Carlson

By John Carlson— Being fitted with hearing aids a few weeks ago has introduced me to a whole new world of aural perception. Everything is amplified. For example, who knew flushing a toilet could sound like you were going over Niagara Falls in a barrel? And ripping open a bag of fresh pork rinds? Godzilla made less of a racket stomping through the heart of Tokyo’s Noodle District. This convinces me I needed hearing aids all along. For years Nancy claimed the same, but I doubted her. Instead, I maintained if she’d simply undergo intense therapy to correct her wide-ranging…

By John Carlson— Some people have infestations of cockroaches, stink bugs or termites. Nancy and I? We have an infestation of slides. You know the kind … those stiff flat picture slides your father shot incessantly when you were a kid, as if he were a paparazzi and you were the subject of his latest photo essay, “Our Boy Blubberpuss.” Can’t say I ever cared for them. I spent way too many Sunday nights fidgeting in our darkened Baptist church, watching slide shows prepared by missionaries to faraway places. They always featured formerly barefooted kids who’d been bouncing around in…

By John Carlson— It seems an unlikely room to have spawned a cultural icon. Partially bordered by heavy curtains, inside there are a couple old television cameras, big hulking ones bearing headsets and lengths of looped electrical cables. There is what can best be described as an industrial-sized easel, a tall ungainly looking thing, steadied below by a large brick. And there are some stacked paintings rendered in a style as comfortingly familiar as fresh apple pie. Oh, and one more thing. There’s the voice … “Listen to the voice,” said one visitor, who happened to be my sister, Patty…

By John Carlson— In response to yucky feelings brought about by the coronavirus, earlier this year Nancy and I pondered adopting a back-to-the-land lifestyle promising a tasty Thanksgiving Day payoff. Our plan: Raise our own turkeys. We were very excited about this, which isn’t surprising. After all, while we were never exactly back-to-the-land, mushroom-munching hippies, in 1982 we did subscribe to Mother Earth News for six whole issues. Our plans came to naught, though. With the failure to approve raising chickens in the city this summer, it only stood to reason that raising turkeys was outlawed, too. It didn’t take…

By John Carlson— You know how on Sundays many Hoosiers visit car lots, comparison shopping when there aren’t any sales people around to interrupt their looking? Nancy and I recently joined them. We weren’t kicking tires, though. We were kicking headstones. Not that we were actually kicking headstones. Walk around kicking headstones and you’ll need a pair of crutches to hobble back to your car. But we were kicking headstones in a figurative manner, just gathering ideas of what’s available for sale out there. Having pondered the purchase of our headstone for awhile, we figured we might as well start…

By John Carlson— Ball State University’s Emens Auditorium has always been great at providing entertainment. But burritos? Not so much. That changed recently, though. Perhaps to remind folks it’s riding out the pandemic’s deleterious effects along with the rest of us, Emens brought “Food Network Star” personality Jyll Everman to Muncie, virtually, for a free on-line cooking class. Nancy and I being a study in contrasts, we were buzzed about this, it being one of the few interests we share. She’s always looking to expand her kitchen skills by cooking things. I’m always looking to expand the size of my…

By John Carlson— There’s a new boogeyman haunting the streets of Muncie this Halloween, and his name is COVID-19. For kids, this sucks. Looking back on my past Halloweens, I remember them as an unrestrained joy, special days that lasted well into my forties. Not that in my forties I pretended to be a kid. I wasn’t going door-to-door all scrunched down while holding a paper sack and hollering “Trick or treat!” in a pre-pubescent falsetto. Much as I loved them, my trick-or-treating days ended once I hit thirteen. But then my own kids came along. That meant I could…

By John Carlson— For our birthdays, my wife and I gave each other a flagpole. A flagpole is one of those gifts a couple gives one another when they have everything they need, plus way too much of what they don’t need. Oh, sure, there are those fantasy gifts you’d love but know you’ll never receive. I suppose for Nancy that’d be a magical time/travel machine that put her in a first-class booking on Viking River Cruises whenever she clicked her heels. For me? Maybe it’d be a fully aerobatic airplane like an Extra 300, the joke being you can…

By John Carlson— About two years ago, I bought an airplane. About two weeks ago, I sold my airplane. In the intervening years, I did a lot of thinking, mostly about the fact that some people probably shouldn’t own airplanes. On the other hand, if I hadn’t owned my Quicksilver GT400 ultralight, I’d never have understood this important truth. What I have also learned is that, while an owner needn’t be some hotshot certified airframe and powerplant technician to successfully interact with an airplane, it helps to at least have a detectable level of mechanical IQ. Which, it turns out,…