After Memorial Day

I'm glad Memorial Day is over with.

For one thing, I get a little tired of all the war movies they dust off for Memorial Day. It's not that I don't honor the sacrifice of the men and women who were killed in the line of duty for our benefit - I just don't think much of most war movies, and somehow watching my favorite war movie, Das Boot, just doesn't seem like much of a way to celebrate Memorial Day (especially in view of the fact that my dad, a ordinary GI, crossed the Atlantic in a convoy that the guys in Das Boot would likely have loved to attack).

Most modern war movies are exceedingly graphic, full of blood and guts and suffering and personal crises and emotional breakdowns. Most older war movies are full of gooey, half-baked ideological smarm. For Memorial Day, the ideological smarm seems more appropriate, but there's a limit to how many times I can watch Bataan or Sands of Iwo Jima or even Battle Of The Bulge - I just can't seem to get enough of watching all those M24 Chaffees running around in the Ardennes portion of Southern California, but after a while the movie just wears me down.

The main reason I'm glad Memorial Day is over is that any time there is a holiday, I can't for the life of me figure out what day the garbage truck will come. It's now Friday and my garbage can is still stuffed, despite having been out on the street since Tuesday. It's as though Parks and Sons skipped the whole week!

And that's a pity, because I had Big Plans for an empty trash can this weekend. In the immortal words of Albus Dumbledore, "Alas. Earwax."

I'm a helpless list-maker, though I notice that this behavior mostly manifests itself at work and may represent nothing more than an easy way to kill twenty minutes. Every Thursday or Friday I jot down a quick list of things I want to accomplish over the weekend, and it all starts out so well. The list will look like this after a few minutes:

* Pull weeds in front yard
* Blow out garage with leaf blower
* Fix flat tire on tractor

But after another ten minutes, the list starts to look pretty daunting:

* Pull weeds in front yard
* Blow garage out with leaf blower
* Fix flat tire on tractor
* Revise homemade dozer blade for tractor
* Plant 23 bushes
* Repaint back yard fence
* Buy 19 tons of ABC and 90 bags of cement and a cement mixer
* Fix the old push lawnmower
* Find a place that sells size 14 EE boots
* Change oil in car, truck and both tractors
* Figure out why tractor headlights don't work
* Weld something

Give me another ten or fifteen minutes and the list turns into the Theater of the Absurd:

* Pull weeds in front yard
* Blow garage out with leaf blower
* Fix flat tire on tractor
* Revise homemade dozer blade for tractor
* Plant 23 bushes
* Repaint back yard fence
* Buy 19 tons of ABC and 90 bags of cement and a cement mixer
* Fix the old push lawnmower
* Find a place that sells size 14 EE boots
* Change oil in car, truck and both tractors
* Figure out why tractor headlights don't work
* Weld something
* Paint bedroom
* Take out carpet and install ceramic tile
* Dig a water retention basin and completely revise flood control scheme
* Rebuild draft control mechanism in the big tractor so it actually works
* Build a raised deck on the back patio
* Build a hay cover
* Build a tractor shed
* Plant 83 trees
* Solve world hunger
* Bring peace to the Middle East
* Cure the heartbreak of psoriasis
* Fix the imbalance of trade

But, seeing as my trash can didn't get dumped during the week, I guess I won't be getting to any of that.

Alas. Earwax.