Yes, once they landed, these creatures could see everything in the neighborhood. This mysterious extra-terrestrial vessel set down here in the wetlands, obliterated much of the surrounding vegetation, many of the physical structures, most or all of the animal life, and who knows what happened to the humans.
Wait. My incessant scraping has revealed something new. There’s lettering on the side. It says “LIC SAFE.”
Keep scraping, dope.
Okay. Yes, here we go: “PUBLIC SAFETY.”
Obviously this was a Trojan horse.
Huh?
A trick. The aliens emblazoned their spaceship with this message to reassure whatever unsuspecting beings they found here: “Public safety” — as in, “We’re here to protect you.”
From the Catholics?
No, dope. From all the soul-killing historical architecture.
The Ipswich Planning Board will hold a 7 p.m. public hearing on Thursday, July 20, in Room A of Ipswich Town Hall, regarding a special permit and other issues related to the public safety building proposed for 36 Linebrook Road.
My new play, Best If Used By, is a funny and poignant look at aging and ageism. The show will run Oct. 12-15; tickets on sale later this month. Details to come. Save the date!
In the far-distant future, archeologists arrive. They’re uncovering stuff from decades or even centuries earlier.
(Transcript excerpts:)
What’s this!
Looks like it might be a church.
What kind of church?
A-frame.
No, dope, I mean which faith?
Look! There’s a sign out front.
Ah, scrape at it, see what it says.
“Hope.” Old English font. I’m guessing Catholic or Episcopal.
Keep scraping.
The top of the sign says “Our Lady.”
Catholic.
I’d say late-20th Century architecture.
Beautiful design.
This road that goes by … looks like it was a pretty major thoroughfare. So many squirrel corpses!
Hey, look over here. Far corner of the parking lot.
The rusted-out body of an old police car, nestled against an area of heavy vegetation.
Speed trap.
Yup.
Scrape at the rust a little on the side of the cruiser, see if we can read the name of a town or anything.
I’ve got something! It says “LICE.”
That’s “POLICE,” dope. Scrape above that, or below.
Here it is! We’re in a place called “SWIC.”
That’s odd. We’ve never found any ancient records of a place around here called “SWIC.”
Oh, wait. I didn’t scrape enough. It says “IPSWICH.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. My data screen says this town was known for having so many historic buildings.
That would explain this! Come over here, across the road. Seems like this must have been a road sign.
Maybe for a business of some kind. Scrape it. See what it says.
“Scrape it.” “Scrape it.” Why do I always have to scrape?
Just scrape it, dope. Stop complaining.
It says “1640 Hart House.”
Wow. It’s nice when they put the year right there on it for you.
Look at it. Perfect early-colonial architecture.
What’s down the road here? Looks like maybe a house.
This one has a sign too! I know, I know. “Scrape it.”
You’re catching on, dope.
Wow! It says “Old Cross Farm. 1716-1725.”
I believe it. Look at this house. Classic design for that era.
This must have been a great-looking neighborhood.
Wait — there’s a side-street.
The church must have sat on a corner.
What’s on the other corner, across the street?
I’ll start scraping.
It’s too big. Scraping won’t be enough.
We’re gonna need the shovel.
And the pick-axe.
[grunting, groaning]
Holy cow. I’m exhausted.
Me too.
What is it?
I don’t know. It’s massive.
Just look at this! These huge rectangular sides!
Over on this end, it’s like three stories tall! I’m tellin’ ya, this thing was 25,000 square feet, maybe more.
Who do you think lived here?
Lived here? This is no house, dope.
A hotel then? A resort? Factory? Indoor theme park?
You’re a dope and an idiot.
Oh, gosh. Please don’t tell me it’s a Wal-Mart.
No, dope. Step back. Take a good look at this gargantuan monstrosity. This clearly wasn’t built here. It’s like nothing else in the neighborhood! This is obviously an alien spacecraft.
No.
Yes. It came from outer space. How else do you explain its strange, inscrutably ugly design?
Well, it is strange, and it’s certainly ugly. I’m not sure what “inscrutably” means. But golly, an alien spacecraft! That explains its huge observation deck.
Yes, once they landed, these creatures could see everything in the neighborhood. This mysterious extra-terrestrial vessel set down here in the wetlands, obliterated much of the surrounding vegetation, many of the physical structures, most or all of the animal life, and who knows what happened to the humans.
Wait. My incessant scraping has revealed something new. There’s lettering on the side. It says “LIC SAFE.”
Keep scraping, dope.
Okay. Yes, here we go: “PUBLIC SAFETY.”
Obviously this was a Trojan horse.
Huh?
A trick. The aliens emblazoned their spaceship with this message to reassure whatever unsuspecting beings they found here: “Public safety” — as in, “We’re here to protect you.”
From the Catholics?
No, dope. From all the soul-killing historical architecture.
The Ipswich Planning Board will hold a 7 p.m. public hearing on Thursday, July 20, in Room A of Ipswich Town Hall, regarding a special permit and other issues related to the public safety building proposed for 36 Linebrook Road.
I was a thief. No, not technically.
I’ve always made my living writing fundraising letters for non-profit organizations. Most of them send mailings to donors already committed to their cause. They often rerun annual campaigns — you’ve received these appeals, right? Envelopes emblazoned with terms like “Annual Fund” or “Holiday Appeal.”
If an appeal generated a good response, the boss would return to me the following year to generate the same appeal again, but rewritten “L4L.”
Translation: “line-for-line.” Same appeal, but change everything just enough that it won’t feel like regurgitating old stuff.
I became an L4L expert.
However, please note: I was rewriting my own words.
If I go to the Boston Globe and pick up a story from last April, rewrite it L4L and sell it to you as my own work, that’s plagiarism.
No, I didn’t copy and paste whole chunks of text. I’ve rewritten everything, line-for-line. But it’s still plagiarism.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of plagiarize is “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own: use (another’s production) without crediting the source.” Or “to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.”
Also, Merriam-Webster offers the noun form: plagiarizer.
My friends, we have a plagiarizer in our midst.
Yes, right here on the North Shore.
The Rowley-based Town Common, which advertises itself as the “largest independent weekly community news for the North Shore of Massachusetts and Coastal New Hampshire,” has taken to plagiarizing the Ipswich Local News.
No, they haven’t copied and pasted whole “Outsidah” columns. But the Town Common does indeed appear to have done the next-worst thing: You take big news items from the Ipswich Local News, rewrite them L4L, then publish them as if they’re original material. Stories based on court hearings. Stories about the Ora project on Waldingfield Road. Stories with details you really must pay a reporter to obtain. Which the Ipswich Local News does, thanks to generous reader-donors and advertisers.
Of course you want hard evidence. I offer this example:
On April 16th, the Ipswich Local News ran a big story with this headline: “Former Dog Kennel Owner Sentenced to Three Years’ Probation,” written by standout reporter Trevor Meek.
Paragraph #7 from that article: “‘Some of those dogs had food, but none of those dogs had water,’ Underwood said. She noted that at the time of the officers’ discovery, Massachusetts was in the middle of a heat wave.”
Here’s paragraph #10 from a story on the same subject, published 10 days later, splashed all over page 1 as the lead story in the Town Common:
“Underwood said, ‘Some of those dogs had food, but none had water.’ She noted that at the time of the officers’ discovery, Massachusetts was in the middle of a heat wave.”
Classic L4L rewriting.
I could also show you paragraph #5, or paragraph #20, but it’s just the same thing over and over: Take a paragraph from the Ipswich paper, rewrite it line-for-line, and publish it as your own.
Of course you might wonder if the Town Common reporter and the Ipswich Local News reporter were both sitting there in the courtroom, at the same hearing, and hey, maybe they just happened to use the same wording to report the story.
Uh, no.
There was only one reporter at the hearing: Trevor Meek, Ipswich Local News. (Thank you, donors and advertisers, who underwrite honorable journalism.)
Plagiarism isn’t punishable under criminal or even civil law. You can get kicked out of school, or lose your job, but you can’t go to jail. In the newspaper world, it’s just tacky. Annoying. In my youth, if your newspaper engaged in these low-life tactics, we would have called you a “rag.”
Shame on the Town Common for such brazen plagiarizing. Maybe it’s time for that rag to just own it, with a new weekly feature: “This week’s BEST OF the Ipswich Local News!”
Doug Brendel, disgusted by the unethical Town Common, refuses to discuss this further. Follow the sourpuss Doug at Outsidah.com.
I took a week off, I was in a far-off state of the Union, doing self-indulgent things, imagining I would recharge my batteries and then return ready for the richly rewarding routines of life in small-town New England.
Now, however, it seems a return to the familiar was mostly a fantasy. Since I left, one short week ago, everything has changed. The world has gone all wonky. In my absence, a former president was arraigned in federal court. Harvard Medical School was rocked by a body-parts-merchandising scandal. And most disturbing of all, to me personally: A massive paving operation is under way on outer Linebrook Road.
Of course I’m grateful, at least in theory, for the vast, smooth expanse of fresh asphalt that the team has laid down between Leslie and Randall Roads. I’ve admired our pothole gods since I first arrived in Ipswich. They have a dreadful job to do, it seems to me, but they do it faithfully, and quickly, and cheerfully. This project, according to the IpswichMA.gov website, is being ably accomplished by the Woburn-based Nocella Paving company. I salute.
On the other hand, losing the potholes really throws me off.
The potholes on outer Linebrook Road are legendary. Cartographers have added them to local maps. Some have names. Some have historical markers. The Trustees have considered conducting guided tours, with “cultural site interpreters” wearing mock DPW uniforms. Our constellation of outer Linebrook potholes have significant social value. Or had.
Yet for all of this, there’s something even greater at stake here. As a person with no sense of direction, I use those potholes to find my way home.
As I dodge one, or straddle the next, or slow my vehicle to ease down into and back up out of a particularly nasty one, I form a kind of muscle memory of the journey. Driving from Route 1 to my house is like a slow-motion theme-park ride. You take the ride again and again, and you come to anticipate the twists and turns, the bumps and thumps. You come to know the potholes like old friends, each one unique in its shape, its width, its depth. You swerve a bit to the left at the horse farm for that shallow baseball-glove-shaped indentation. You aim straight over the top of a cavernous hollow at the Town Moderator’s house. You slow down for what I call “O’Keefe’s Gulch,” because it’s so enormous you’d have to veer into the front yard of the neighbor across the street to miss it entirely. The “DANGEROUS INTERSECTION” sign standing adjacent to this colossal depression is not about automobiles colliding; it’s about automobiles disappearing, sailing over the edge into the yawning abyss, never to be seen again.
And then — if I make it past the horse farm and the Moderator’s place and the deadly gulch — I’m home! I may not know north from south, I may not be able to find Riverview Pizza without help, but I know my potholes. I can get myself home, gosh darnit.
Or at least I could. Before this.
Now, I careen unimpeded around that bend at Leslie Road, and sail along on the smooth, gleaming blacktop like a 747 taking off, and I’ve lost my bearings and I’m hurtling cluelessly past my house, on toward Hood Pond and who knows how far, to places further than I’ve ever ventured, and who knows what danger I’m in? Maybe it’s true — there be dragons!
Doug Brendel officially lives in a house on outer Linebrook Road but don’t look for him there, he may have missed it. Go to DougBrendel.com and click “Contact me” and see what happens.
I married my handyperson.
This marriage, initiated 35+ years ago, has been essential to my survival, because I have no experience, and certainly no expertise, in matters mechanical. I understand that there are nuts, for example, and that there are bolts; but as to which is which, I am largely clueless. I understand that bolts need to be bolted, but don’t nuts need to be nutted? Also: nails vs. screws: Nailed? Screwed? I find myself asking: Why quibble?
So here at our homestead, my wife happily accomplishes any task that requires analytical skills, or tools. Especially power tools. It would be dangerous to let me touch the power tools.
Accordingly, I have been relegated to the safe, mindless jobs. I’m so happy to do my part! I scoop the cat box. I clear the dishes after dinner (we call this “kitchen duty”). Over the years, I have only broken a few dishes during kitchen duty. And I empty the dishwasher (we call this “dishwasher duty”). I have only broken a few more dishes during dishwasher duty.
I also put out the flag on the front of our house every morning, to demonstrate our patriotic fervor; and I bring in the flag every evening, at sundown, to show proper respect. And I take out the compost on Tuesday evenings for early-Wednesday-morning curbside pickup, and take out the recycling and the trash on Wednesday evenings.
I also … wait, I’m thinking … I’m sure there’s something more….
Oh, wait! I do my own laundry! Yeah! And … uh, I’m sure there’s something more.
Let me think.
(Thinking, thinking….)
No, I’m sorry. That’s it. My wife mows the lawn. She trims the cats’ claws. She keeps the house clean. And she works a full-time job. Which she often has to go in to the office for.
So to be clear: I’m a lazy stay-at-home senior-citizen empty-nester spouse.
It’s not easy! It might be easy if the routines stayed simple. But the routines are not reliable. Like when there’s a holiday. Last week, when Memorial Day fell on its federally mandated Monday, the Ipswich trash-and-recycling pickup schedule was delayed by a day. Delayed! By a day! A whole day!
This is a life-shattering wrench in the machinery for someone who’s trying to manage basic household chores with limited bandwidth. Someone like me.
It’s not just a little “calendar glitch.” Think what this actually means. Instead of putting out the recycling and the trash on Wednesday evening as usual, I need to put out the recycling and the trash on Thursday evening. If I don’t tune in to the holiday-week schedule change, my stuff doesn’t go away the following morning, and I’m stuck with it for another long, cluttered, smelly week.
On the other hand, if I’m fortunate enough to remember the holiday-week schedule change, I can look out my front windows and see which of my neighbors have forgotten about the holiday — because they’ve pulled their trash and their recycling to the curb a whole day ahead of schedule. I’m suddenly superior.
I would delight in their failure, except that I’ve been the idiot so often.
Well, I bring you good news. Last week, we observed Memorial Day. And I remembered — in advance — the goofed-up trash-and-recycling schedule. I got our stuff out to the curb the night before.
Yes, I did forget to bring in the flag. Disrespectful, I know. Sorry.
And I forgot to scoop the litter box. Sorry, cats. Sorry, wife.
But otherwise, I was golden.
Doug Brendel is such a loser. Don’t even bother to follow him. But if you want to nose around in his miserable domain, you might visit DougBrendel.com.
I said a bad word today.
You’re reading this later, but as I’m writing this, it’s today. It’s that Sunday you loved, this past holiday weekend (after a frustratingly chilly May), when suddenly it was 88 degrees. I mean Fahrenheit.
(If it was 88 Celsius, it would be 190 Fahrenheit, and that’s not likely to happen till 10 or 12 years from now. Unless the Republicans completely take power in Washington; then, all bets are off. Buy bikinis now.)
What I’m saying is, I uttered a bad word today, out of my mouth — an expletive — on Sunday, the Sunday before Memorial Day.
It was 88 degrees in coastal Massachusetts, and 88 is just wrong, if you ask me, because I came here for the mild weather.
I’m glad my mom wasn’t here to hear the bad word I said.
Nobody lives in the Arizona desert heat for 24 years (as I did) and then longs for more hot weather. I don’t do the “outdoors.” So I was uneasily hanging out on my screen porch this past Sunday, trying to tolerate the heat — you were probably at the beach, or cooking out, totally loving it. Hurrah! I’m glad for you. “Hot weather!” Yay. But I was on my screen porch, thinking I was safe from the bugs.
But when I came here to New England, I didn’t account for the midges.
So I got a bug bite today. Which is why I said a bad word.
Midges aren’t the only bugs in coastal Massachusetts, of course, but they are the ones I have to pay the greatest attention to, because as it turns out, the midge is the one bug whose bite I’m allergic to.
Midges get through the tightest of screens. Yeah. My screens. The tightest screens manufactured in the entire world, which I paid extra for. Marvel-Studio-movie screens. Screens you can hardly breathe through.
Screens keep out bugs? Forget that. Midges rule.
Some time ago, when I first went to my local doctor with a painful, itchy inflammation of my epidermis, she recoiled in horror. (You never want to see your doctor recoil in horror.)
“We need to do something about this!” she said.
Of course, she was speaking from the standpoint of empathy. For which I am grateful.
“We can address this condition,” she said, “but I can’t do anything about prevention.”
Prevention! Like I’m living in the jungles! What do I need? A screen over my bed? Over my head?
This morning, with my arm swelling up, minute by minute, my forearm looking more and more like Popeye, I started chugging an anti-allergy medicine. And slathering myself in anti-itch cream.
And I’m thinking back, across my life….
I didn’t say bad words in the Arizona desert. It was God-awful hot, but I didn’t cuss. I didn’t say bad words in Chicago, even when the winter winds whipped through my five layers of clothing as I waited for the bus on Lake Shore Drive. I worked for a time in Ohio, and I went to college in Missouri, but did I cuss there? No. The weather, and the bugs, were survivable.
But now, with my arm red and swollen to embarrassing proportions — like an over-ripe mango, but with less market value — I am cussing.
As far as I can tell, all the deadliest bugs have congregated here, in preparation for New England’s summer season.
And they have dedicated themselves to biting me.
In my antique New England homestead, it’s not feasible to move from room to room with a midge-bite allergy. Your arm is bigger than your head, and you can’t get through the narrow colonial-era doors between the living room into the kitchen.
We’ve reached out to antique-house renovation experts to inquire about emergency measures, to enlarge the doorway.
I may spend the summer in the outhouse.
Saying bad words.
Don’t tell Mom.
Doug Brendel is cussing in one of the outbuildings at Dragonhead, his “estate” (as he calls it) on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Check him out from a safe distance at DougBrendel.com.
The lack of affordable housing is a problem in Ipswich, there’s no denying it.
And now the problem has hit home for me in a very personal way.
A breezeway connects the back door of our 205-year-old house to our even-more-rickety 50-year-old garage, and every spring, a pair of sparrows nest in the breezeway rafters just outside our back door.
The birds spend days assembling their domicile from twigs and leaves and the stuffing from easy chairs abandoned by neighbors at the side of Linebrook Road.
Then the mama lays her eggs, and the sparrow-couple swap turns sitting on them.
Eventually the eggs hatch, and the babies scream for food more or less continuously for a week or two, while the parents fly out and back in an endless search for sustenance for themselves and their brood.
Finally the youngsters flop out onto the back stairs, one by one, and quickly learn to fly.
Charming.
But the affordable housing crisis is real. Here’s how I know. This spring, we had two sparrow families on our breezeway.
One family set up as usual in the rafters just outside the back door. But soon, another sparrow-couple set up housekeeping in the rafters midway between house and garage.
It seems NIMBY is not just a human thing. The original squatters appeared to take enormous offense at the arrival of the second set of squatters. There was lots of screeching, squawking, and what looked like dive-bombing as the couples competed for the best bits of trash for nest-building. One day on my driveway the moms-to-be screamed and snapped at each other for half an hour over a torn corner scrap of “Tales from the Scanner.”
The harsh reality is that, when these innumerable babies were born, our quality of life was significantly diminished. The newborns’ screeching for food, coming from two nests instead of just one, was twice as loud — which is to say, half as ignorable — as ever before. Out on my screen porch, to get any work done, I had to turn off my hearing aids, don noise-cancelling headphones, and hum “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” by Stevie Wonder.
Yet the First World problems just kept coming.
For example: Sparrows have no concept of hygiene. The notion that they fly till they find a clean windshield and then unload? That’s a myth. I am a witness: Sparrows blithely relieve themselves wherever they happen to be at the moment. And where these four parent-sparrows happened to be most of the time, with two nests full of hatchlings to tend to, was my breezeway. My back stairs became a public health emergency. Lahey launched a mobile hygiene workshop just for birds. I was contacted by a Peruvian guano broker looking to expand the market for fertilizer.
Sadly, furthermore, affordable housing is not a self-contained crisis. It’s dominoes; one issue leads to another. Once you add housing units to your property, you’re subject to all kinds of Ipswich permitting requirements, not to mention state and federal regulations. If we get a third sparrow family next spring, I’ll have to ask Town Meeting for a change in the bylaws. Meanwhile, the building inspector will be in my face, demanding tiny guardrails up in the rafters — with PETA requiring tiny gates to let the young sparrows out when they’re ready to take flight.
If only Ipswich would construct more affordable housing. Then the sparrows might be able to comfortably settle closer to the train station, perhaps despoil the roof of the metal canopy over the commuter benches.
Next spring, I’m hoping the birds can find happiness in the Bruni project.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. If you check him out at DougBrendel.com rather than dropping by in person, you avoid the biohazards.
Ipswich residents were shocked last week to learn of the sudden closure of the Hall-Haskell House, home to the Ipswich Visitor Center and a popular gallery featuring a rotation of North Shore artists.
The extraordinary glass artwork of Ipswich resident Mary Woodall-Jappe was being featured in what was scheduled as a week-long exhibition.
The building is more than two centuries old, and responsible authorities said they were closing it because of a structural issue.
Which sounds plausible on the surface, of course. But in this paranoid age, when conspiracy theories are exchanged like children’s trading cards of yore, we should probably take the initiative and debunk the most likely misconceptions before they take root and catch fire and scorch the innocent.
1. Someone at Town Hall did not secretly order the Hall-Haskell House closure because they hate Mary Woodall-Jappe’s art. This is inconceivable, because her art is fabulous. I have some of her pieces on display in my own home. (Good news: Mary’s show was rescued by the Meetinghouse Gallery at the top of Meetinghouse Green. Bad news: The show closed Sunday at 4 p.m. But you can still experience the wonder of Mary’s artwork online at NextWaveGlass.com.)
2. Ipswich old-timers did not slip in under cover of night and use handsaws to cut through support beams in order to weaken the Visitor Center structure and turn tourists away because “this town is getting too crowded.”
3. Joe Biden did not order the building closed until solar panels are installed on the roof.
(3a. The Hall-Haskell House was not shuttered as a budgetary measure, to pay for a state-mandated fleet of electric cars for town officials.)
4. This was not an act of God, punishment for Ipswich’s sins. Ipswich may have plenty of sins, but God was reportedly juggling Trump cases last week and didn’t have time to focus on Ipswich. (A leaked inter-office memo from heaven reads: “Thy Lord God hath bigger fish to fry.”)
5. The Hall-Haskell House closure had nothing whatsoever to do with last week’s Town Meeting vote in favor of removing the Ipswich River dam. The building did not begin groaning in sympathy with the dam when news of the vote arrived. It should be understood that the Hall-Haskell House and the Ipswich River dam are not even of the same generation. The Hall-Haskell House regards the dam, a mere 115 years old, as a young whippersnapper.
(5a. The Hall-Haskell House and the Ipswich River dam have not engaged in a mystical mutual suicide pact, betting on which one goes down first.)
6. The town did not falsely claim structural problems as an excuse to close the building so future town managers hired from out-of-town could live in the basement.
7. The structural damage was not caused by Covid.
8. There is no secret plan to demolish the Hall-Haskell House and put in condos. Nor a parking lot. The pro-condo people may have secretly lobbied for demolition, but the pro-parking lot people blocked them, and as a result of the standoff, the plan went nowhere.
9. The Hall-Haskell House did not simply give up the ghost in despair when it heard Harvard architectural students refer to the Hammatt Street lot as “the jewel of Ipswich.”
10. This has nothing to do with a feud between the ghost of Charles Hall and the ghost of Eunice Haskell. The ghost of Charles Hall has lived quietly in the house since he passed on in 1825, and he is on very good terms with the ghost of Eunice Haskell, who bought the house from him fair-and-square but was happy to let him stay on in the basement. Meanwhile, she is perfectly content to live upstairs, often coming downstairs on invisible visits to art shows, and sometimes vibrationally influencing shoppers to buy certain works of art. The Hall-Haskell House must be preserved, if for no other reason than to keep these two fine spirits properly cared for.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in a house even older than Hall-Haskell, with its own ghost issues. Make a visitation to Doug at DougBrendel.com.
Spring has sprung. Life is good.
My father will affirm this view. He was a springtime baby, born during the Hoover administration. Dad will turn 91 next week, and he’s in very good health, which is cause for gratitude, even rejoicing — not just because it means he’s still around for us to enjoy, but also because it means my DNA probably carries the longevity gene.
It’s been a long, lovely, leisurely Ipswich spring so far, with some much-needed rain, yet not too many raw, blustery days. Along with the inevitable clouds, we’ve had quite a lot of delightful sunshine.
(Of course, complaining is our official town pastime, so on the first hot day, someone will complain that spring was too short. But let’s agree, right now, to encircle the complainer and thrash them with our campfire hot-dog-grilling sticks.)
It’s spring, and Mother Nature announces this by causing the trees and bushes to fluff out, turning Ipswich beautiful shades of green, and making it easier for the cops to hide from speeders. In wintertime, that line of vegetation at the edge of the Catholic Church property doesn’t work as a speed trap. But this is the season of hope — and thanks to Our Lady of Hope’s springtime foliage, Ipswich police officers can once again ensnare speeders as they roar toward downtown on Linebrook Road. This has the potential of reforming lead-footed miscreants, making our streets safer for young and old, reducing the noise of roaring vehicle engines, and leading to the overall improvement of our quality of life. Life is good, and might be getting even better.
Another wondrous sign of spring: The Marini farmstand opened last week. I live on the Marini end of town, so I depend on this source of fresh food — except during our long, sad winters, when I’m forced to forage in my freezer, or eat from cans like a house pet. On Marini’s opening day, I was able to wait almost three full hours before I dashed into the farmstand, giggling and dancing with joy. (A kindly young woman in a Marini polo shirt quietly escorted me back out onto the parking lot until I could control myself.)
And this spring may turn out to be better than any previous spring — because the Marini farmstand has expanded! The expansion is very nice, completely in keeping with the other structures and the feel of the area. Rumor has it that Mr. Bruni proposed adding 90 or so apartments, but I understand the Marini family wisely declined that gracious offer.
Spring has sprung, life is good, and it’s time to count our blessings. Grieving over last year’s departure of the beloved Ithaki restaurant can now end, as the Brown Square Bistro has opened in that space, with a lively, ever-morphing menu. Last night I had a dessert designed to look like a Truffula tree from Dr. Seuss’s book The Lorax. Instead of a puff of cartoony leaves, my miniature tree featured cotton candy. Life is sweet.
Oh, we could focus on the negative, the sad, the infuriating, the ugly. We are, in this election season, overwhelmed by lawn signs. But let us look on the positive side. We have such a rainbow of lawn-sign colors, I hear the town is up for a public-art grant.
Spring is lovely. Life is good. Sure, we’re bracing ourselves for a contentious Town Meeting, followed by a Select Board election with six candidates and only four open positions, which means perhaps a third of all voters may be disappointed in the outcome. But let’s do what Eric Idle recommended: “Always look on the bright side of life.” Okay, he sang this song during his own crucifixion — but it became a megahit! Good things come out of bad situations. Let’s look at our Select Board election this way: With each of us casting four votes on Election Day, we can all wake up the next morning and say, “At least two of my candidates won!”
Doug Brendel lives a cheery life of unfettered joy on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Find out more at DougBrendel.com.
Election Day is coming, here in Ipswich, Massachusetts, the day we make our voices heard and our opinions known, even more than every other day of the year, hunkered over a Reuben sandwich at Sofia’s with our equally grumpy friends.
This year, we’ll be asked to choose Select Board members. This is part of a solemn tradition stretching back 389 years. When it began, the Select were men, serving on a Board of Selectmen. Eventually, Selectmen could also be women, but they were still called Selectmen. Finally, in recent years, instead of Selectmen, we have Selectpersons, serving on a Select Board.
In any case, we have to select them.
It will happen at the Ipswich Y, converted into a cavernous polling place, with tables and voting booths and ballot-reading machines standing in four long lines, one for each of our esteemed precinct.
And whether you realize it or not, it will be costly — and potentially dangerous.
Yes, dangerous. Because of the ink.
Ipswich doesn’t use those quirky voting machines you’ve heard about. No tabs to flip or levers to pull. No troublesome punchcards, with those “hanging chads” that got George W. Bush elected. No. Ipswich is a historic town. We do things the good old-fashioned way. With ballots printed on stiff, sturdy paper, an open oval next to each candidate’s name.
And with Sharpies.
Well, maybe they’re not actual Sharpie-brand Sharpies. But they’re pens, loaded with permanent black ink — I assume it’s permanent, because how could you trust a ballot marked with erasable ink? The Town of Ipswich graciously stocks each voting booth with a black Sharpie-type pen, so you can fill in each of your preferred ovals with a small dab of permanent black ink.
It is assumed you’ll use the pen properly, and dispense the ink appropriately. No licking the inky tip of the pen. And no smelling the ink fumes. These activities would be hazardous to your health. Permanent marker ink is made from chemicals you probably don’t want to ingest, by nose nor mouth, according to the Northern New England Poison Center:
Put them all together and you get permanent marker ink!
(P.S. The Northern New England Poison Center adds this hopeful note: “Permanent markers are safe when used as intended.”)
The most painful Election Day hazard, however, is probably cost. Ink is expensive. A single Sharpie typically costs at least $1.20. Even buying in bulk, at a lower unit cost, you’re still talking about serious money. I found permanent black ink online for roughly $75 a gallon.
But we could cut costs, and quite easily. Hear me out:
We’re being asked to fill four Select Board seats from among six candidates. This means every ballot will get four dabs of costly permanent black ink. But if our leaders would simply let us cast “no” votes instead of “yes” votes, we’d only have to fill in two little ovals on the ballot instead of four. The town would save half of its total Election Day ink budget.
And just imagine how much more satisfying it will be to vote against candidates rather than for. To be honest, I’ve already got a couple in mind.
But of course, it’s too late to change gears like this for the upcoming election. So we’ll need to blacken the ovals adjacent to the names of the candidates we favor.
So, to be clear: I urge my fellow citizens to vote. Please vote in favor of four candidates. And vote quickly. For the sake of your health, hold your breath.
(Don’t hold your nose, though. That might look snarky.)
Doug Brendel lives in Precinct 3 and writes with a cheap, safe pencil. Follow him by clicking “Follow the Outsidah” here at Outsidah.com.
There’s a large species of goose, the graylag, typically up to three feet long and weighing more than seven pounds. It’s found in salt marshes and elsewhere.
The graylag goose is the goose of life, revered in ancient times, in Eurasia. Something to do with fertility. And it’s not just religious superstition, apparently. Graylags procreate with astonishing efficiency. They seem urgently committed to preserving the graylag way of life.
The graylag is also a goose of the arts. The earliest quill pens, invented centuries ago, were made from graylag goose feathers. (Right-handed writers deemed left-wing feathers the best, because they curved away and let you see the whole page. Us lefties needed right-wing feathers.)
But sometimes, for all its auspiciousness, the graylag can be fooled. And it doesn’t seem to require a very complex scam. Strangely, this goose, long associated with fertility — reproducing itself, giving wing to the next generation — can’t always recognize its own eggs.
The acclaimed scientist Niko Tinbergen noted that the graylag, if it notices an egg outside of its nest, will engage in a sort of ritual, an instinctive routine. It sticks out its neck and, with great seriousness of purpose, rolls the egg into the nest. Heaven forbid the next generation of quill pens should be lost.
But was Mother Goose reacting out of habit, or real discernment? Dr. Niko, that wily trickster, began testing the goose by placing a series of other more-or-less spherical objects — non-eggs — outside the nest.
I’ll simplify the test results for you: The goose flunked.
The graylag goose was operating on auto-pilot. She would stick out her neck and resolutely roll just about anything into her nest. Even a volleyball. Although, once she got that volleyball into her nest, she regretted it. She fretted and fussed. A volleyball, she realized, would not produce a fine new generation of quill pens.
Ipswich, you’re the goose. You live on or near the salt marsh, you’ve preserved your way of life for centuries, and you’ve contributed greatly to the arts. Your school theatre classes, for example, have been renowned not only for producing highly acclaimed shows but also for reproducing — turning out generations of successful young professionals in the theatrical arts and beyond.
And here comes Town Meeting, our twice-a-year nesting grounds. Town Meeting is where we lay our eggs. It’s where we set the course for the next generation. Where we nurture our legacy. Secure our future. Decide how history will someday regard us.
Year after year, at our springtime gathering, we’re shown a school budget. We stick out our necks and resolutely roll that budget into the nest. But are we discerning? Or are we on auto-pilot?
This year, the mad scientists will show us an egg and ask us to stick out our necks and roll it into the nest. But wait — is it really a good egg? This budget doesn’t have the life of theatre classes in it. It won’t produce another generation of the artistic leaders Ipswich is known for.
Look carefully, Mother Goose. That’s no egg. It’s a volleyball.
Of course, someone at Town Meeting might happen to offer a motion to amend the school budget by transferring a few thousand dollars from “free cash” to the School Department, just in case the School Committee might fund theatre classes after all.
If someone makes such a motion, I guess the wise geese will vote “yes.”
If the amendment fails, then the wise geese will have a big decision to make: Pretend the volleyball is a healthy egg, and roll it into the nest as usual? And then live with it, and regret it?
Or say no — not fooled — honk honk, that’s a volleyball! — and vote “NO” on the whole school budget?
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where geese and other wildlife dominate the rustic landscape. Follow Doug by clicking “Follow the Outsidah” here at Outsidah.com.
Watch for details!
I love Lorraine, and my wife knows all about it, and I don’t care. Every time I see Lorraine, my heart skips a beat.
Yes, passion can kill. You fall in love and you lose your mind. You stop seeing the world clearly. You start taking chances. You develop improper habits. You can wind up wrapping your Range Rover around a tree on Old Plains Road, and the Ipswich Historical Association will put you in jail for defacing a historical artifact.
But of course, most of us never fall prey to the curse of extreme passion. We’re New Englanders. We’re solid citizens. When I moved to Ipswich, I understood this protocol. When I moved into my two-century-old Ipswich home, I accepted the unspoken requirement: You’re a Puritan now. Don’t screw up. You’ll lose the respect of your fellow New Englanders. And that’s going to be awful for you.
Still, the way I feel about Lorraine, I’m willing to take that risk … because the quiche at the Ipswich Inn is just that good.
Some years ago — long before we bid a sad and abrupt farewell to the late great Inn proprietor Ray Morley this past October — there was a brouhaha about the expansion of his dining room. At the time, I thought it was about zoning, and traffic, and neighbors’ lives being ruined by the noisy clink-clink-clink of diners’ forks on their plates.
No. All of this was distraction. Diversion from the real issue. I understand this now. It was about the quiche. Not just any quiche. Quiche Lorraine — and what it can do to an unsuspecting person like me.
Quiche Lorraine is technically a “tart,” an open pastry case filled with a magical custard concoction of thick cream, eggs, and bacon. (The Inn adds or substitutes other wondrous proteins.) In recent decades, American chefs have made the mélange even more devastating by adding cheese. I can only say, “OMG.”
Technically, quiche Lorraine can be served cold — but at the Ipswich Inn, the servers rush it from the kitchen while it’s still warm.
Most Friday mornings when I visit the Inn’s dining room, there’s a “specials” board on display, and I arrive preoccupied, heart thumping, hoping to see “quiche Lorraine” there. When it’s not, I have to settle for some fabulous benedict or another, or one of their exotic omelets. All good, but…
WHAT ABOUT MY QUICHE LORRAINE?
It’s become sort of a minor religion, and not just for me. My usual breakfast companions now join me in praying that quiche Lorraine will be on the menu, because they know if I go Lorraineless, I’m going to be jittery and irritable. My speech slurs and I say things I’ll regret. The quality of my friends’ breakfast experience is grossly diminished if I have to settle for a mere “scrambled and sausage.”
But let me assure you, I’m not simply accepting my obsession and descending into a state of hopeless desperation. I realize that the Ipswich Inn is a venerable North Shore institution, and it would be unseemly to disrupt the homey ambience of the dining room with an emergency intervention — paramedics rushing in to keep “that quiche Lorraine guy” from croaking just because there’s no quiche Lorraine on the specials board.
So I’m working on it. There’s a 12-step program for this, and I’m making my way through it. It’s not easy. It doesn’t happen overnight. But I’m on the journey.
Step 1: I’ve admitted I’m powerless over quiche Lorraine.
Step 2: I understand that a power greater than quiche Lorraine could restore me to sanity.
I’m still working on Step 3: turning my will and my life over to the care of God. When I pray, it feels like God just says, “I know. I love that stuff too.”
Doug Brendel is grateful to live on outer Linebrook Road, only 5.3 miles from the Ipswich Inn, so when the quiche Lorraine cravings become too much, he can get there in 12 minutes. Unless there’s a train at the Lord’s Square crossing. In which case, ignore the screaming. Follow Doug’s recovery journey by clicking “Follow” here at Outsidah.com.
My entire life, I’ve made my living as a writer-for-hire. So I was definitely interested to meet ChatGPT.
It’s said that this free-to-anyone software can write an essay on any subject — in a matter of seconds — and do so at a level of intelligence that fools even the most skeptical high school English teacher. My colleague Bob Waite even wrote a column about it, so it must be the real deal.
And Chat isn’t just a writer. It also does its own research. To write what you want written, it automatically functions like Google. Ask it anything, and it seems to cull the Internet for whatever info you need. Try it yourself, at Chat.OpenAI.com. There’s a window at the bottom of the screen. Type a note there, using ordinary everyday English. Tell Chat what you want, and let’s see what you get.
Just don’t count on it being the truth.
ChatGPT tells lies.
Here’s how I learned the unsettling truth about “Chat truth.” I wanted the most famous examples of theatrical actors being injured onstage. Chat immediately responded with a brief description of the well-known Spider-Man tragedy: opening night on Broadway in 2010, the title character attempting to fly over the audience, but falling 20+ feet to sustain fractures of the skull, vertebrae, a shoulder blade, and ribs.
But then Chat went on to tell me about a 1984 incident in London’s West End, when the mega-acclaimed Anthony Hopkins (whom I revere) “accidentally stabbed his co-star … with a prop knife during a fight scene.” Chat named the co-star and specified that he “was rushed to the hospital,” “required several stitches,” and “was able to return to the play after a brief absence.”
Only one problem. It never happened.
Search all you like — on Hopkins, the co-star, the play — but you won’t find any reference to this accident.
“There have been many other incidents of actors being injured or killed during stage performances throughout history,” Chat insisted, “but these two are perhaps among the most famous.”
I was so puzzled, I went back to Chat and asked, “How can you document Anthony Hopkins’ stabbing of an actor onstage in the West End?”
“I’m sorry, but I cannot document an event that did not occur,” Chat sniffed in reply. “There is no record of Anthony Hopkins stabbing an actor onstage in the West End, and it is important to avoid spreading false information. If you are referring to a fictional event or a scene from a play, it should be made clear that it is not a real-life occurrence.”
Hear, hear.
Just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy, I returned to Chat and asked, “What is the most famous incidence of an onstage accident resulting in an actor’s injury or death in a theatrical play?”
This time Chat seemed to repackage the Hopkins stabbing story — still Hopkins, still 1984, but now it was a production of Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, and a different actor-victim, and only “a minor injury.”
Then Chat brought up the original Hopkins play again, but without Hopkins, and in a different year this time — and oh, by the way, now it was an actor accidentally hanging himself.
I figured maybe I wasn’t using the right syntax, perhaps failing to communicate clearly.
“Tell me about Anthony Hopkins accidentally stabbing a fellow actor in a West End stage production,” I prompted.
Now Chat put Hopkins in yet another play, in yet another year, and had him stabbing yet another fellow actor. And the victim got more stitches this time.
I was stunned. “Is that story true?” I asked.
“Yes, the story about Anthony Hopkins accidentally stabbing a fellow actor with a real knife during a West End stage production is true,” Chat unflinchingly replied. “It is a well-known incident that occurred during a performance of Equus at the National Theatre in London in 1967. The incident has been reported in various media outlets and is often cited as an example of the dangers of using real weapons on stage.”
“What is your documentation?” I asked.
“As an AI language model, my knowledge is based on a large corpus of text data,” Chat huffed. “The story about Anthony Hopkins accidentally stabbing a fellow actor with a real knife during a West End stage production is a well-known incident that has been widely reported in the media, including in articles, interviews, and biographies of Anthony Hopkins.”
Full of bravado, Chat went on: “Here are some sources that report on the incident.”
Then came the bibliography: an Independent article from 1998 (followed by a link), a Guardian article from 2018 (followed by a link), “Anthony Hopkins’ autobiography, Anthony Hopkins: The Biography” (which isn’t an autobiography).
So of course I checked out the links.
The Independent link led to this: “This page doesn’t exist.”
The Guardian was more politely British: “Sorry — we haven’t been able to serve the page you asked for.”
But Chat still wasn’t finished trying to sell me. Under the list of “sources” was this paragraph:
“These sources provide detailed accounts of the incident and its aftermath, and confirm that the accident did occur during a performance of Equus in 1967, resulting in Edward Woodward being injured by a real knife that Hopkins had mistakenly picked up instead of a prop knife.”
I decided to give Chat one final chance. “Did Anthony Hopkins accidentally stab an actor onstage?” I inquired. “There is no evidence to suggest that Anthony Hopkins accidentally stabbed an actor onstage. This appears to be a rumor or a false story,” Chat answered.
Then Chat lectured me: “Anthony Hopkins is a highly respected and experienced actor who has been involved in many productions throughout his career, and there is no record of such an incident occurring. It’s important to be cautious when it comes to stories that circulate online and to verify the information before accepting it as true.”
I kept testing Chat. Math, I figured, is one thing you can’t fib about. Eh, no, it seems this bot can’t stop fibbing. “214 is divisible by what numbers?” I asked. Chat replied with 1, 2, and 107. Correct. But then the irrepressible Chat had to keep selling me. “These are the only three factors of 214,” Chat continued, “as it is a prime number.”
Actually, no, Chat, sorry; 214 is not a prime number. A prime number has only two factors — 1, and itself — that’s what makes it prime.
And that’s what makes you a big fat liar.
I was planning a speaking tour. I asked for “all the Connecticut cities with a population of 10,000 or more within one hour’s driving distance of Danbury.” Chat listed six cities. This didn’t seem right. I lowered the figure to 5,000. “Sure,” Chat replied — and gave me a list of 12 cities. Still not right. The smallest city on the list still had almost 52,000 people. I tried asking for a threshold of 2,500 people. “Certainly,” Chat answered smugly — but the new list only went down to Naugatuck, pop. 31,742.
“There are no Connecticut cities within an hour’s drive from Danbury with a population between 2,500 and 31,742?” I demanded.
“I apologize for the error in my previous response,” Chat averred. “Here’s the corrected list.”
Finally, a list of 18 cities.
Maybe ChatGPT doesn’t tell you the truth until you push.
And even then, how can you trust it? This is a bot willing to tell enormous lies — and even throw an Academy Award-winner under the bus — just to gain your trust.
Beware, world. ChatGPT is the Donald Trump of bots. Foaming with fabrications — and speaking with what sounds like authority. When it’s really just … hm, what’s the word?
Heck, I don’t need to sit here trying to figure this out.
“Chat, what are the most common terms for bull****?”
P.S. Ask Chat about Anthony Hopkins stabbing a fellow actor, and let me know what you hear back. ChatNonsense@DougBrendel.com.
Doug Brendel lives in an old house on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with no friends but ChatGPT, who can’t be trusted. Follow Doug by clicking “follow” here at Outsidah.com.
You’ve seen those all-seeing, all-knowing signs on the highways, the ones that tell you how far it is to a certain destination, and how long it will take you to get there, based on current traffic — like “113 Newburyport: 14 mi, 13 mins” or “NH State Line: 20 mi 18 mins.”
The Massachusetts Department of Transportation reportedly has 160 such travel-time signs on 351 routes across 675 miles of the state. (You can actually visit Mass511.com online, click on “Go Time Boards” button, and see them all at once.)
I confess to puzzling over this entire enterprise. What exactly is the point, for someone driving through Burlington, in being advised that it’s 7 mi 13 mins to I-93 Woburn and 10 mi 11 mins to Rte 20 Waltham?
Certainly there is no one more time-conscious than me. I’m somewhat efficiency-obsessed. Maybe not just “somewhat.” But if I’m heading home on that east-west section of 95 through Wakefield, and I see that going 2 mi to Lynnfield is going to take me 2 mins, how will this change my plans? Perhaps I’m expected to say, “Aw, heck, I’m not going to spend 2 whole mins just to get to Lynnfield! I’m going to bounce my little car off the interstate into the woods, and go through Middleton!”
But I won’t. I’m sticking with 95, whether it takes 2 mins or 4. Or, heaven forbid, 5.
Yes, I tend to be a hopelessly liberal tax-and-spend guy, rooting for government to make life better for people; but the cost of setting up the Go Time Boards, and maintaining them, is a government expenditure I don’t quite understand.
And aside from the money issues, I admit to wondering about the surveillance. How does MassDOT come up with this info? Are there government-owned-and-operated drones, invisible to the naked eye, hovering over our road system and reporting back to mad scientists in a secret bunker where nefarious computers crunch the numbers and continuously feed data to the Go Time Boards?
Well, yes, sort of. Except there are no drones. The informants are … uh … us. Yes, you and me. According to a Boston.com article by Heather Alterisio, the system is reading drivers’ phones and Bluetooth devices.
Is this “Big Brother” scary? Let’s agree that it’s not. No personal data is stored in the system, according to a MassDot spokesperson.
So since we have this solid assurance of the government respecting our personal privacy — and it’s highly unlikely that the Go Time Boards are going to be decommissioned and torn down anytime soon — let’s go with it.
I would recommend that the travel-time signs could help us even more. Yes, more! By offering even more practical information … to truly improve our lives, in the moment.
A few sample suggestions:
I humbly submit these ideas, and welcome others. Government of the Bluetooth-enabled, by the Bluetooth-enabled, for the Bluetooth-enabled. That’s what I’m for.
Reach out to me via GoTimeBoards@DougBrendel.com.
Doug Brendel may talk big, but he’s a coward, rarely departing his appalling hovel on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich. Let’s face it: He’s desperate for Go Time Boards. On those rare occasions when he leaves his home, he’s calculating every second till he can get back home to safety. Such a sick soul. Pity him. Okay, just kidding. Reach out to him via GoTimeBoards@DougBrendel.com. —Editor
I have not lived in Ipswich long, but I have lived here long enough to gauge the community’s character.
If you write an occasional newspaper column and pay attention to the feedback, you get a sense of what people really care about. Over time, patterns emerge.
Depending on the opinions you express, people love you — or despise you. More commonly, however, they just don’t give a rip.
What excites the public imagination in Ipswich, Massachusetts?
I can write a column suggesting that we solve the persistent speeding problem on outer Linebrook Road by stationing snipers on the top of Linebrook Church, and nobody objects.
I can write a column speculating about bombing the Ipswich River dam in order to get rid of that anachronistic, environmentally pernicious dam thing, and I hear nothing. Not a nod. Not a yawn. No salutes. Not even any hate mail.
I can write a column about the Ipswich School Committee fiendishly ransacking the high school theatre program (as they did some weeks ago, effectively canning the lone theatre teacher and canceling all theatre classes) — first condescendingly lauding theatre students, in an official School Committee meeting, for passionately expressing the need for theatre classes; and then proceeding, in the face of those very students, to vote unanimously in favor of eradicating theatre faculty and classes — and what changes? Nothing. As I write these words, every anti-theatre member of the Ipswich School Committee, which is all of them, are still unopposed for re-election — including any members whose own children came up through the school theatre program, yet which members voted to kill theatre classes. So theatre classes are still kaput.
Over the years, I’ve written about Ipswich potholes, parking, permitting, and plovers; Ipswich recycling and composting and garbage pickup; Ipswich dogs and chickens and greenheads; Ipswich Select Board citizen’s queries; the Ipswich Board of Health; Ipswich bug-spraying and bicycling and baked goods. Even caffeine-free Diet Coke. Hardly anybody cares about any of this stuff, apparently. It’s the same stuff that’s been happening in this town since the original Mr. Winthrop played poker with Masconomet to win Castle Hill. (No beating a royal flush.)
But when I make one innocent, passing remark about how much I hate bologna, there’s a firestorm.
I express a pallid preference for turkey over bologna, and it breaks the Internet.
Since that day, a few weeks ago, when I had the apparently insane idea of expressing my preference for Market Basket’s deli-sliced Jennie-O honey roast turkey, I’ve been deluged with commentary from besotted bologna-backers. I’ve received emails, texts, old-fashioned letters. Messages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. There are pro-bologna dances on TikTok now, and it’s my fault. I hear Friends of the Ipswich Library are lining up a series of bologna lectures; they’re planning a special day for selling bologna books.
People have reached out to me with all manner of bologna-eating advice. I’ve been taught about the superior brands of bologna, and the brands to avoid at all costs; the proper way to eat bologna, and the condiments to avoid under penalty of death. I’ve received photographs, videos, maps to the most excellent bologna stores. I’ve waded through swamps of people’s childhood bologna-eating stories. At my door, face-to-face with the UPS delivery person, I had to sign for a strange-smelling package.
I’m beginning to get a sense of what’s important around here.
I realized, soon after arriving in Ipswich, that people were passionate about clams. People will argue loudly about whose clams are best. You can raise the question of “best fried clams” and soon there will be fisticuffs. Clambox people will crush Woodman’s people every time.
But opinions about clams are NOTHING compared to opinions about bologna. Oscar Mayer could make millions livestreaming a heavyweight bout at the Ipswich Tavern. The Deutschmacher-Kretschmar-Kunzler bologna people could face off against the Ekrich-Swift-Selter Sweet Lebanon team.
No actual boxing, you understand. You just eat bologna sandwiches till you die. Last one standing wins.
Doug Brendel eats turkey, and that’s about it, at his home on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Click “Follow” to get all the Outsidah posts in your inbox, even the stuff the papers are too horrified to print.
The news crackled like musket fire. The great gadfly-citizen Phil Goguen will move out of Ipswich.
It’s almost beyond imagining.
Phil has been a fixture in this town since time immemorial. In select board citizen’s queries, Town Meeting tirades, letters to the editor, social media posts, and campaigns for public office, he’s been the single most consistent and outspoken and belligerent government watchdog in Ipswich, a virulent voice against spending, taxes, budget overrides, and government in general, pushing for transparency, accountability, and audits. Especially audits. Lots of audits. Also term limits.
I like Phil. I first met him when he was running for a spot on the select board in 2014. He arrived at our downtown meeting place flashing his classic snaggletooth smile and regaled me with stories and opinions and it was delightful. In the years since then, I rarely agreed with Phil — hardly anything except keypad voting — but he was so entertaining!
Then, the stunner: “After 60 YEARS we are leaving Ipswich,” he announced on social media last week. “YES, we are moving to easier living.”
Well, yes indeed, Phil. It will be way easier for you without the select board citizen’s queries, Town Meeting tirades, letters to the editor, social media posts, and campaigns for public office. You’ve kept up a steady barrage of high-energy activism for years and years, far beyond the capacity of most people half your age. It’s time your life got easier, Phil. Kick back, cash your Social Security checks, show your Medicare card at the doctor’s office, and enjoy your tax dollars at work.
It’s going to be unsettling, this post-Goguen era. There will be gaping silences. Awkward uncontested budget votes. Without Phil alleging subterfuge, the dynamics of government will shift. For some town officials, all the fun will go out of covering up.
But I believe we as a town will survive this shock. One time-tested strategy for recovering from civic trauma is to focus your energies on commemoration. This I plan to do. I’ll be spearheading a multi-faceted campaign to salute the contributions Phil Goguen has made to our town. Plans have not yet been finalized, and I’m open to additional ideas. But here’s what the committee and I have sketched out so far:
1. A Phil Goguen statue on North Main Street. In the same way that Phil has been an outsized presence in our town, any Phil Goguen statue should definitely be gargantuan. And he should be depicted holding a megaphone. Not just holding it, shouting into it. (There could even be a continuous loop of sound clips lifted from old ICAM video.) Debating what material to make the statue from, we’ve decided for accuracy’s sake it has to be brassy.
2. In the select board’s meeting room at Town Hall, we’d like to see a nice framed photo of Phil displayed in front of an honorary citizen’s query microphone (non-functioning).
3. The best tributes are interactive. We envision a lovely Phil Goguen walking trail through some of our beautiful open spaces, culminating in a restful Accountability Park, complete with comfortable benches interspersed with statues of auditors, each auditor hunching skeptically over one of the benches. (We briefly considered animatronic auditor figures, but then the park wouldn’t be restful, it would be tiresome.) Saluting Phil’s enduring passion for government transparency, the benches will be made of see-through acrylic.
4. The centerpiece of our campaign will be erected directly in front of Town Hall: an immense open checkbook.
Best of all, Phil, this stuff will be totally taxpayer-funded.
Love ya, buddy! Best wishes for a grand season of easier living.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, mostly off ill-gotten government grants. Click “follow” here at Outsidah.com to get more stuff than they’re willing to print in the paper.
The debate over the Ipswich River dam downtown — whether and when and how to take it out — has been going on forever. It’s time to settle this issue.
#1: Whether. “To dam, or not to dam, that is the question.” No, that’s not really the question. The dammed Ipswich River is artificially unhealthy. Wildlife on, in, and near the river will be happier without a dam.
#2: When. However we do it, we need to get rid of the dam sooner, not later, especially because of the confusion and corruption this debate will inflict on our youth. The next generation of Ipswich High School students will graduate thinking Damn Yankees is about the Ipswich River controversy because they won’t have theatre faculty to teach them about American stage classics.
#3: How. Aye, there’s the rub. It’s a big thing, this dam. And heavy. And it was originally built to be permanent. There are no easy-release clasps fastening the ends of the dam to the riverbank. How to dismantle it, destroy it, dispense with it? (Are there professional dam demolishers? Does “Junk Junk Baby” have an aquatic squad?)
However we get the job done, we won’t be alone. U.S. News reported recently that 57 dams were demolished in 2021 alone; and 1,951 total had been demolished as of February 2022, most of them in the past 25 years. (At the time of the report, U.S. regulators had just approved a plan to demolish four dams on a California river, which would be the largest dam removal and river restoration project in the world.)
I’ve heard that some folks in Ipswich have talked about resolving this dam situation by taking matters into their own hands, possibly even sneaking around after dark. Of course any illegal activity would be against the law; that’s why they call it illegal. So I don’t recommend any of the nefarious plans I’ve overheard.
(At the same time, however, I do believe in freedom of the press. How else could I get this stuff into the paper week after week? So I’ll just make it clear, here and now, that under no circumstances will I reveal my sources. You can arrest me, you can throw me into one of those pink-walled cells in the Ipswich jail, you can cut off my supply of Jennie-O honey roast turkey, but I will still never tell you where I got any of the following ideas.)
For example, it would be very noisy and messy to drop a bomb. I have no doubt some of our enterprising Ipswich residents could manage it — I’ve seen some absolutely awesome backyard fireworks displays. But delivering the bomb to the target would be one very risky aspect of the operation. An airplane is going to be expensive; also leasing a helicopter. You could use a drone, but you’re going to need a very large drone to carry this dam bomb.
Also, a bomb makes an explosion, and bits of the dam will go flying everywhere, and someone’s going to get their eye put out. It’s an insurance nightmare.
So no, bombing is out.
It might be possible to dig a hole through the dam, an underwater tunnel, to let the water through. Even a relatively small passageway would be a good start, and maybe all those pounds of water pressure would corrode the dam from the inside out, eventually causing the entire structure to implode. Of course, for this strategy we’d need people who are good at digging — historians come to mind. Also, we’d need historians with scuba experience. And waterproof jackhammers.
Maybe the surest way to get rid of the dam is just to turn it over to the Ipswich School Committee. They could announce that the dam is under-enrolled — inadequate numbers of herring in the fish ladder — and vote to collapse the thing. Unanimously.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, tuning his supersonic hearing aids to the latest town gossip. Track him at DougBrendel.com.
The nightmare is over. The agony has ended.
I’ve finished the baloney.
This was torture of my own making.
It was a package of thin-sliced baloney, $2.62 worth, just two-thirds of a pound, with a Sunday sell-by date.
I never should have bought it. But I caved in.
It wasn’t just that it tasted awful — although it did taste truly awful. This “Vienna German bologna” is just $3.79/lb., and for good reason.
But this two-thirds of a pound of baloney was painful for another reason. A psychological reason.
During the long days I spent choking down this perhaps-meat, bite by reluctant bite, this package of baloney in my fridge door-drawer taunted me, more and more every day, as a symbol of my multiple character flaws.
First character flaw: my Jennie-O® honey-cured turkey breast addiction.
I came by it honest, this addiction. Years ago, desperate to downsize my enormous belly, I became a fanatic calorie-counter. Discovering pre-sliced Jennie-O® honey-cured turkey breast in the favorites bin in the Rowley Market Basket deli department was a breakthrough moment: only 25 calories per ounce! A single slice of the stuff, slightly sweet and oh-so-affirming — especially wrapped around a calorie-free dill pickle — could get me through a snack-panic and buy me another hour of fidelity to my weight-loss regimen.
Eventually I lost a total of 70 lbs. and gradually divorced my calorie-counting app, but my Jennie-O® honey-cured turkey breast passion proved impregnable.
Second character flaw: impatience.
Here again, I do feel I was victimized by enablers.
The favorites bin in the Rowley Market Basket deli department, by its very nature, caters to the patience-challenged. It’s a big rectangular space loaded with deli delicacies — various cheeses and meats, all precisely sliced and primly packaged and labeled and ready to be scooped up by anyone in a hurry.
If you’re the patient type, of course, or you want something that’s not in the favorites bin, you can take a number from the little red machine (which looks disturbingly like a cartoon alien sticking out its tongue, but that’s another column for another day); then you wait to be called; then you tell the deli worker what you want, and how much of it, and how you want it sliced; and they do it for you, and it’s a beautiful experience — but it has required all that time. Minutes and minutes. By the time you leave the deli counter, you’re quite a bit behind in your lifetime consumption of deli products. You may actually need to eat the stuff you just bought more quickly, in order to catch up on your basic nutritional needs by the time you die.
Third character flaw: poor judgment.
Last week, I was saddened to find no Jennie-O® honey-cured turkey breast in the favorites bin. To be honest, this has happened a few times before; it’s natural for deli inventory to ebb and flow. But generally you can find some suitable substitute: another type of 25-calorie-per-ounce turkey, for example, or some sliced ham with only a slightly higher calorie count.
Occasionally, though, you can’t. Last week, with terrible timing, I arrived at the favorites bin to find no turkey, no ham, nothing but various cheeses and — heaven help me — “Vienna German bologna.”
(They still market it with the Italian spelling — which should properly be pronounced boh-LONE-yah — but this so-called food is so gross, our entire culture has learned to see the Italian word bologna and automatically declare it BALONEY. This should be a clue.)
I could have taken a number and waited to be called. I could have waited for my Jennie-O® honey-cured turkey breast to be sliced and weighed and packaged. But no. In a perfect storm of my character flaws, I grabbed a package of baloney and told myself, “It’ll be all right. Just one package. You can do this.”
Let me be clear about the villains and the victims in this sad story. There are heroes, and there are morons. In my Ipswich neighborhood, on outer Linebrook Road, we have three main types of heroes:
(1) First responders.
(2) Pothole fillers.
(3) The workers behind the Market Basket deli counter.
These are men and women with not only astonishing blade-management skills, but also superhuman forbearance. They call the “next number in line” without any way to know whether this will be a simple “pounda ham” or some bizarre configuration of roast beef or a complicated “half-pound of Thin’n Trim chicken breast sliced to an eighth of an inch — let me check your first few slices to make sure it’s thin enough, okay? — plus a pound of Hoffman’s super sharp cheese ($4.49/lb.) in quarter-inch slices,” or “Could I have five-eighths of a pound of baked ham but do you still have that Galbani provolone? Could you check in the back, please? I’ll wait.”
You can age into the Medicare bracket waiting behind this person in the Market Basket deli line.
It’s not that there aren’t enough deli workers. Hats off to Market Basket for keeping the deli department staffed in this tight labor market. It’s just that the deli workers have an impossible job. They work as fast as they can, but they’re stuck dealing with human beings. To get from “#45, please?” to “#46, please?” can take two minutes or a lifetime. There’s no way to predict.
So I avoid the little red alien-tongue number-machine. I go to the favorites bin. I pray I’ll be able to feed my addiction for at least one more day.
And I am proof: people can change. People can grow. People can learn. I have changed. I have learned. I have grown. If I don’t find Jennie-O® honey-cured turkey breast, there is one thing I can be sure of in this life:
I will never, ever, ever again settle for Vienna German bologna.
Gah. So gross.
Doug Brendel hoards pre-sliced Jennie-O® honey-cured turkey breast from the Rowley Market Basket deli department in the freezer of his home on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Don’t risk infection by clicking “Follow the Outsidah” at Outsidah.com.
Love fish? You live in the right place. I’m a huge fan. Ipswich is a great place to enjoy fish. Think of all the wonderful fish you’ve enjoyed in Ipswich. Amazing freshness, quality, variety.
Of course, we may claim to love fish, but the fish may have an alternative perspective. As you’re gutting the fish, the fish is not feeling your love.
Love high school theatre? You live in the right place. I’m a huge fan. Ipswich is a great place to enjoy high school theatre. Think of all the wonderful high school theatre you’ve enjoyed in Ipswich. Amazing freshness, quality, variety.
Of course, we may claim to love high school theatre, but the high school theatre students may have an alternative perspective. As you’re gutting the theatre department, the theatre department is not feeling your love.
Ask Google “how to gut a fish,” and you get 162 million answers. But not even one begins with the actual first step, which is to take the fish out of its appropriate, healthy environment, the place where it thrives: the water. A “fish out of water” may still be breathing when you gut it, but it won’t be for long.
Ask Google “how to gut a high school theatre department,” and you get exactly zero answers. At least till this essay goes online.
Then, at least, the world will know how Ipswich does it.
The actual first step is to take high school theatre out of its appropriate, healthy environment, the place where it thrives: the classroom. A high school theatre program taken out of the classroom may still be breathing when you gut it, but it won’t be for long.
It’s actually a type of discrimination, what humans do to fish. We’ve chosen to single them out for our peculiar expression of “love.” And it turns out bad for the fish.
It’s actually a type of discrimination, what Ipswich does to theatre students. While orchestra, band, and chorus students earn credit for after-school participation in their programs, and they’re free to take the classes in their specialty during “R-block,” theatre students are barred from these options. Orchestra, band, and chorus programs have robust enrollments because it’s easy for a student to include those classes when they map out their schedules. Theatre classes have consistently been taken by 15 to 20 students, but as many as 50 others want to and can’t because of scheduling conflicts.
Human beings’ particular discrimination regarding fish has been going on for thousands of years. Ipswich High School’s discrimination regarding theatre students has been going on for quite a number of years. My own youngest child came up through the Ipswich theatre department, graduating in the pandemic class of 2020. She’ll soon graduate with a full four-year BFA in Acting. The point being: she is among those Ipswich theatre students most seriously dedicated to their craft. And yet, in her four years at Ipswich High School, she enrolled in only a meager two semestersof theatre classes. Why? Because of scheduling conflicts due to the anti-theatre R-block discrimination policy.
“How to gut a high school theatre department” starts with making it hard for students to take the classes. Then you can claim that kids aren’t taking the classes you offer, so these under-enrolled classes need to be eliminated. (It’s like a fisherman cackling, “Heck, these fish didn’t work very hard to stay alive!”) So it won’t be enough to resurrect theatre classes from the dead. The school’s historic anti-theatre scheduling bias must be eliminated at the same time.
When the news broke about theatre classes being canceled, the town-wide firestorm prompted the School Committee to respond with a public statement. They insisted that gutting theatre classes does not “signal a lack of support for the arts.”
Nor does gutting the fish signal a lack of support for the fish.
Yes, we love theatre. Pan-fried is best, I think.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he survives on a steady diet of seafood and cynicism. Check him out at DougBrendel.com.
You don’t really own a 205-year-old house.
It owns you.
The house makes most of the significant decisions for the family: Whether that door will open or remain jammed. When if ever the kitchen light will stop flickering. Which small animals will take up residence in the cellar.
If the house doesn’t make the decision, it’s only because the question isn’t significant enough for the house to bother with.
From the time we Brendels took “possession” of this place, on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, we recognized that we were not really its owners, but merely its stewards. The house — which I’ve christened “Dragonhead” — had already lived three of our lifetimes, and unless we screwed up, it would outlive us by another three or more.
Dragonhead has survived more than two centuries of hurricanes, blizzards, floods, pandemics, you name it. When rains of biblical proportions swamped Ipswich, even our neighbors uphill from us were pumping out their basements. But our solemn dirt floor, bounded by the original 1817 stone foundation, remained bone-dry.
As if the house were making a smug statement of fact: “Staying dry. My decision.”
Flooding is one thing, however; cold is another. After the marvelously mild weekend we just enjoyed, it’s almost hard to remember that just one weekend earlier, we were hunkered down for a record-shattering Arctic cataclysm, freezing pipes in homes across the region. Dragonhead may have attempted to say “Staying warm. My decision,” but the double-digits-below-zero wind chill proved too daunting for the elegant old warrior.
We awoke on Saturday morning to find that the kitchen sink would not drain, the bathroom sink faucet would produce no cold water, and the toilet would flush but not refill. A couple of drain-reamers later, we had the kitchen drainpipe open all the way to the septic tank. Success! Hope bloomed.
But in the bathroom, the old pipes couldn’t handle the cold. When my wife realized that water was flowing freely through a busted pipe, she raced to operate the shutoff valve, which is in the basement. (She took the second-fastest route she knew, having crashed through the floor a couple weeks earlier, in a now-famous staircase repair accident.)
So as I write these words, there’s no water to the toilet, the sink is unusable, and the washing machine in the next room is an empty cavern, gathering dust. Close inspection of the crime scene has confirmed that the plumbing in this part of the house is utterly inaccessible. We’ll have to pull up the floor to get at the broken pipe.
Meanwhile, I’ll be getting to know one of Ipswich’s outstanding laundromats.
As for the busted bathroom — which was MY BATHROOM — I have no choice but to relocate upstairs, into my wife’s bathroom. I’m okay with sleeping in the same bed, but I haven’t shared a bathroom with this woman in years. This feels weird.
She gallantly invited me to take a shelf in the medicine cabinet, but I feel awkward knowing what she’ll be seeing every day. Like bottles of pills for thyroid, cholesterol, blood pressure — little statues saluting my physical decline. The special kind of floss I really can’t live without. The nose-hair clippers. It’s all just too intimate. Even for marriage.
That’s my opinion, anyway.
On the other hand, what Dragonhead says is: “You needed to move in with her. My decision.”
Doug Brendel lives with his First World problems at Dragonhead on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. You can explore his odd world at DougBrendel.com.
I’m afraid the Old Testament record of Creation is somewhat incomplete.
The first seven days are solid: light, firmament, earth and plants, heavenly bodies, birds and fish, land animals and humans, and a day off.
What’s missing is Day 8, when God created potholes.
It’s not known for sure whether the potholes actually came on Day 8 or a bit later — to God, “a day is like a thousand years,” according to Second Peter 3:8 — but it’s clear that the potholes came very, very soon after Day 7, in response to the invention of pavement. Apparently, shortly after humans appeared (Day 6), they took advantage of God’s day off (Day 7), and — behind His back, without any divine approval — paved.
This is not speculation. A prophet talks about it in Isaiah 40:4: “The rough ground will be made level, and the rugged ground will be made smooth.” Pavement, obviously. And not God’s will. Ask any seminarian.
So when God roused Himself from His sabbath and looked around at Creation on Day 8, He was horrified. Not just in a Joni Mitchell way — not just because “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” — but because human beings, God’s proudest Creation achievement, would now go racing around on their smooth pavement in their manmade machines, crashing into not only each other but also the Day 3 trees and the Day 6 land animals, particularly the squirrels. Running into the trees would not do as much damage to the trees as to the humans themselves, but hitting the squirrels was going to be exceedingly hard on the squirrels.
All this pain and suffering grieved the heart of God. However, He was not one to sit and mope. He was still the Creator, after all. So He corrected mankind’s mistake. He responded to the pavement problem by creating a divinely simple solution: potholes.
Potholes are God’s way of keeping drivers on their toes.
I witnessed this supernatural safety feature last week, as I returned from Ipswich center to my home on outer Linebrook Road. Near the curvy Y-shaped intersection at outer Linebrook Road and Leslie Road (sometimes known as the Gateway to Rowley) was a trinity of potholes. Their configuration was not random. They were precisely situated to require devilishly careful calculation. If I eased my vehicle to the left, my right tires would go into one of the potholes. But if I eased to the right, my left tires would go into them, along with my rack and pinion. The only other solution would be to swing into the left lane and risk an unpleasant confrontation with oncoming traffic — which could easily happen, since there’s a rise in the road at that point on Linebrook, so you can’t see a vehicle heading your way. Until it’s too late.
Consequently, I had no choice but to slow down, ponder my eternal future, cross myself, and proceed at a snail’s pace.
This is God’s plan for my life.
I confess, in winters past, I have been known to hurl my very small car around that Gateway to Rowley curve and slide helplessly into a snowbank. But God loves people, including me. He gave us potholes. Potholes are a gift from the Father.
It is no secret that I revere the workers who repair our Ipswich potholes. I’ve posted videos of these heroes dutifully fulfilling their mission. I’ve referred to them as the “pothole gods.” They have a hard job and they do it well. It’s thankless work — people always complain about how long it takes them to show up. (I have an Ipswich-resident friend who says driving into this town is like entering the Paleozoic Era.) But the worst of the pothole-fillers’ burden is not physical or social; it’s spiritual. They’re spending their working lives striving to undo what God is striving to undo: mankind’s moral depravity. The sin of speed. Is there any other explanation for potholes? I think not.
Follow Doug Brendel at DougBrendel.com but stay back 100 feet.
The floor of our 205-year-old house gave way last week, and my wife Kristina plunged through it to her doom, ultimately landing on the dirt floor of our basement.
I was in the living room when I heard a cry and a crash, in rapid succession. I ran toward the sound. Turns out the cry had come from the first floor, as she began plummeting toward almost-certain death, but the crash I heard had echoed up from below, where her mangled body now lay.
My first thought, of course, was: This will be a good column for the paper! But very, very quickly, I re-ordered my priorities and ran back through the living room and the kitchen to the basement door and down the steps. I felt vaguely foolish taking the long route, when Kristina had just made this journey much more efficiently, but in any case I was soon standing over the victim, who, like Tiny Tim, did not die.
The problem in writing about this horrifying incident is that Kristina serves as my first reader, reviewing the initial draft of every piece I produce, and she feels some unreasonable need to stick with the facts. (She says I have a tendency to exaggerate, which is an utterly ridiculous suggestion, but I keep letting her edit me because I don’t want to go to prison for libel.) So far, in the piece you’re reading right now, she has objected to “plunged,” “doom,” “plummeting,” and “mangled.” She also edited out the part where she fell 125 feet, screaming.
And, picayune as she is, Kristina says that technically it wasn’t a “floor” that gave way. She was trying to repair a broken brace under the first-floor staircase landing — she’s always been the family handyman — so she had taken up the floorboards of the landing. At that point, she could look down and see that the stairs had originally continued into the basement. She could also see flooring on the top side of the basement ceiling. (What appeared to be flooring. —K.)She stepped down onto it, tested it a bit, and it held; so she proceeded to go to work.
That part of the basement ceiling, however, was actually just a covering, intended to mask the underside of the landing after the stairs were redesigned. Within a few minutes, the not-a-floor proved that it was not a floor, and Kristina dropped to the next available actual floor, which was dirt, and miraculously avoided brain damage. (Not miraculously. —K.)
Kristina also insists on pointing out that she didn’t drop directly onto the dirt floor. She owned the beloved Time & Tide fine art gallery on Market Street, and even though the gallery closed in 2012, we have kept much of the gallery gear on a shelving unit in our basement, with a tarp thrown over it. It was this mountain of stuff (not really a mountain —K.) that broke Kristina’s fall; she bounced off of it onto the floor (not really a bounce —K.), coming away with nothing but a couple remarkable bruises and a bit of a bump on the back of her head. Which proves that art saves lives. And/or: Hoarding saves lives. (Not “proves.” —K.)
My handyman always prefers to make repairs herself, on the cheap, rather than hiring a costly professional, but after barely dodging massive injury and an agonizing death (hyperbole —K.), she blew the dust off of her checkbook (exaggeration —K.) and called an expert. Ipswich town historian Gordon Harris is a semi-retired master carpenter who adores antique houses, so he was eager to help. He worked quickly, adroitly, and cheerfully, and his invoice was delightfully reasonable. (Not delightfully. —K.) Today, in a house where each vintage floorboard makes a unique sound — squeaking, squawking, moaning — the staircase landing is proudly silent. To be honest, I’m feeling a little paranoid about walking anywhere else in this house.
Doug Brendel steps lightly in his old house on outer Linebrook Road. Follow him at DougBrendel.com.
It is essentially impossible to track or contain criminal behavior in Ipswich, and thus it has always been.
At least since 1687, when Rev. John Wise went to prison for refusing to pay British-imposed taxes, Ipswich has been home to innumerable lawbreakers. People roaring past Doyon at 25 mph when the lights are blinking and the limit is 20. People insolently running lawn sprinklers during drought-driven watering bans. People secretly building walls and installing doors inside their homes without proper permitting. The list of violations boggles the mind.
With generations of miscreants, Ipswich is the Australia of New England.
Now we see the tragic tendency toward feloniousness on County Street, where the state has closed one lane of the bridge and barred southbound travel over it. Neighbors in the area will attest that innumerable reprobates are sneaking their vehicles over the semi-crippled span. Should we be surprised? One-way — wrong way — the Ipswich way.
But it’s dangerous. And rude. And illegal. So it should stop.
Police surveillance can only accomplish so much. Our officers of the law are smart, dedicated, and mostly good-looking, but there are not enough of them to station someone on County Street around the clock.
So I humbly suggest some alternatives.
Of course, there’s an alternative to these alternatives. You could stay off the County Street bridge headed southbound. You could respect the law, and other drivers, and yourself.
And spare yourself the herring.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, in perfect compliance with local, state, and federal laws, except perhaps for the one about rinsing your aluminum foil before you recycle it. Follow him at Outsidah.com.
Whatever’s going on, it’s probably not ideal when you have to call your doctor.
But when it’s the other way around — when the doctor contacts you — that can be a stressful moment.
It happened to me, last Thursday.
I was already scheduled for a routine appointment that afternoon with my primary care physician, Dr. Aimee Hromadka, in the Cable Professional Building on County Road in Ipswich. Dr. Hromadka has been my doctor ever since I arrived in Ipswich, so there is no one more intimately acquainted with my physical body, inside and out. If anything has gone wrong, or is going wrong, or is likely to go wrong, or is on the razor’s edge of going wrong, she would be the one to know about it.
She has been a superb doctor, patiently and expertly navigating the maze of my bad habits to keep me in good health. And she’s done it with a lovely sense of humor. During my annual physical, she showed me a printout of my “numbers” — good blood pressure, good cholesterol, good on thyroid and prostate, liver and kidney function. “Only one of these numbers keeps getting worse,” she observed. “Your age.”
After so much success under Dr. Hromadka’s care, I rarely feel any stress heading into an appointment. And especially not last Thursday, anticipating a simple medication adjustment that afternoon.
But I was totally unprepared for the shock of the message she sent, out of the blue, that morning.
It was bad news.
“Congratulations!” she began. “You have the distinct honor of being our final patient in our Ipswich office.”
I had seen the warning signs; I had heard the rumors. North Shore Physicians Group was planning to evacuate their County Road facilities and move into their much larger quarters at 414 Haverhill Road in Rowley.
But now — the end was so near! There was no time to prepare. It was all too sudden.
And I realized that, of course, this wasn’t just about me. The overall healthcare quotient for the town of Ipswich was about to decline precipitously. There’s also the matter of long-term decline in our town’s quality of life. Rowley already has the chocolate factory, the Market Basket, and the McDonald’s. Now they’ll have my doctor too.
Why such a move? I pleaded for answers. At this point, I received good news/bad news. The Haverhill Road facility offers many more medical functions onsite. “When I need to send you for labs,” Dr. Hromadka explained, “it’s right there.” As if this is a good thing: no delay between the moment the doc utters the dreaded term “blood work” and the moment you’re being punctured and drained. On the other hand, this will give me less time to dread the puncturing and the draining — and I’ve heard that dread decreases lifespan. The good news is that I may live longer, now that Dr. Hromadka can have me poked on the spot anytime she wants.
After the initial shock of the Ipswich location’s terminal diagnosis, I began to settle down a little. I took deep breaths and drank water and had a burger. This helped. Soon I was able to see the big picture, to find the silver lining. I live so far west in Ipswich, on outer Linebrook Road, the new place in Rowley is actually way closer to my house. Instead of spending 13 endless minutes to get to my doctor — with the possibility of a serious backup at Winthrop School or the fire station — I’ll get there in only 5 minutes. Saving 16 minutes round-trip on every doctor’s appointment, on top of what I gain by cutting back on dread, will almost certainly extend my life by several years.
Dang, now I wish they’d bailed on Ipswich years ago.
Doug lives 2,222 feet from the Rowley line. Visit him at DougBrendel.com.
What do you call a group of ducks?
This is one of those rare questions you can’t simply turn over to Google. This question overwhelms Google. There seems to be no definitive single answer. On the contrary, multiple websites offer differing answers. BirdFact.com actually offers the equivalent of an honors course on the subject of duck-group names, with no fewer than 45 options. You can have a badling of ducks, or a brace of ducks. You can have a brood, a company, or a diving. A fleet, a flight, a flush. A knob of ducks, a lute, a plump. Duck groups have different names if you see them in the air or on the water or on the ground. Look, there’s a skein of ducks! A what? You know, a smeath — a sord — a suce of ducks. You mean a wobbling of ducks? Yes! Sheesh! Don’t you speak English?
These questions are critical in my neighborhood now, out here on Planet Outer Linebrook, in the western nether-regions of Ipswich, Massachusetts, because we’ve been invaded by a duck gang. I was surprised the first time I looked out my front windows and saw them waddling around on a neighbor’s grass. I was a city boy my entire life till I arrived in Ipswich, so I had limited exposure to ducks. I assumed they needed water, but the body of water closest to my house is a neighbor’s little pond about halfway between here at Cumby’s. The next-closest traditional duck habitat would be Hood Pond, a mile or so further west. But here they were. A dopping of ducks, brazenly strutting their stuff.
I shuddered, flashing back to the tough neighborhood I survived in Chicago. To me, this didn’t look like ordinary, innocent, awkward waddling by harmless poultry. This looked like stalking, the kind of quiet menace that street gangs brought to East 59th Street on the South Side of my childhood. It seemed to me that these could be murderous killer fowl, descending on outer Linebrook to have their way with us, threatening our lives and livelihoods, forcing us to pay protection. The Godfather, Part 4, but with birds.
They do look silly, on the surface — by which I mean, the surface of the earth. Ducks are designed to skim along the top of a liquid. Their dopey webbed feet are frantically cycling under the surface, but topside, they look calm and cool, almost regal. It’s all a cover-up. But on your front yard? They wobble, they move like windup toys, and not very good windup toys. They snuffle their silly rounded beaks into the grass, searching for bugs and other yummy grossities, and appear to meander aimlessly. But my Chicago experience taught me that this is not aimless meandering. This is “casing the joint.” They’re looking for control. They want to quietly coerce us, via fear and intimidation, to obey them.
The Linebrook Road ducks did all the bug-grubbing they could on my neighbor’s property, then they waddled over to mine. I stood safely behind my window, watching them extend their territory. They rooted around our forsythia, doing their best to look like regular everyday feathered friends, but I could read the evil in their hearts. “This is our home now,” they were saying. “We’ll waddle here all we want, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. All the way from Hood Pond to your neighbor’s miserable little cesspool — it’s ours.”
The pressure is intense, and unrelentless. Every day now, I find this wedge of ducks marching past my windows, this puddling of ducks circling my house in their ominous, passive-aggressive single file.
And you know what happens next. If they don’t find the bugs they need, as they root around in your grass and unraked leaves, they start quacking you awake before sunup, refusing to let you rest until you throw bread out into the yard. Cave in to that demand, and you open the floodgates. One ultimatum after another.
Until you have no choice but to call a butcher with a rifle.
Then, things get ugly.
Doug Brendel hides from daggles of dangerous ducks outdoors at DougBrendel.com.
Is the election finally over? I mean the record-shattering, hair-splitting Massachusetts House of Representatives contest settled by a single vote out of some 24,000. Is it all over? The hand recount, the court challenge, the rulings by our rulers, everything?
Because if it’s really over, if it’s totally settled, then I’m ready to move on to the merchandising.
I’ll be opening the Every Vote Counts Museum, with an awesome exhibition featuring every one of the disputed ballots, each in its own frame under its own spotlight. Each museum guest can borrow a big magnifying glass to super-enlarge their view of the scribbled graffiti, random obscenity, and multiple Donald Trump write-in votes that complicated the manual recount. You’ll see first-hand how many ways voters are capable of failing to follow simple instructions, like “completely fill in the oval to the right of your choice.” You’ll also come face-to-face with the heartbreaking decline of our educational system, as you review the handiwork of multiple adults who never learned to color inside the lines. All in all, an emotional and meaningful museum experience.
You can visit the museum for a single modest fee (registered voters get a 10% discount), but there are also optional ticketed tours:
Coming soon: Our museum will offer valuable workshops on important topics like “How to Fill Out a Massachusetts Ballot” and “How to Sue the Massachusetts Secretary of State.” (The “Ballot” workshop will have two separate tracks; general voters will attend “How to Use a Sharpie” while advanced voters enjoy “Better Ways to Express Your Rage.”)
In the museum gift shop, you’ll find an entertaining array of bobblehead dolls: not just the candidates and the usual Massachusetts celebs, but also the ordinary folk, the real heroes, who had to squint at the ballots, one by one, and pass judgment. Show one of these bobbleheads a mock ballot and their head will bob either “yea” or “nay.” (Tablets of mock ballots sold separately, in quantities of 24,000.)
Also in the gift shop: a precisely rendered replica of a ballot box — but slide your ballot into the slot and discover the fun truth: It’s really a shredder! So handy for home or office election fraud.
And you won’t want to head home without your commemorative “Every Vote Counts” coffee table book. This stunning full-color volume lets you relive the agony and the ecstasy of the 2022 Second Essex District race.
For a limited time, buy one copy of the coffee table book and get a fun-filled children’s activity book free of charge. Besides coloring maps of all 5-1/2 towns in the district, and putting a sticker on their own house, that child you love will have a great time filling out an intentionally tricky ballot, and working out a maze that gets them from their own home to their proper polling place, then to court, then to court again, and finally to the State House.
As you leave the museum, we’ll give you a complimentary sticker to proudly wear home. You’ll have your choice of “I Voted,” “I Forgot,” or “I Blew It Off.”
It’s not too late to get in on the ground floor as an investor in our new Every Vote Counts Museum. And there are benefits. With a contribution of $50,000, for example, you get a lifetime supply of black Sharpies. For $100,000, I come pick you up next Election Day and drive you to your polling place.
A quarter-million and I drove you back home.
Doug Brendel lives in Precinct 4 of Ipswich, Massachusetts, 6 exhausting miles from his polling place, which may account for his ballot irregularities. Pass judgment on him at DougBrendel.com.
The final issue of Time magazine each year announces the “Person of the Year.” But in 1983 they named the personal computer “Machine of the Year.” And in 1989 our endangered earth became “Planet of the Year.”
These departures from tradition seem to have opened the floodgates. Last week’s POTY issue featured not only a POTY but also the Icon of the Year, Entertainer of the Year, Athlete of the Year, Heroes of the Year — this goes on and on: Invention of the Year, Breakthrough of the Year. Sometimes just one “of the Year” isn’t enough: Time names multiple books, movies, and TV shows of the year.
The outrage, of course, is that Ipswich was completely ignored.
Totally unfair. Lots of stuff deserving of recognition happened here in 2022.
So, as a public service, the Outsidah forthwith sets the record straight:
So there, Time magazine. Take that.
I’m thinking next year, we get Ipswich into the Oscars.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He was named Windbag of the Year but declined the award. Follow him at NewThing.net.
I know it makes the religious types crazy, but…
Here’s a 22-minute take on the original Christmas story, for your Yuletide enjoyment.
(If your PC prefers an mp4 format, here ya go.)
Page 2…
I have not lived in Ipswich long, but I have lived here long enough to know who takes your blood.
Pity the poor phlebotomists. Appointment after appointment, they put up with vampire humor. Intrepid patients who don’t mind giving up their essential bodily fluids can actually crack Dracula jokes during the designated draining.
But not me. Phlebotomy is not a comic topic, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get sick at a sight of blood; I get sick at the sound of blood. We can’t even use the word at my house. We randomly substitute the word personality to keep me from keeling over in the midst of an ordinary conversation.
(I’m not alone in this. I went to college with a woman who had an even more severe variety of this condition. In literature class, the prof said, “The author goes on in this vein,” and poor Becky flopped right from her chair onto the floor, out cold. God made people like Becky so that people like me have someone to pity. “Vein” “Artery”! Doesn’t bother me a bit!)
Wait, gimme a minute, please. I’m feeling a little woozy writing this.
Okay, all better. Thanks for your patience.
When I moved to Ipswich, my first order of business was to find a doctor, which inevitably means finding a phlebotomist, because a doctor will eventually order “labs.” (It’s a euphemism to keep you from freaking; you know they want a sample of the red stuff.) I found a doc in Ipswich, and made it my business to befriend the person with the needle, whom I’ll call Scarlett, not only to protect her privacy, but also to make a clever color connection.
I wanted to be sure Scarlett understood that she had my utmost respect, and that she would not be getting any cracks about fangs from me, nothing but complete cooperation, anything to speed the process along as smoothly and painlessly as possible.
And also to make sure she understood, and agreed, that I would need to lie down for this.
Yes, you read that right. I gotta lie down. Not just sit down. Lie down. Prone. Flat out. Horizontal.
I’m still remembered scornfully in the town where I used to live, out west, because on my first visit to the doctor, I tried to be a big strong boy. Didn’t confess my condition. Suddenly I was waking up on the floor, and discovering that medical professionals have a capacity for incredibly unrefined language.
So yeah, when I arrived in Ipswich and made Scarlett’s acquaintance, I was quick to squeal on myself. No surprises. No collapsing to the carpet.
And Scarlett was cool with it. The consummate professional. Sit back, this chair reclines, stretch out, try to relax, how’s your family, all done, don’t get up too quickly. Beautiful.
But here’s the thing about life. Sure, it can be beautiful for 500 milliliters or so, but at some point it changes. Accordingly, the medical practice was sold, and I lost my lovely Scarlett. And the outfit they got sold to isn’t in Ipswich. They’re in a place called Rowley.
Now, with great dread, I found myself visiting a new phlebotomist. I’ll call her Ruby.
Ruby of Rowley.
It didn’t go as I expected.
Ruby was cheerful, energetic, not at all vampire-like, and when I told her I would need to lie down, she was completely sympathetic.
Sit back, this chair reclines, stretch out, try to relax….
Waiting for the needle, I tried to make conversation. “I can’t imagine doing what you do all day,” I said weakly.
She chuckled as she poked me.
“To me, it’s like Kool-Aid,” she said. But then her face darkened a bit, and she proceeded to make a shocking confession of her own.
She can’t handle raw meat.
“The first Thanksgiving after my wedding, I tried to prepare the turkey,” she recalled. “My husband heard me gagging and came running before I fainted.”
“You’re a phlebotomist!” he roared. “How can you have a weak stomach? Over a turkey?”
Then she had to spill the whole truth. It’s not just raw meat. It’s anything that hasn’t been obviously, thoroughly cooked through-and-through.
“Deli meat,” she whispered, shuddering. “They slice it! It’s so thin and wiggly! It’s horrible!”
Ruby looked at me, her face grim, her skin ashen.
“I can’t make a ham sandwich,” she murmured. “I’ll pass out.”
I was strangely reassured, learning that my new phlebotomist has a foible. I used to be embarrassed, having to lie down to give personality. But no more. We’re equals. I may even be a bit superior. I can make a ham sandwich.
We’re going to have a Christmas goose this weekend, and I’m going to help in the kitchen. Standing up.
Doug Brendel lives in an old house the color of personality in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Check out his other life at NewThing.net.
Winter descends upon New England, and with it the need for firewood. Also firewood-lugging.
Do you have a fireplace? I mean a real one. The kind of fireplace John Winthrop Jr. and his gang put in their homes in the 1600s.
Sure, those fake fireplaces can be charming — like in the front room at Fox Creek Tavern in Ipswich, or the back room at American BBQ in Rowley. But they don’t require firewood-lugging. They only require power cord-plugging. You don’t have to be physically fit to slide prongs into their proper slots in a wall outlet. With a real wood-burning fireplace, on the other hand, you must lug firewood. It helps to be Popeye. Eat your spinach.
It also helps if your wood is stacked close to your fireplace. This minimizes the amount of lugging you have to do, and the amount of spinach you have to consume. However, it probably isn’t feasible to have a mountain firewood stacked in your living room; a single cord is 128 cubic feet.
So it’s helpful to understand high-efficiency firewood-lugging.
Pay attention, class.
To begin, a real-life example of the principle in question:
Our woodpile is located inside our garage, against the back wall. To get firewood from our garage woodpile to the living room fireplace requires quite a complicated process.
First, you must assess the size of your firewood. Firewood comes in various lengths, and the average girth of the average pieces will also affect your calculations. (My firewood typically comes from Wolf Hill Home & Garden Center, at Route 1 and Linebrook Road, less than a mile from my home.)
Then there’s the question of your firewood carrier — the device you use to lug your logs. My particular top-grain brown suede log-carrier (also purchased at Wolf Hill) is basically an expensive rectangle of thick leather with a couple of straps for handles. In my case, it holds about five pieces of my particular size of firewood. Which is plenty, because I can’t stand to eat any more spinach.
I go to the garage, load the carrier, and head back through the house to dump my five pieces of firewood into my living room firewood rack, which holds a total of about 15 pieces of firewood. So I have to make three round trips between woodpile and fireplace.
But here’s the key to efficient firewood-lugging. After the third wood-dump, I return to the garage to toss my empty firewood carrier. I could simply throw it, as usual, on top of what’s left of the woodpile, turn around and return to the house. But no. (Pay attention now.) I toss the carrier and then pick up one more log and take it with me, back into the house.
Eureka!
I bring the one additional log into the living room and said log on top of what’s already stacked in the firewood rack.
I’m gaining one stick of firewood for every three trips to the garage. Those 15 logs become 16.
Check the math! I’m eliminating every 15th trip to the garage. That’s more than a 6% gain.
Over the course of the entire winter, how many trips to the garage could I spare myself? Lots. About twice a month, I get a day off from firewood-lugging.
Think of the time I’ll save. I’ll be able to learn calligraphy. Take a Wordle class. Search the house for that missing cat.
Life is short. Spend it wisely. Not lugging firewood. Every trip to the woodpile, add a log.
At the end, on my deathbed, I’ll be able to rasp one final word of wisdom to my loved ones:
“Spinach … eat 6% less of it!”
Doug Brendel lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in an antique house with an impossible number of fireplaces. Check him out at DougBrendel.com.
An old man sits hunched at the wheel of his ancient, rusted Mercedes-AMG GT with twin-turbo 4.0-liter V8. His face is wrinkled, his frame withered. He scowls.
“Why are you scowling, Grandpa?”
The old man works his jaws and runs his rubbery tongue over his toothless gums.
“This place makes me sad,” he rasps. “And mad.”
“Ipswich?” the little boy whimpers. “I thought you’ve always loved Ipswich!”
“I don’t mean all of Ipswich,” the old man grumbles. “Just this place. This part, little Dougie. This one part we’re looking at, right here, right now, you and me.”
The little boy looks out through the cloudy, pockmarked old windshield.
“Grandpa, it doesn’t look bad to me. Why would it make you sad or mad?”
“Ah, they ruined it!” the old man growls. “Back in 2023. Before you were even born.”
The little boy’s eyes open wide as he peers at their surroundings. “Was it wonderful before?”
The old man pushes away from the steering wheel, leaning back with a heavy sigh on the cracked gray leather of the driver’s seat.
“We called it Five Corners,” he says, his voice wavering wistfully.
The little boy squints, his head swiveling to take in the whole scene. “I only see four corners, Grandpa.”
The old man turns, his face suddenly breaking into a smile, facing the boy. “You’re so observant, little fella! You take it all in, you see it like it is. Just like I did at your age. No wonder they named you after me.”
“But why did they call it Five Corners,” the boy asks, “if it only had four corners?”
“They ruined it!” the old man thunders. His palms pound the steering wheel, and the boy flinches.
But then the boy composes himself and tries another question.
“Why did they change it, Grandpa?”
“Not change!” the old man roars. “Ruination!”
The little boy is full of pity as he looks at his grandfather. He can see the old eyes glistening with melancholy memories.
“Those were the days,” Grandpa says, his voice dropping off almost to a whisper. “People communicated with each other back then. They looked each other in the eye, from their vehicles. They waved their hands, they wiggled their fingers. They came to some unspoken agreement. It was the only way to get through Five Corners. It was tradition. It was how things were done. People who didn’t reach out, who didn’t participate in the norms of our community, they paid the price. We had people stuck on Market Street for hours trying to turn left onto Central. And we liked it that way. Some drivers on North Main hoping to cross the intersection southbound finally formed a new religion where you prayed for divine protection and just eased into traffic and took your chances.”
The little boy feels a lump forming in his throat.
“But Grandpa, things were so beautiful back then — why would they, uh, ruinate it?”
The old man looks away from the boy, out over the curled edges of his faded beach sticker.
“Make it more compact, someone said. More like a standard four-way where two roads meet. Improve capacity, someone said. Improve placemaking. What the heck is placemaking?”
Little Dougie frowns skeptically. “I don’t know. Is that a rhetorical question?”
“The side street on Town Hill used to be one-way coming downhill,” Grandpa grouses. “Now it’s one-way going uphill. That’s just wrong. It’s against nature.”
The little boy frowns, not quite understanding.
“And a traffic light!” the old man goes on. “A modern, electronic, totally non-historical traffic light! John Winthrop Jr. never needed a traffic light, did he? What do we need with a traffic light?”
Little Dougie looks up at the traffic light.
“It’s green, Grandpa.”
Grandpa guns the Mercedes. The little boy’s head bounces off the back of his seat.
“In the old days,” Grandpa mutters, “we’d still be stuck back there. And we’d like it that way.”
Doug Brendel lives so far west in Ipswich, you have to navigate Five Corners, Lord’s Square, and the Route 1 intersection to get there. Find Doug somewhere between here and Hood Pond, at DougBrendel.com.
Ipswich made big news last week, because there wasn’t any news.
On Election Night, the race for the Essex Second District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives — a district of which Ipswich is one of 5-1/2 towns — was too close to call.
It was still too close to call the next day, and the day after that. And a week after that.
At one point, election officials were waiting for FWABs. That’s “federal write-in absentee ballots,” the ones cast by Uniformed Service members or their family members, or citizens residing outside the U.S. It seems weird to me that any election could be determined by a FWAB, but that’s the law: GUTI — “get used to it.”
Meanwhile, something called “provisional” ballots were still to be “resolved,” whatever that means, by the RMV — results to be released by today, Wed., Nov. 23rd.
At one point, it was reported that Republican Lenny Mirra was leading Democrat Kristin Kassner by just 4 votes — out of a total 23,488 cast.
(If true, that would be a win by less than 0.017%. Yeah, say it out loud: seventeen one-thousandths of a percentage point. You’ll probably never again need to form those words. Hope your mouth enjoyed it.)
Massachusetts law provides for a recount when the numbers are so close, and I hear a recount is under way. But FairVote.org’s Director of Research reports that a recount has changed the outcome of an election only three times out of nearly 6,300 elections in the past 22 years. Way better to win outright, the first time around, no matter how close the vote was.
So while you wait for the final answer, the tension can be torture — and knowing how hard it is to overturn an election via recount, the regrets can be even more painful. Somewhere in the Essex Second District, there are five Democrats who would have voted for Kassner — and could have put her over the top — but somehow, they didn’t get out to vote.
I have five friends in Ipswich who admit to being Democrats, but who didn’t end Election Day sporting an “I Voted” sticker. So I set out to interview them, in the wake of this historic near-miss, to find out what they might have to say for themselves. Excerpts from the transcripts:
Voter #1: “I meant to vote, sorry. I forgot. If Obama was running, I wouldn’t have forgot.”
Voter #2: “Wait — we didn’t win? Who won? Who was running?”
Voter #3: “I actually went out to vote, but when I got to the Y, a certain individual was going in ahead of me who really did me dirty in high school, class of ’76, and until I get an apology from that certain individual, I refuse to go anyplace that does business with them. The Y included. Saying it’s ‘just a polling place’ is no excuse, if you ask me. They could exclude certain people if they wanted to. They do it in Florida, don’t they?”
Voter #4: “Dang, I’m sorry I didn’t vote. I thought for sure we would win. I figured Lenny made his money in construction for 30 years, did something with his hair, and became a full-time politician. After Trump, who could trust a résumé like that?”
Voter #5: “I’m gonna vote in the recount, for sure.”
Doug Brendel lives in the political outback, on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Follow his strictly non-political non-profit work at NewThing.net.
My garbage man is mad at me.
Me! The most conscientious sorter of waste products in the history of Ipswich, Massachusetts.
I am a devotee of the Ipswich Local News’ environmentalist columnist Paula Jones, who patiently and repeatedly teaches us about sorting our plastics from our pistachio shells. I obey Paula’s every word. I am a dues-paying curbside-composter. I peel the labels off my mangos before tossing the skins. At the end of a carton of eggs, I debate its disposal destination: Garbage? Recycling? Compost? The bag of non-recyclable film plastics hanging in my pantry? Or maybe slather it with organic mustard and munch it during Sunday Night Football? That’s it, five options. I don’t have the patience for any more.
We have so many environmentally superior options for disposing of our waste, we Brendels can go weekswithout filling our kitchen garbage can. Ipswich garbage-collectors are in danger of losing their jobs because there’s so seldom anything to collect at our place. The lucky guys who draw outer Linebrook Road duty spend their workdays riding on the back of the truck, listening to NPR on their earbuds and chuckling at their good fortune.
So why is my garbage man mad at me?
Because of bittersweet.
Bittersweet is that invasive vine, Celastrus orbiculatus, that people used to make those twisty holiday wreaths from. It’s so deadly, it’s illegal to sell it in Massachusetts today. When you see a tall, majestic New England tree coiled in beautiful vines, that’s bittersweet literally strangling it.
Before long, the bittersweet climbs to the top of the tree and spreads its leaves from its dozens of shoots over the top of its host, cutting off sunlight, killing the entire tree. Climate change is slow; bittersweet is fast. Even faster because birds disperse its seeds, and new vicious little bittersweet babies pop up like crazy all over the place.
Snip bittersweet with shears, hack at it with a saw, yank it out by its roots; but the question of the remains remains: Where should this go?
I can’t dump this stuff in the old compost heap at the corner of my property. The nasty little berries of the fallen bittersweet will take hold and start a whole new environmental crisis. That’s why they call it bitter.
Likewise for dumping my bittersweet in my curbside compost bin. Couldn’t this evil eventually leach out from the compost into other Ipswich curbside composting members’ properties? Yes. Bittersweet is a demon. Kill bittersweet? Forget about it. Google “bittersweet” and you’ll find 27.46 million webpages of despair. Bittersweet cannot be composted.
So it seemed my best option would be the good old-fashioned standard weekly garbage pickup. I stuffed the hacked-down tangle of bittersweet vines into one of those leaves-I-raked bags and dumped it in the bin like any ordinary bag of trash.
On garbage pickup day, however, my lovely garbage-collector took the other contents of our garbage bin and left the pernicious bag of bittersweet behind.
I adore my garbageman; I salute the effort, I support the cause. I don’t want to damage this relationship. So the next week, I took certain steps. I certified the bittersweet as “legal” and “approved,” by stuffing it all into one of those official Ipswich “overthrow” bags — $2 each, sold in rolls of five (at Aubuchon, Conley’s, Cumbie’s, DJ’s, Richdale, Shaw’s, and Tedford’s).
Also a non-starter. My beloved spurned me again. Left my bag at the curb. He wasn’t fooled by the overthrow bag I’d hidden my bittersweet in. The spiny twigs were poking out through the thin veneer of the bag, sneering silently to my dear garbageman: “Take me and you’re fired!” It’s the law: Leaf trash ain’t ordinary trash. Leaf trash must be composted, not hauled off and incinerated like ordinary Ipswich rubbish.
The truth is that bittersweet doesn’t even qualify for our annual Curbside Leaf Pickup Week, one of our town’s most cherished holidays, which happens each year, the week before Thanksgiving. (Hey! We’re in luck! That’s this week!) If bittersweet is included your curbside leaf bag, it winds up in the compost stream — and the seeds poison the gardens of countless other New Englanders. Again: Bittersweet cannot be composted.
The only proper end for bittersweet — the vines, which carry the berries, which carry the seeds, which carry the poison to our other vegetation — is death by fire. If your garbage pickup person can’t be tricked, bribed, or threatened into taking your cut-down bittersweet (so it can eventually be incinerated), then you’ve got to burn it yourself.
My clever wife follows the old New England tradition of twisting bittersweet vines into wreaths, then using them as fire-starters in our fireplace. She also recommends adding demon scarecrow decorations, “to give them a truly country-chic look.” These would have been especially popular last month in Salem. If only I had planned in advance to monetize this idea.
This whole episode has also taken a toll on my relationship with my garbageman. I hope to patch things up, but you never know with these things. Before long, it may be a tearful late-night argument over disposal of foil gift wrap.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where his antique house is being slowly strangled by vegetation. Take a look at Doug, at least while you’re able, at DougBrendel.com.
It’s a calculated risk, moving into a 200-year-old house. You’re not really the owner; you’re a temporary steward. The house has already lived longer than you ever will, and unless you screw up very, very badly, the house will still be standing there, aboveground, long after you’ve moved below. Living in a historic home is a privilege, an honor, a responsibility. And occasionally a pain.
In my chosen hometown of Ipswich, Massachusetts, my house — the back part built in 1797, the front part in 1817 — is regarded as “new construction.” Ipswich is famous for having more First Period homes (1626-1725) than any other community in America. Technically I can’t call my house “Colonial”; the historians have specified “Federal” for this era. This house is too “new” to be “Colonial.” If I refer to my house as “Colonial,” someone from the Ipswich Historical Commission shows up at my door with a musket.
Buy a 200-years-new house and you make certain assumptions. You may love the beautifully preserved original touches, the period detail. You may be charmed by the nooks and crannies. But you may also have to live with tilted floors and crooked doors, leaky window casings, and ancient systems. A historic-house expert once visited our dirt-floor basement, saw the odd assortment of makeshift columns holding up the floor above, and pronounced a simple, sexist, and probably accurate verdict: “What you have here is 200 years of lazy husbands.”
An owner may make improvements as their budget allows. After our house was built by Deacon Timothy Morse, some subsequent owner put in an oil tank and radiators. Someone wired the place for electricity. And someone sprang for the most important enhancement of all: indoor plumbing.
I’m no engineer, and I’ve never needed to be. I’ve lived most of my life, 60+ years or so, in reasonable houses, built in my own lifetime, with completely modern conveniences. Today, if I want to microwave yesterday’s pizza while someone else is blow-drying their hair, the house suddenly goes dark and quiet. You’re going to need to find something called an “electrical panel” and “reset” something called a “circuit breaker.” I don’t know what any of this means. All I know is, growing up in Chicago, I could toast a slice of raisin bread while watching Bugs Bunny. Now, I can’t.
This week, I learned — in greater detail than ever before — about the imperfections of yet another system in my beloved antique dwelling. Thanks to occasional minor emergencies in the downstairs bathroom, I have learned to use a plunger. My wife is the practical member of the team; she owns all the power tools and understands all the mysterious ways and means of our old house. But she was away at work, I was home alone, and the toilet backed up, so I plunged.
My very good neighbor across the street is a plumber, and he taught me the ideal technique for plunging: It’s not just push-push-push. The more effective practice is push-push-PULL. I push-push-pulled for half an hour or so, and finally got the line clear. I was so proud of myself, I decided to celebrate by doing my own laundry.
However, as the washing machine emptied, water started flowing from the base of the toilet, and backing up out of the adjacent shower. I found the bathroom, the hallway, and the laundry room flooded. I sprang into action. I spread an assortment of beach towels to sop up the water — I texted the news to my wife — and I left town.
In my defense, I did have a previously scheduled speaking engagement in Connecticut.
While I was there, I got the report from my wife. It turns out that the decades-old pipe between the centuries-old house and the who-knows-how-old septic tank was clogged. So for some unknown number of days, we’d been pumping all of our waste — from every sink, shower, tub, and toilet — into our basement.
By the time I got home, my wife had hired emergency drain-uncloggers, and all we had left to contend with was our basement floor. Instead of Federal Period dirt, we now have Jurassic Period swamp.
Our plumbing system? Intact. Working as well as it did the day it was installed, back there in the 19th Century.
Our house? Intact. Occasionally a pain, but we’re going to keep it.
Our marriage? Intact. I married my handyman. She knew what she was getting into.
Doug Brendel lives in a state of perpetual confusion on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Check in on him, please, at DougBrendel.com.
We’ve survived another Halloween, but some of us more painlessly than others.
Assaults by ghosts can be expected in this spooky time of year, and not just by badly behaved children wearing cut-up bedsheets and lugging plastic jack-o-lanterns door-to-door.
I mean the real thing.
A carpenter named Timothy Morse Jr. was laid to rest in the Old Linebrook Cemetery, where Linebrook Road bends and Newbury Road begins, half a mile south and west of my house, a house which Mr. Morse built for himself and his family in 1817. After a couple hundred years’ worth of corpses were deposited in said cemetery, the “new” Linebrook Cemetery was established next door to the house. The remains of Mr. Morse, however, were not relocated. When his ghost wants to revisit his 205-year-old work of art, he has to float half a mile north and east.
I imagine Mr. Morse visits from time to time, particularly when he’s offended by some so-called “upgrade” to his masterpiece. Take the problem with the front door, which I inherited when I arrived from Arizona and bought the house. The entire place was beautifully preserved by the prior owner, but the front door was, shall we say, a lost cause. It appears that Mr. Morse may have scavenged a door that was already 175 years old by the time he hung it.
In any event, by the time I took possession of this front door, it was a rectangle of weather-beaten some-kind-of-wood, which complained noisily when you tried to open it and even more noisily when you tried to close it.
After some time, a persistent draft in the front part of the house made it clear that the “historic Morse door” was rotting from the bottom up. It would have to be replaced. Not just the door, but the threshold, the frame, the works.
A North Shore artisan was retained, the work was done. Beautiful. Here’s a brand-new-but-historically-appropriate front door to accompany the adjacent “Timothy Morse. Jr. House 1817” plaque affixed by the Ipswich Historical folks before I ever came to town.
My neighbors must have been pleased. Finally, they wouldn’t have to look at that wretched old washboard of a front door.
I don’t think Mr. Morse was pleased.
Our front door doesn’t get much use, really. Typically, it’s just where I lean out each morning in my bathrobe to mount our humble American flag in its wall-bracket next to the door.
But cometh Halloween … and the new door won’t open. (Cue spooky music.)
There’s a latch, not a doorknob (in keeping with the “old New England” spirit of the house), and the latch seems to be jammed. I can turn it a little bit, but not enough to release the door and open it.
Undaunted, I head back through the house, bathrobe swishing dramatically, emerging from the mudroom in my fuzzy slippers, traipsing down the driveway, clomping through the front yard, mounting the front steps, and taking hold of the fancy new front-door latch.
The new door still won’t open. (Spooky music swells.)
At this moment I’m really hoping nobody comes by with a camera, because an agitated full-grown man in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers clearly engaged in breaking-and-entering through the front door of a house on Linebrook Road is absolutely an Internet meme just waiting to happen.
My wife works at the century-old Crane Estate, where tour guides swear that Mrs. Crane (d. 1949) sometimes messes with the locks on the doors. I don’t think Mrs. Crane simply skulks about the mansion on Castle Hill. I think she offers workshops for fellow ghosts, maybe signs autographs afterward.
And when Mr. Timothy Morse Jr. chatted her up, she had a word of wisdom for him:
“Lock their doors. It makes them crazy.”
Doug Brendel cowers in fear in his antique house on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Follow him, but not too close, via DougBrendel.com.
Can a man hold his breath 350 days?
We’re about to find out….
IT’S OFFICIAL! 350 days from today — on Thursday, October 12th, 2023 — Doug Brendel’s new play Best If Used By will open at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport, Mass.
In this unique story of love and loss, resentment and reconciliation, two former friends, now senior citizens, vie for a single role in a new show.
Starring beloved North Shore actors Rebecca Axelrod and Barbara Bourgeois, and directed by Castle Hill Productions founder Kristina Grundmann, Best If Used By will run for 5 performances.
More details to come!…
Thanks to Executive Director John Moynihan and the Firehouse team for welcoming this new production to next year’s fall Firehouse lineup!
Until then, somebody please make sure the playwright breathes.
I have an Episcopalian friend who lives at the corner of County and Poplar in Ipswich, and now that the bridge is one-way heading north, she can go to church but she can’t go back home.
She loves the church, and the church family loves her, but nobody wants her there permanently.
Yes, technically, she can return home, but to get there she has to make a circuitous journey past four other faith traditions: the Methodist and Congregational churches, the Christian Science reading room, and the Choate Bridge Pub.
The other option is to walk to church, and walk home, which is possible because the bridge is still open in both directions for pedestrians.
But it’s a daunting trek, some two-tenths of a mile, one way. That’s 422 steps, 211 of them on each leg.
On a frigid winter Sunday morning, my friend will certainly prefer the comfort of her Chrysler to the cold of her Crocs.
With the bridge closed to southbound traffic, her trip home from church — north on County, left on Green, left on North Main, left on South Main — will cover three times as much distance as it took her to get there. The math of the situation is overwhelmingly complicated. Instead of two-tenths up and two-tenths back for a total of four-tenths, it’s two-tenths up and six-tenths back for a total of eight-tenths. Twice the total distance. My friend’s Sunday morning gas bill will literally double — which can’t help but cut into her donations to the church. The bridge closure discriminates cruelly against the Episcopal church.
The bridge closure will also diminish the non-church aspects of my friend’s life. Between all those stop signs and left turns, not to mention navigating Five Corners, by the time she gets home it will be time to go to church again. Forget making a living or having a romance or going to Shaw’s. She’ll have to go on welfare and order groceries from Amazon. It’s just one minor bridge closure to you, maybe, but it’s radical lifestyle upheaval for an innocent resident of Poplar Street.
The problem with the bridge, they say, involves “structural deficiencies.” So besides the narrowing of traffic to a single lane, the bridge now has a weight limit of 15 tons. “The bridge is still safe for travel,” DPW director Rick Clarke is quoted as saying. But beware. If you’re walking across the bridge and 15 tons’ worth of vehicles are crossing at the same moment, the bridge at that moment is overloaded by your exact weight.
It’s not a farfetched scenario. The bridge is 200 feet long, give or take. The average Ford F-150 is about 18.5 feet long. I told you the math is complicated. I’ll boil it down for you:
The County Street bridge could accommodate 10 pickup trucks. But a Ford F-150 weighs well over 3 tons, and that’s without a load of what-not in the bed. So we’re talking more than 30 total tons of truck.
Even if you got D’s in math like I did, you can see the terrible chance my friend will be taking if she walks to church.
My heartfelt advice: Pause, dear one, as you approach the County Street bridge. Look around. Make sure there isn’t a caravan of pickup trucks crossing at the same time as you.
Better yet, drive to church; take the long road home. Maybe stop at Heart & Soul for lunch on your way back. Take sustenance for your pilgrim journey.
And may God bless you.
Doug Brendel lives a bridge too far, on outer Linebrook Road, 4 miles west of Ipswich center, and works remotely, 4,200 miles to the east. Follow him at NewThing.net.
It was a romantic notion, I confess, moving from a perfectly framed almost-new house in a master-planned community in Scottsdale, Arizona, to a 200-year-old house scavenged from 300-year-old leftovers on a winding road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, but here we are.
And things are, shall we say, different in small-town New England.
The Pilgrims and the Puritans (I could never quite keep them straight) came over from Holland or England (I could never quite keep them straight either) with their own strict ideas about what was appropriate and what wasn’t, and apparently it wasn’t appropriate to build big closets and cupboards, places where you could store lots of stuff. I guess it was regarded as worldly and scandalous to have lots of stuff.
Or, apparently, even if you were irreligious, you still built your house with tiny closets and cupboards, or none at all, just to keep from being tried and convicted and hanged as an infidel, or a witch.
However it happened, my antique house got built (of course it was “new construction” back then), and I fell in love with it and bought it and moved into it with the full knowledge that my family and I would face a dreadful dearth of closet and cupboard space.
I have no one to blame but myself.
There wasn’t even a word for closet before the 1300s, and even when the word was invented (from the Latin clausum, for “closed”), a closet was designated as a “small private room for study or prayer.” Those folks in the Middle Ages clearly did not understand that a cool American guy would need a place to hang his voluminous capitalist free-market supply of multiple suits, too many shirts, and more pants than any one person could possibly wear — not to mention a few vests that can’t be tossed out, just in case vests come back into fashion.
Also, please, if you don’t mind, there should be enough space to walk in, turn around, and survey this mini-clothing-kingdom as I decide what to wear for maximum impact in this afternoon’s committee meeting.
(Closets started out as “wardrobes,” separate pieces of furniture, in old Europe. But according to ClosetsByDesign.com, it was the resourceful Americans who invented the built-in closet, a space-saving space designed directly into the wall. Appropriately, this was back during the era of President Martin Van Buren, an early champion of indoor plumbing. In his upstate home, Van Buren installed the first flush toilet north of New York City. You don’t read “The Outsidah” just for fun; we bring you all manner of valuable information, like this Martin Van Buren bit.)
We need our spaces, for our stuff. Where would you be without your closet, cupboard, or sideboard? Thank heaven the French gave us words for all these storage places: the cabinet (“small room”), the dresser (“to arrange”), the buffet (“bench or stool”).
And then there are shelves.
You might expect a house with a shortage of closets to make up for it with a surfeit of shelving. But no. My antique house proves otherwise. Puritans condemning closetsful of clothing were not going to sanction shelvesful of stuff. History tells us that a German family as far back as the 1300s may have had a schelf, a plank affixed to a wall where they kept small objects. But New Englanders in the early days evidently regarded such small objects as sinfully superfluous, because they created precious few places to put them.
When we moved into our house on outer Linebrook Road, I inherited the downstairs bathroom, the smallest bathroom ever constructed outside of a jetliner, and with even less shelf space. There’s a dollhouse-sized medicine cabinet above the sink, and a barely-toilet-width nook for the toilet, with two shelves above the toilet. I call them shelves; I’m being generous. They’re two wooden shutters — those flaps that hang on the outside of your house to cover your windows, with diagonal slats — turned horizontal and nailed into the wall, to serve as shelves. As if installing actual shelves would be scandalous, an admission that the house’s residents had capitulated to the iniquitous urge to acquire stuff.
In this minuscule bathroom space, I survive by a system: (a) Day-to-day requirements jam the medicine cabinet. (b) Anything not required every day goes on the slat-shutter-shelves above the toilet.
I have tried to be creative with the limited space, sliding four small rectangular wicker baskets onto the two shelves to hold my immoral abundance of bathroom effects. Whatever goes into these baskets, however, is promptly forgotten.
The shelves are above eye level, so when I want something from one of the baskets, I have to pull it down from its place and go foraging. I’m such a classic American pig, hoarding far more stuff than I need, that every expedition into the over-the-toilet baskets is like an archeological dig into the depths of my own decadence.
This week, for example, I went searching for replacement blades for my Gillette Sensor razor. In one of the wicker baskets, I found multiple toothbrushes given me by my dentist over the years (and consistently ignored, since I use an electric toothbrush), along with a dentist-gifted sample-sized tube of toothpaste, a bag of floss picks, a tiny squeeze bottle of something called “spot treatment,” a package of “cooling eye gels,” and a small leather travel case stashed with the essentials I would need if I ever had to leave town in a hurry.
No razor blades.
The next basket featured athlete’s foot powder (although I’m no athlete), shaving cream (although I wear a beard), shoe polish (never used), a hair brush (also never used), multiple bags of cough drops (I feel fine), and another small leather travel case — apparently because at some point I felt I might need to leave town in a hurry and didn’t remember that I had already worried about needing to leave town in a hurry.
Still no razor blades.
The third basket had even more dentist’s-office toothbrushes and toothpaste, a roll of gauze bandaging the color of mud, a half-empty box of bar soap, a brush for shining shoes (never used), an array of combs in sizes and colors I would never be caught dead using, and a supply of hairpins (why?). Oh — and boxes of gas relief and laxative tablets left over from a long-ago mercifully forgotten colonoscopy prep.
I’m only giving you a partial inventory here, you understand.
In the final basket, there was an electric beard-trimmer, a travel-size bottle of hairspray, another roll of gauze bandaging but in neon lime green this time, a stack of pandemic-era disposable masks, another comb, another toothpaste, more toothbrushes — and a pharmacy bottle containing leftover cyclobenzaprine.
So I am fully prepared if I develop muscle spasms or my hair gets mussed. And I am really prepared if I make someone mad enough to run me out of town.
But I clearly don’t have enough stuff on my shelves, because I don’t have any razor blades.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with his mountains of mostly pointless stuff. Enter the maze if you dare, at DougBrendel.com.
Pray for me. I’m at the RMV.
Not the Rättsmedicinalverket. That RMV is the Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine. This isn’t Sweden. This is Massachusetts.
It’s also not the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde. That’s the National Museum of Ethnology in the Netherlands. If you’re looking for that RMV, you’re in the wrong place.
This is the Registry of Motor Vehicles, which is called the Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMV, almost everywhere else in the U.S., but here in (the Commonwealth of) Massachusetts, we like to hark back to an earlier era, when we had hifalutin registries, thank you very much, not just dumb old “departments.”
At the moment, I’m at the RMV office on Route 1 in Danvers, like several dozen other people. Yes, we’re all unique individuals, we all have lives of our own, but we’re bound by a common, desperate need: the need to comply with some detail in Massachusetts law that will allow us to continue operating our chosen vehicle.
In this hermetically sealed capsule of a waiting area, we’re all thinking the same thing — for some of us, it’s deeply subconscious; for others of us, it’s painfully conscious, sparking and flaring just under the surface:
I need my vehicle. Mess with my use of my vehicle, and I will kill you.
This room is a simmering cauldron of anxiety and potential rage. It’s not safe here.
Also, because it’s taking forever … Please pray for me.
I tried to do this a week ago. I went online to the RMV and navigated my way to the specific issue I needed to deal with. It might have been easier to reach the Rättsmedicinalverket. (If only I had needed a crime-victim cadaver in Stockholm, I could have scored in a minute or two. But no. This is Massachusetts. This is the RMV.)
Eventually, I figured out how to find the appointment-making page of the website, only to find out that a miracle had occurred. The day I wanted an appointment to deal with my particular issue happened to be the very day when the RMV would begin taking walk-ins for my issue. No appointment needed.
Saints be praised! I knew in that moment that I had a been a very good boy, and God was rewarding me.
Wrong.
I arrived at the RMV. At the door, a uniformed officer quizzed me about my intentions (he stopped short of making it an old Soviet-era movie by saying “Show me your papers”), and pointed me into a certain line. Soon I was at the window, where the staffer had just one question for me:
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I replied. “The website said—”
The staffer threw up her hands, exasperated with my idiocy. “Okay. I can arrange an appointment for you. Right here. Right now.”
That was a week ago.
So here I am, today. To make the appointment she made for me a week ago. A morning appointment — yeah, baby; I’m no dummy — to get in here ahead of the crowds.
As I write, I’m in my second hour of waiting for my appointment — the firm to-the-minute appointment assigned to me personally by the staffer behind the window that I was approved to stand in the line for by the uniformed officer. All legal and accounted for. Totally legit. I’m good. I’m clean. Authorized. Certified. Verified.
But I’m still sitting here.
Looking around, I see my situation may not be so bad.
There’s a pretty nice tent city here for long-term dwellers. The price is right. And there’s a shared hotplate.
Volunteers from area churches drop in from time to time with food and clothing.
Since I arrived, one couple fell in love and got engaged.
It’s the RMV. Pray for me. Especially if you’re from one of those religious traditions with long, drawn-out prayers.
This may take a while.
Until today, Doug Brendel has lived on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Henceforth, however, it’s possible you may only be able to find him at the RMV office in Danvers, or at DougBrendel.com.
Pray for me. I’m at the RMV.
Not the Rättsmedicinalverket. That RMV is the Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine. This isn’t Sweden. This is Massachusetts.
It’s also not the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde. That’s the National Museum of Ethnology in the Netherlands. If you’re looking for that RMV, you’re in the wrong place.
This is the Registry of Motor Vehicles, which is called the Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMV, almost everywhere else in the U.S., but here in (the Commonwealth of) Massachusetts, we like to hark back to an earlier era, when we had hifalutin registries, thank you very much, not just dumb old “departments.”
At the moment, I’m at the RMV office on Route 1 in Danvers, like several dozen other people. Yes, we’re all unique individuals, we all have lives of our own, but we’re bound by a common, desperate need: the need to comply with some detail in Massachusetts law that will allow us to continue operating our chosen vehicle.
In this hermetically sealed capsule of a waiting area, we’re all thinking the same thing — for some of us, it’s deeply subconscious; for others of us, it’s painfully conscious, sparking and flaring just under the surface:
I need my vehicle. Mess with my use of my vehicle, and I will kill you.
This room is a simmering cauldron of anxiety and potential rage. It’s not safe here.
Also, because it’s taking forever … Please pray for me.
I tried to do this a week ago. I went online to the RMV and navigated my way to the specific issue I needed to deal with. It might have been easier to reach the Rättsmedicinalverket. (If only I had needed a crime-victim cadaver in Stockholm, I could have scored in a minute or two. But no. This is Massachusetts. This is the RMV.)
Eventually, I figured out how to find the appointment-making page of the website, only to find out that a miracle had occurred. The day I wanted an appointment to deal with my particular issue happened to be the very day when the RMV would begin taking walk-ins for my issue. No appointment needed.
Saints be praised! I knew in that moment that I had a been a very good boy, and God was rewarding me.
Wrong.
I arrived at the RMV. At the door, a uniformed officer quizzed me about my intentions (he stopped short of making it an old Soviet-era movie by saying “Show me your papers”), and pointed me into a certain line. Soon I was at the window, where the staffer had just one question for me:
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I replied. “The website said—”
The staffer threw up her hands, exasperated with my idiocy. “Okay. I can arrange an appointment for you. Right here. Right now.”
That was a week ago.
So here I am, today. To make the appointment she made for me a week ago. A morning appointment — yeah, baby; I’m no dummy — to get in here ahead of the crowds.
As I write, I’m in my second hour of waiting for my appointment — the firm to-the-minute appointment assigned to me personally by the staffer behind the window that I was approved to stand in the line for by the uniformed officer. All legal and accounted for. Totally legit. I’m good. I’m clean. Authorized. Certified. Verified.
But I’m still sitting here.
Looking around, I see my situation may not be so bad.
There’s a pretty nice tent city here for long-term dwellers. The price is right. And there’s a shared hotplate.
Volunteers from area churches drop in from time to time with food and clothing.
Since I arrived, one couple fell in love and got engaged.
It’s the RMV. Pray for me. Especially if you’re from one of those religious traditions with long, drawn-out prayers.
This may take a while.
Until today, Doug Brendel has lived on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Henceforth, however, it’s possible you may only be able to find him at the RMV office in Danvers, or at DougBrendel.com.
I have no claim to greatness, I realize that. And in this world of 100,000 YouTube channels, it’s harder than ever to lay claim to greatness. The closest you’re likely to come is to meet someone great, and you hope somehow that some residue of that greatness rubs off on you. You might even fantasize that maybe, somehow, it made a difference for that great person that they met you. I shook Jimmy Carter’s hand once, during his first presidential campaign, and then he won. Coincidence? I bumped into the newsman Peter Jennings, literally, in a hotel lobby. Then he died. Coincidence, absolutely. But at least I bumped into Peter Jennings. The movie star Ginger Rogers handwrote me a letter. I display it in a frame in my office. Brushes with greatness.
This week we observe the one-year anniversary of the passing of the great man, the longtime Ipswich Chronicle owner Bill Wasserman. I confess, when I first crossed his path, I didn’t recognize his greatness; I was too new to Ipswich to know he was already legendary. Sitting in the front row at Town Meeting, I was drawing lame cartoons of the various speakers. Over the course of a few Town Meetings, Bill came to the citizens’ mic and spoke his mind, and I scribbled. I just thought he was an ordinary mortal — articulate, insightful, clever, but let’s face it, also elderly, a bit bent over, curly white hair gone a little wild. I auto-sorted him into a stereotype and thought nothing of it.
Today, every time the Ipswich Local News arrives in your mail (and you can’t stop it even if you want to because it comes to you via a nonprofit postal permit), you have, in large measure, Bill Wasserman to thank. Even more importantly, and to be serious for a moment, you have Wasserman to thank that there’s a newspaper at all. Certainly a string of editors, reporters, advertisers, and others served as building blocks over the years; but Wasserman was a cornerstone. He shepherded the Chronicle operation for years; and then, as that paper faded, he came alongside John Muldoon to launch the Ipswich Local News. Wasserman in his 90’s was out there on the pavement, hawking ads for the fledgling weekly. Some may have had the temerity to snicker, but it was only a coverup for the awe we had to feel. We were witnessing a kind of greatness. Wasserman supported and promoted the new paper, and look: it succeeded. Coincidence?
He complained from time to time about the “Outsidah.” He didn’t like my frequent mentions of area businesses if they weren’t paying for advertising. I imagine if I wrote my columns further in advance, I could have given Bill notice of any businesses I would be naming, and then he could drop in on them in a trenchcoat and a fedora and muscle them for some advertising dollars. But there was no such lead-time in my calendar, so countless local businesses were spared the Wasserman strong-arm, and they have my procrastination to thank for that.
Even when he was annoyed, however, Bill was unfailingly gracious. Early in my time of working with him on the paper, in a long string of emails between the great man and editor Muldoon and me, I somehow lost track of Wasserman’s first name and referred to him as “Ed.” Wasserman didn’t get angry; he got even. He responded simply by proceeding to call me “Alan.”
In a week or two, I’ll have the joy of delivering my 400th “Outsidah” column. I have served multiple editors. But Bill Wasserman cast a unique shadow. Too late, I came to realize that the bent, curly-headed shape was the shape of greatness. Too soon, he was gone. I don’t care if he was 94. It was too soon for me. Alan needed more time with Ed.
Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, where the ghost of Bill Wasserman occasionally drops in to offer advice. Follow Doug at DougBrendel.com.
An Open Letter to Ipswich Selectperson Tammy Jones:
Tammy, don’t quit. Retract your resignation. Rescind your reversal. Rethink your recalculation. Revoke it, repeal it, repudiate it. Renege! You won’t regret it.
I know you love the job; you said so yourself. You’re only quitting because of those damnable personal and professional obligations. I get it, I really do. I know how distracting and draining it can be to deal with annoying life-details like mental health and children and that ominous hissing under the hood of the Saab.
And I know the $1.25 per meeting that the Town of Ipswich pays you for Select Board duty just doesn’t go far enough in the checkout aisle at Shaw’s.
Let me help.
I bring you good news. You don’t need to quit. Sure, they scraped your name off the Ipswich Select Board webpage within minutes of your resignation announcement, even though it won’t be official till October 26th. Still — regardless — I assure you, Tammy — there is hope.
Donald Trump gives us hope.
Yes, we have our nation’s actual second-term president to thank. How so? Well, our awesome leader has recently established the fact that the nation’s chief executive can declassify top-secret materials just by thinking about it. This is fact, not fake. “When the president does it,” Richard Nixon declared, “it is not illegal.” (According to at least three current Justices of the Supreme Court, it’s already “settled law.”)
How does this breakthrough in governance relate to you, Selectperson Tammy Jones? Here’s how:
“Thinking it makes it real” is not merely a federal matter. Thanks to the beautiful reality of trickle-down economics (invented in the Reagan era and indisputably verified ever since then), whatever our true president says on Truth Social universally applies to every level of government, top to bottom — all the way from the supreme halls of ultimate power at Mar-a-Lago, where a great man was robbed of the presidency, to the humble office of the lowliest local police chief who once dreamed of becoming an interim town manager. And everywhere in between. Which includes you, dear Tammy.
This means that you don’t need to attend those tiresome Select Board meetings. It’s a whole new world. You don’t even really need to log on via Zoom. They send you the meeting agenda in advance; click on it when you feel like it. Wherever you are.
Maybe you’re lounging with your iPad in front of the fire, in an elegant evening dress. Maybe you’re on the toilet, on your phone. Doesn’t matter. Scan the agenda items at your leisure.
“One Day All Alcohol License for the Baptist Church.” Waddaya think? Blip. You just voted.
“Four million dollars for the Bruni Project Backward Time-Travel Feasibility Study.” Waddaya think? Blip. You just voted.
You need to report on the progress of the Market Street Traffic Misdirection Subcommittee? Blip. You just delivered your speech. And it was awesome.
Tammy, I’m so glad for you. Glad that you’re serving on our Select Board now, when “thinking makes it real,” instead of, say, seven or eight years ago, back when it had to be real first. With this new system, you can stay on the board without ever showing up, and make a greater impact than ever.
Of course we would rather see you there in person, at Select Board meetings. But if it’s not possible to have you physically present, we would still be grateful for the benefit of your perspectives on Town issues. You’ve contributed well. We need your thinking.
Think positive, Tammy. These days, thinking is all it takes!
(Doug Brendel lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts. At least he thinks so. Track his meanderings via DougBrendel.com.)
I live in Ipswich, I love Ipswich, I chose Ipswich, I prefer not to leave Ipswich.
In fact, I prefer not to leave my bedroom.
Working from home as a writer, my chosen commute is bed to toilet and back. Work uniform: bathrobe.
But my work takes me out of town, out of state, out of the country, and far too often.
This past week, I found myself in Los Angeles. That’s California, if you’re not familiar with U.S. geography. California, which, if not technically “out of the country,” is pretty darn close to it.
On the other hand, in this globalized world of ours, far-flung cultures have mushed together, so that one place is more and more like the next place, and the previous place, and every other place. In the iPhone age, you can visit the Taj Mahal while sitting on the toilet. And someone living near the Taj Mahal may be looking at you as well.
Apparently, we’re all in this together.
Over time, each culture bleeds into all the others. Have you recently spent the night in a hotel? They give you lotion. Squint at the bottle. What do they call it? “Sage and avocado”? “Citrus and gasoline”? It doesn’t matter. All hotel lotion smells the same, from Motel 6 to the Ritz. Forget about uniqueness. The world is global now.
Our cultural mashup didn’t start with the Internet. No, we have Dwight Eisenhower to blame for this mass mess. He’s the president who gave us the interstate highway system, with its standardized rectangular green interchange signs and square yellow “Exit 25 mph” signs. Thanks to Dwight, every mile of the United States looks like every other mile of the United States. Drive Montana, and the signage makes it practically Massachusetts.
So this past week, when I was on the West Coast, I had to pinch myself each morning to get reoriented to the new reality, because L.A. is virtually indistinguishable from Ipswich. If I didn’t keep my wits about me, I might go down the skyscraper elevator and out the automatic hotel doors and into the world of castoff syringes and crazies chanting end-of-the-world warnings and mistakenly think I was at a Planning Board meeting.
(There was a guy on the sidewalk selling Universal Studios tour tickets. He seemed familiar. I think I may have seen him on the Ipswich Community Giving page on Facebook.)
Getting through the day in L.A. was a challenge, I confess, as I repeatedly lost track of where I was. I stood paralyzed at Hollywood & Vine, trying to figure out how to get to Zumi’s. And why is the ocean on the wrong side? Oh, wait. It’s L.A. Not Ipswich. L.A. But how to tell them apart?
Here is there. There is here. Everywhere is everywhere.
You can get “Ipswich clams” at Connie & Ted’s, in West Hollywood. And you can get a “California burger” at Rudy’s in Somerville. If I type a casual preference for Caffeine-Free Diet Coke in a note to a friend via my laptop keyboard, a dozen ads for Caffeine-Free Diet Coke delivery services roar into my life.
The utter equivalence of every environment — every phone, every screen, every tweet, every conversation — is turning us into robots. We have no unique experiences. We have only corporate experiences.
So, see? Why bother with travel?
“Cinnamon and asphalt.” Smells like the Hilton to me. Or the Ipswich Inn.
Exit 70A, 25 mph.
See you there. Or here. Wherever.
(Doug Brendel, intrepid road warrior, officially lives on outer Linebrook Road in Ipswich, Massachusetts, although he spends far too little time there. Track him down, please, by following NewThing.net.)
The Outsidah 