Bruce the Blog

Last Friday, I roved over to The Terrace Club on Route 6N in Mahopac to catch Class Action, a popular Yorktown rock ‘n’ roll cover band fronted by Gary Cusano, a lawyer by day and fierce rocker by night. Gary and Company have been very generous and kind to our Harrison Apar Field of Dreams Foundation, twice donating their services to help us raise money.

I like to support those who support our efforts and it helps that I really like to “lounge” around on a Friday night to chill after the work week, socialize, and listen to thumping music. Class Action does justice to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Billy Joel, The Rolling Stones and the like.

On Friday night, The Terrace Club was packed for the 10:00 p.m. performance. Before I left home, Elyse asked if I expected to see anyone I knew. “Probably Rob Reiss,” I told her, referring to a Yorktown physical therapist who is a friend of the band’s and with whom I played some pocket billiards when Class Action played a few months ago at O’Malley’s in Mount Kisco. Sure enough, Rob WAS there with wife Margot.

Asking the bartendress to start a tab for me, she asked my name. “First or last,” I asked, as if it mattered. There’s not too many Bruces, so that would have worked without my tab going to another Bruce down the mahogany or vice versa. But I chose my surname. “Apar,” I recalled it was.

At that moment, the gentleman occupying the stool to my left (I was standing, my preferred position when I’m hanging out — and there were no stools left anyhow) turned, looked at me, and fairly blurted, “Bruce Apar!”

When you’re in the news business, you’re not sure if that shock of recognition will be followed by an embrace or a sucker punch. Fortunately, in this case, I was embraceable.

It was someone I hung out with in Westhampton Beach 30 years ago as a half-shareholder in his summer house. He has a video of me he’s been wanting to give me for a couple years. I can guess what’s on it, and so can Elyse, who happened to be dating this person when she met me. I think the video I can wait to see involves a swimming pool, a raft, and a snorkel. Ankles aweigh!

This person was at The Terrace Club with someone other than his spouse. Later, another person I know entered the restaurant with two persons other than his spouse, but that’s because she is his ex.

It was then I realized we must all have happened upon a secret meeting of the Mid Life Crisis Men’s Club to which we were subliminally invited. I must have RSVPed without knowing it. My own MLC includes entertaining thoughts — serious, almost-ticketing thoughts — of traveling solo to Santa Fe to stay at the vacation home of a Syracuse U. frat brother who’s invited me several times. It seemed a good opportunity for early April, when Elyse and Elissa (with college friend in tow) and I are scheduled to be in Vero Beach at her parents. I figured “Lucy” (my nickname for Elissa since the day she was born — with red hair) would be otherwise occupied with her pal, as would Elyse with her folks, so I wouldn’t be very missed.

I was getting pretty excited about bacheloring it with my friend Norm in stunning Santa Fe, where his backyard views go on forever, and the days are filled with leisurely hiking, museum-going and soaking in Mother Nature in all her glory.

I found cheap airfares, surfed online for events we could attend and — then it hit me. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Lucy will be out of college in two years, off on a life of her own, and how many family vacations do we have left?

How many more times will I be playing golf with my father-in-law Buddy, an octogenarian who shoots his age. His love of golf is manifest in his and Roz’s backyard, which looks out over their golf community’s 14th fairway.

Then there’s the painfully obvious missing piece of our family that my absence would only magnify. And so it was Tuesday morning getting ready for work that I reversed course, calling Elyse to tell her it was ixnay on the Santa Fe. I spoke about my wanting to be there for her, for Lucy and for her parents. “You mean because they would think it’s wrong if you weren’t,” asked Elyse. “I think it’s wrong” was my reply, fairly boasting that I had figured something out for myself and felt the conviction deep inside me without compromise. It was a character building moment that was virtually tangible, excuse the oxymoron.

“I have to say I’m happy,” she told me. She had not objected one iota to my previous plan to go west, middle-aged man, part of her ethos to “not tell you what you should do.” Hmmm. Can I have that declaration etched in marble perhaps and cemented to our front porch for all to see? I’ll get back to you on that. I said that I knew she wasn’t very sanguine about my solo act and knew she was muting that dismay. I was happy to hear her say she was happy about my paternalistic decision to be a family man at the right moment.

Meanwhile, back at The Terrace Club, I was single too, for the simple reason, as I told someone who inquired, “Where’s Elyse,” that our body clocks seem to run counterclockwise to one another, so “I come alive at night when she’s ready for bed.”

Just to prove my point, on Saturday night, after a full day of reading Curious George to preschoolers at the Jefferson Valley Mall Book Blast, then rushing to a special meeting of the Yorktown Athletic Club board, on which I sit, Elyse and I were two of 300 laughing our assets off at a five-temple comedy night at Yorktown Jewish Center that featured three very funny standup acts.

It was over about 11:00 p.m., and my evening was only getting started. I headed for one of my several homes away from home, Colonial Terrace in Cortlandt Manor (Travelers Rest being another), where The Foundation for Excellence in Yorktown Schools was holding its annual casino night fundraiser, with a late night after-party that seemed tailor made for my nocturnal schedule’s event hopping. I got there 11:30 and most of the crowd was still enjoying the evening.

On Sunday afternoon, Elyse and I enjoyed the off-center comedy Kimberly Akimbo at The Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls (which I reviewed in this week’s North County News).

It’s been a quiet week so far, which is fine by me because I could use the break, but the fun resumes Friday with a Rocky Patel open house at Doc James Cigars in Shrub Oak, where owner Adam DeSiena is hosting Rocky himself to promote some new smokes. Then it’s on to the grand opening in Peekskill of Birdsall House, a highly anticipated brewery.

Saturday we’re off to New Jersey for the bat mitzvah of another Syracuse U frat brother’s daughter, then to the Lakeland Education Foundation Casino Night at Colonial Terrace, honoring my pal Chuck Newman, where a record crowd of 320+ is expected. That’s some turnout. No surprise, cause Chuck is some kind of special guy. I’d love to stay for the dinner, but a St. Patty’s Day biennial house party is waiting in Yorktown, and it’s a doozy.

But first some personal grooming to attend to. Thursday night I’m trying a new place to get my head handled, Michael Robert Salon on Lexington Avenue at Route 6 in Mohegan Lake, next to Augie’s Restaurant, then I’ll swing by to say hello to “Augie” herself — Audrey Hochroth — and husband Sal Barone.

Maybe they’ll even let me sneak in a private audition for their Augie’s Idol Season 2, which begins April 13-14. Oh, you mean judges don’t have to audition? Never mind then.

Last week was not a good one for my lofty claim that I write a daily blog. Posted Tuesday, then not again until past midnight Thursday, then skipped the weekend altogether. Clearly, I gotta get this blog thing down pat. Speaking of Richard Nixon, my pal and NCN’s political columnist Andy Bazzo, a loyal Bruce the Blog reader, saw me Thursday in the NCN office and had to make a smart-alecky remark about my new glassless look that he learned about — where else — on my blog.

“You know,” said Andy, as we stood in a room other than the newsroom, “from the side, without your glasses, you look like Richard Nixon — you have his nose.” Well, I hope the statute of limitations is up on my purloining a U.S. President’s proboscis. Shades of the memorably hysterical scene in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” when he points a gun at a disembodied nose he is stealing in order to clone it into a full-fledged person.

Adding insult to injury, the Amazing Bazzo then left me a voicemail on Friday feigning umbrage that I didn’t mention his — ahem — Nixonian compliment in my post time-stamped March 5 (even though I wrote it Thursday night, tapping away well past midnight). Sorry, Andy, but being compared physiognomically to our esteemed 37th President is more noxious than Nixonian.

Richard Milhous Nixon, in the view of many, has paradoxically been treated kindly by the footsteps of history, and not without good reason. The stage play turned acclaimed Hollywood film, Frost/Nixon, has helped elicit retrospective sympathy for his Shakespearean-size tragic descent as the only U.S. President to resign from office in disgrace as the self-inflicted victim of hubris more elevated than Mount Olympus.

Couple the evolutionary forgiveness burnished by the sands of time with his rising reputation as a visionary internationalist for his famed relationship building with China long before the rest of the world caught up to that enlightened collaboration, and — voila! — you have one of the two or three most fascinating, intellectual and complex Presidents of the 20th Century.

Come to think of it, Andy, thanks for invoking Richard Nixon’s name in the same breath as mine. I’ll take my presidential comparisons wherever I can get them.
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In the 15th month of my bodily reincarnation, now I get comments to stop getting so skinny, or that I’m getting as thin as Elyse. Hardly. Don’t worry about me. I used to say, about 15 years ago, that my cholesterol level could win the American League batting title because it was 330. (Today’s it’s below 200.) Well, my body fat percentage is well into double digits.

Since lots of people still ask me what I did to lose the 40-plus pounds that went thataway, and think I’m still losing weight, the answer is I’m not. I’ve stabilized at about 186, from a high of 230 in January 2009.

The further answer is that diet is only the half of it. Regular exercise — combining cardio and weight exercises — is the other all-important half. I’ve been trying to lose those stubborn love handles and flatten the tummy and all that stuff that is exceedingly difficult to do when you’re in the second half-century of this thing called life. Doing three sets of 15-20 leg lifts on the Captain’s Chair helps, as does high-intensity interval training on the treadmill, where I alternate jogging easily for two minutes at 3.5 mph, then sprinting — or my version of it, at 6-8 mph — for 90 seconds to two minutes, for a total of 17-20 minutes two to three times a week. It does seem to slim down the silhouette even without shedding more poundage. But if it looks like I’ve lost more weight, who am I to complain?

I’ve heard tell that people get contact lenses so they don’t have wear to glasses all the time, thus dispensing with all those old, lame jokes about “Four Eyes,” which nobody ever really hears anymore anyhow, but we’re talking here about seeing, not hearing.

Well, I’m not those people. I’m people who just got contact lenses for the first time ever (see Blog Entry 03.02.10, “Lens Me Your Eyes”) within a hair’s breadth of my big birthday that isn’t 50. When people my age negotiate a mid-life crisis by going the “I don’t need no stinkin’ bifocals anymore” route, it’s not such a simple event. It’s more of a drawn-out process.

I thought, in my “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty” naivete, that acquiring contacts meant losing eyeglasses for the most part. But, as the inimitable John Belushi might say, nooooooooooooooooooo, not in my special needs case.

I’m nearsighted, and wear glasses to see distances. Although nine out of 10 doctors say I could read or do close work sans glasses, I never take them off because the lower portion of the lens is ground to clarify very short distances .

My new contacts, contrariwise (one of my favorite obscure words), are not bifocals. While they have done wonders for the totally blurry world I know without glasses, which now is in high definition with my contacts, but any object that comes within about four feet of my face is now a blur because the unifocal contacts don’t compute that distance. That’s the problem. The solution? Don’t ask.

But before we get there, let me bore you to tears with the trivial news that on Day 4 of becoming a contact lens addict, I achieved the Olympian Gold Medal nirvana of removing the contacts from each orb in a single try. That compares with the dozen or more attempts it took me on Day 1 to both put in and remove the contacts from each eye. Keep in mind that the technique I was shown for removing the soft lens was to pinch it as it sat on my cornea. Sounds like fun, huh? Miraculously, now that I’m with the program, the contact lens removal procedure seems easy and, more important, it works pretty well! I’m starting to master installing them as well.

My opthalmologist — apparently following the similar advice of my wife Elyse, a lifelong contact lens wearer — recommended I buy what Elyse calls “Cheaters,” but what the drugstore displays drily label “Reading Glasses.” They are about 20 bucks, unless they have a fancy brand name like Gel, in which case they cost more than twice as much.

Dr. Dieck wrote on a piece of paper that I should get 1.75-power cheaters when working at a computer terminal (about 2-3 feet from my face) and 2.50-power glasses for extremely close-up reading. Elyse scoffed at the seemingly absurd notion of having to obtain two sets of reading glasses. She surmised if I split the difference and got 2.0-power glasses, it would suit me just as well.

Being her husband, I of course didn’t listen to that reasonably sage advice. I went with the guy with the medical degree. Oh, I also needed non-prescription sunglasses, he told me, to put over my contacts, then I’d really have it made in the shades.

Shopping in A&P, I espied an endcap display of attractively-packaged “High Definition” sunglasses. And to think they’re not even made with plasma or LCD! When I found out they cost 10 bucks … SOLD! Then, upon donning them, I realized they revealed the anatomical asymmetry I never before noticed of one ear being much lower on my head than the other. Either that or the El Cheapo glasses are so poorly mass manufactured they don’t sit squarely on my noggin. Back to A&P they will go. I’ll upgrade to a pair from CVS maybe.

So, to sum up, my lifelong dream of having contact lenses that would rid me of those unsightly spectacles once and for all has resulted in my owning and variously using the following inventory of eyeball enhancements:

1 pair prescription contact lenses (prescribed by doctor to wear maximum 6 hours a day until acclimated)
1 pair prescription eyeglasses to wear when not wearing contacts
1 pair prescription sunglasses that clip on over the eyeglasses
1 pair 1.75 reading glasses for computer terminal work
1 pair 2.50 reading glasses for extreme close-up work like reading
1 pair off-the-shelf El Cheapo sunglasses to wear over the prescription contact lenses
1 huge headache trying to keep all the above organized and within easy reach
1 huge lanyard on which all the above can hang to keep within easy reach and which I conveniently can use to hang myself with if I ever decide to end it all instead of contending with the quintuplet-lenses monster that my contacts have created

Do the math. Contact lenses x 5 pair of lenses = 10 eyes. How did that happen?

When I mentioned the angle for this blog to Elyse, she started laughing heartily. She’s my reliable one-woman focus group. Then she added, “I can see [our late son] Harrison laughing his head off at you with the contacts. He’d be making jokes right and left.” Her invocation of Harrison’s soaring sense of humor started me crying my head off.

I told her the burst of emotion also been pent up. I had thought since the weekend about how in his glory Harrison would be with my alma mater, and his fave college, Syracuse now Number 1 in the NCAA basketball rankings. Can’t remember the last time, if ever, that happened. How I wish he was here to enjoy that with me. Two weeks after we lost Harrison in March 2003, two weeks after he had filled in his NCAA bracket with Syracuse in the Final Four, the Orange for the first time won the NCAA Championship.

It didn’t exactly help keep my tear ducts dry that just last night was the Jewish anniversary of his passing, known as his yahrzeit, and we still tonight had the ritualistic 24-hour candle burning to commemorate the solemn occasion.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my new contacts. The question really, though, is whether my eyeglass solution is half empty or half full? I’m sure Harrison would have the answer. And I’m sure it would be funny as all heck and he’d have me doubled over, laughing so hard I’d be crying. Like now.

There is a page elsewhere in this blogosphere of mine titled “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty.”It’s enough to make you sixty to decide a decade past your half-century mark that contact lenses might be a good idea. I acquired eye lamination for the first time in my life yesterday, to be exact.

I remember like it was yesterday when I first found out I needed four eyes instead of two. My spouse — who happened not to be the same person that proudly carries that mantle today, but enough about either of them — was getting on my case (some things don’t change even when spouses do) in the motor vehicle I was driving that I didn’t see the exit sign in time. I don’t understand what her problem was with me traversing three lanes, from the passing lane (which apparently is news to those slow-witted types who sit there without a clue they are in a passing lane, not a sitting lane, and are supposed to get back to the middle lane after passing cars in the middle lane), to the slow lane in one not-so-smooth move.

So Wife 1 — ahem — “sugggested” I get an eye exam. This was probably some 35 years ago. Wouldn’t you know it. She was right. I needed glasses.

I’ve had ‘em ever since, but after 35 years of gazing at the world with my cranium under pressure, I thought it was about time I escaped from the plastic prison. It’s not as if I didn’t get the focal point a long time ago.

Wife 2 wondered aloud why somebody of my — ahem — maturity (or maybe she said age) would first want contacts at this stage of existence. It was then I realized she didn’t get the memo about the mid-life crisis that visits men of a certain age. Somebody could make a fortune sending email blasts about men’s mid-life crisis to women, charging a premium for addressing it to their wives, or at least to their current wives. Their former wives likely would just laugh upon receiving it, relieved that they missed that milestone.

So March 1, 59 years 346 days after I arrived on earth, my eyeballs lost their virginity to Bausch & Lomb soft lenses. Let it be recorded that this fateful fall from grace occurred in the Mt. Kisco office of Dr. William Dieck. It was quite a learning curve enduring the tutorial of taking the contacts out and then putting them in. As Brenda, the affable lab technician, told me, some people can’t wear contacts simply because they can’t stand to have anybody touch their eyeballs, not even with their own hands.

When Brenda first put them in, she told me to cool my heels (not in those words) in the waiting room for about 10 minutes to adjust to the new sensation. I ambled around the eyeglass store that abuts the doctor’s office and of course immediately and impatiently hightailed over to the nearest looking glass to eyeball my newly naked visage. Whoa! To me, it seemed, jeepers, creepers, what a pair of peepers you  have, grandma.  My eyes seemed notably larger, like I had the lead in a high school production of Mr. Magoo Goes to the Opthalmologist, except without his glasses. (You know, high school shows can’t always afford all the props.)

I must have tried putting the lens in and removing it a dozen times in each eye. The same fiasco recurred that evening at home as I tried taking the lenses out. Then again in the office Tuesday as I endeavored to put them in at about 3:30, timing it to follow the good doctor’s direction that I try not wearing them more than six hours a day for the first week to acclimate myself.

Once the contacts were in at the doctor’s office, though, I quickly liked the liberation, as I told Dr. Dieck, who chuckled in a way that seemed to say, “OK, pal, whatever you say.”  No sooner was I in my car, calling Elyse to tell her mission accomplished, than I reflexively went to adjust the glasses that no longer were bridging my nose.

I was off to find drugstore reading glasses the doctor said I’d need now to do close work, which is part and parcel of my profession.  Plus I’d need a pair of cheapo sunglasses when wearing the contacts.

Getting the little suckers in and out isn’t my idea of the jollies, but once they’re in place, so far, so good.

I’m trying my darnedest to conjure some contact lens humor. It’s slow going, but I envision light at the end of the tunnel. I have a penchant for puns and, let’s face it, my jokes don’t get any cornea than that.

Up at 7:20. Clock flashing 2:35. We lost power, my powers of deductive reasoning tell me. We regained power, ditto the deduction, kiddo. Yippee. Out bedroom window. Wow, it’s weally white out there, wifey. Wifey: “Yes, I know, you wuss, where were YOU at 6:00a when you shoulda been shoveling snow instead of shoveling the shoot last night at your computer doing whatever it is you do on that dagnabit demonic device.” (Disclosure: All previous dialogue is purely figment of my imagination. Never said. Never happened. But this is a blog, which means half of what is writ is true. Like the famous advertising axiom, you just don’t know which half, unless the blogger tells you, and even then, who knows? As for anonymous bloggers, that creepy crawly species of digital devolution, you can’t believe anything those gutless wonders write. They blog for therapy when they should be IN therapy, but I can’t help them there because I’m not a licensed practitioner.) How’s THAT for a protracted parenthetical aside? Send your answers to bapar@ncnlocal.com if you don’t want to win a prize because I got nuttin’ to give.

Like the little kid I never stopped being, the profusion of snow excites me. I can’t wait to get outside and get to the office. I’m assuming there will be few of us there, mainly those like myself who live within a coupla miles, within the Yorktown town limits.

It may sound flakey, but even though on days like this a person can feel adrift, I have ice in my veins, and perhaps water on the brain. But I say, bring on the snow, man.

Open the garage door. There’s a curvature of snow rising up to where the door just was before retracting on its creaky pulley contraption. I pick up a shovel to push some of the snow away from the portal, all the while thinking this may not be the best idea because my back has been bothering me since bowling those three games Sunday night with my YAC brethren in support of Yorktown High baseball coach Sean Kennedy’s fundraiser for the team. Let’s just say after a long layoff, I found bowling currently is not right up my alley, and it didn’t help that my back was infirm before the ball got rolling (which explains why my game from the get-go was in the gutter until I found my graceless form).

I pulled my 1998 RAV 4 ragtop out and immediately had the sensation of hydroplaning, except on frozen instead of liquid water. It was kinda fun, actually.

At the end of our hammerhead driveway, the car stopped as the wheels kept spinning. I couple of jukes back and forth let me burst through the street-plowed embankment forming a barricade between the publicly-owned street and our bank-owned paved path destined to end in a garage.

I picked up the yellow plastic bag containing the 20th Century artifact that still arrives daily and brought it inside like the once-in-a-while thoughtful husband I oughta be more often-in-a-while. The wife peered outside the warmth of the kitchen and what passes for a virtual mud foyer and declared after eyeballing the snow by the garage entrance that it looked like 18 inches. After I regained my composure from being doubled over laughing at the hyperbolic assessment, I said it was a drift, not fallen snow, and that it probably was less than a foot deep at that.

Elyse produced one of those math-class three-sided rulers with markings on two sides I didn’t understand in trig and still don’t, and sure enough, the snow stopped at about 10 inches. Case closed.

It was now about 8:35 as I proceeded to the office, snapping white-out vignettes with my phone along the way (Verizon can’t offer the iPhone soon enough for my money, and it will take a lot of that for me to change my fruit diet, but I like apples more than blackberries anyhoo.)

The only vehicles I espied between my house and where Route 35 meets Broad Street right past Brookside Elementary were snow plows and that of my neighbor, Yorktown Board of Ed trustee Mark Drexel, who rolled down his window while making the turn from town to Broad as I sat at the Stop sign to ask what I was doing on the road in these conditions. Me: “I’m crazy.” Mark: “Me too.”

Oh, yeah, and there was one other private vehicle, driven by someone who, in this of all conditions, didn’t have his headlights on. He’s of course our Maddening Motorist Award winner of the day, and one only can hope the dunderhead doesn’t cause damage to someone else who knows enough that it’s both common sense and state law to have headlights on in inclement weather so other motorists can more easily see you coming. I barely saw him barreling down Broad Street as I waited to exit our development. Nice going, Slick.

Then, at the intersection of Ridge Street and Route 202, a power line was down, hovering not far above the roof of my car, with Yorktown Police Officer Mike Kahn on the scene. I continued snapping away (photos will be posted at Facebook.com/NCNLocal).

In the middle of town, I could continue to count other cars on one hand. Pulled into Starbucks closed. Edwin’s open. 7-Eleven open. Those business operators should get some kind of prize for customer service beyond the call of duty. Let’s hear it, folks, for neighborhood owned-and-operated businesses. Last time there was a lot less snow falling one afternoon, Panera closed its doors at 4:00 p.m. What’s with these chain operations? Hardly hardy stock. Guess which businesses I’ll be sure to patronize more in the future? The ones who are there when you need them most, that’s who. Local businesses, that’s who.

This is the kind of weather and these are the kinds of times that cause some of us to fret for the future of civilization. Believe it or not, that’s not meant to be either facetious or an exaggeration. A day like Friday, Feb. 26 separates those in the snow from those who don’t want to know what it takes to get the job done.

What does one make of workers who arrive at their Yorktown office at 7:30 a.m. from an hour’s drive away in a different state — none the worse for wear — or who determinedly push ahead from Poughkeepsie to report to work. Or a worker whose husband is shoveling the snowplow-created wall of snow blocking the cul-de-sac driveway so she can get to work on time? These are folks made of sterner stuff when the white stuff causes others to act like the sky is falling.

For an employer, a day like today is a no-win. You can’t exactly expect people to push ahead to get to work under such conditions, but the truth of the matter is I am no mountain man and am far from fearless and not exactly wreckless when it comes to my personal safety and well-being, and I don’t see that this is exactly a record-making meteorological event. The main roads are very passable if you drive with due caution at sensible speeds.

My friend Ahmad Bash, owner of Yorktown’s 7-Eleven, told me this morning that a customer told him, “This is the worst I’ve seen.” Both Ahmad and I concurred it’s far, far from that. “He hasn’t seen much then,” I cracked. Ahmad recalled the storm of 1996 that was appreciably more precipitous than this occurrence. This is no walk in the park, but it’s also not a walk through Central Park at night in the 1970s and ’80s, which in that era was downright foolhardy, if not death-defying. Maybe it still is, but Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg have done yeomans’ work reducing NYC crime in general, so hats off to them both. The only folks who still think NYC is the nation’s crime capital are those who never visited it but hate it nonetheless. I’ve encountered the type in my Left Coast travels especially, like the time one wit advised a friend not to go near Yankee Stadium because it’s in … The South Bronx! (ominous melodramatic music swells here). Of course, the immediate periphery of The Stadium is eminently safe because it has more cops patrolling than a precinct stationhouse.

Weather like this also tests the resourcefulness and sheer competency of TV news. One field reporter described a town where power had gone off and on and off again, labeling that chronic problem “concurrent,” which was as close to “recurring” as he could manage but made no sense. Something tells me he’s not into crossword puzzles. Comic books, maybe. It’s no joke, though. These are professional, very well-paid public presenters and information agents who struggle to speak with authority or lucidity. And you thought Ted Knight’s character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show or William Hurt’s airhead anchor in “Broadcast News” were pure fiction?

When the going gets tough out there, the tough in general don’t seem to be producing TV news coverage, which quickly begins to play like the movie “Groundhog Day.” Every “package,” as those who make TV call it, is a cookie-cutter version of the one before it and after it. How many B rolls of snow plows and salt trucks do we need to see, or motorists whining, or a reporter standing waist-deep in a snowdrift. We get it. It snowed. A lot. Thanks for the incisive reportage.

My opthalmologist’s office is closed today, so my experiment in wearing contacts for the first time in my life will have to wait. When I called a second time to see if anybody would be in the office today, the message service operator told me, “The roads are awful, sir.” Oh, I see (but not with contacts until next week, I guess.)

Well, tell that to a hospital patient who needs a nurse or doctor or orderly, or to someone in the ER waiting for a serious injury to be treated: “We’re sorry, but nobody can help you today because, you know, the roads out there are just awful.” Tell it to the people of Haiti: “We just had 12 inches of snow and you can’t imagine what it’s like. We are completely dysfunctional.” You can say that again. Haitians only wish they could imagine something so relatively uneventful.

Hudson Valley Hospital Center spokesperson Dawn French tells us that “[we] had a couple of dozen staff members stay overnight, some sleeping on inflatable mattresses…to ensure we continue to provide quality care for our patients.  The Engineering Department has worked through the night plowing the hospital to keep it safe for visitors and staff…”

THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT! 

Despite the edgy observations this blog is known to make as a matter of course — that’s commentainment! — I don’t sit in judgment or hold to account or blame anyone for not going to work today (and if you care what I think anyhow, that’s your first mistake; I’m just another jerk with an opinion on everything that doesn’t concern me.)

What can rankle, though, is the attitude of anyone who virtually decides not to go to work the next day based on the eventuality of a forecast — not on the workday’s actuality. It’s not my opinion that matters in that case. It’s just wrong. Maybe it’s time to change jobs for that person, or for the job to be changed for that person. In the case of Friday, Feb. 25, the forecast was prescient and a decision to stay home is well advised. But at other times, when the forecast overstates the actuality, it’s not the weather’s severity that decides who shows up; it’s whether the person’s free will wants to be at work that day.

Now I’m in Chase Media Group offices at my desk. Oops. We lost power. But there’s backup. So, heigh-ho, it’s back to work I go. Where there’s free will, there’s a freeway that’ll take you there. Unless there’s a little (less) snow in the way (than today). Then, where there’s a wimp, there’s no way I’m going in to work on a so-so snowday because I’d rather play than make hay. O-kay! Whatever you say!

Stay safe, warm, dry. And don’t patronize anonymous blogs. If you’re going to get riled up, like by today’s especially bilious blog entry you just read, might as well know who to rant against.

The Wife and The Daughter, who have been known to answer to the given names Elyse and Elissa, respectively, wanted to take in a museum this past Saturday. The Daughter is home for an asynchronous mid-February break from SUNY Oneonta, where elementary ed is her game and math her “concentration,” as they say in academia. It’s asynchronous because none of her buds (or for girls is it buddas?) are on break simultaneously. Dem’s the breaks (and if you’re a Dem dese days, dings definitely are broken, aren’t dey?).

So she is given to doing crazy stuff like auditing an elementary school class at Brookside on Monday and Tuesday, and attending Yorktown’s Board of Ed meeting Monday night to take notes on assignment. And on Saturday, we decided to go get us some culture at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, the place I have loved since I was knee-high to an illegally-opened fire hydrant. There’s no place in the world like Manhattan, not that I’ve been to all that many spots on the globe, so call it just a wild guess. But one with which I find myself eminently comfortable and confident. If you know a more exciting place on the planet than the isle once called Manhatta, please text me the longitude and latitude at your earliest convenience so I can visit it forthwith.

Admittedly, I wasn’t jumping up and down about visiting the cultural mecca indecorously abbreviated as MOMA, which sounds like the name of the mother of a famous cellist. What’s so funny? Makes sense to me that Yo-Yo Ma’s momma would be named Mo-Ma. If you dare to disagree, please stop reading this blog right now and I’ll give you a full refund.

Okay, for those of you still here … I found myself stopping and staring at virtually every objet d’art as we wended our way through the museum, especially absorbed by the exhibit on architecture and landscape, though I wonder what it meant that there was no Frank Gehry on display.

The Monet Water Lilies room was ethereal. I wanted to spend more time in the Joan Jonas video installation in the Akio Morita room (informing The Wife that he is a co-founder of Sony).

The Gabriel Orozco exhibit was too much for The Wife, though I can’t imagine why she didn’t find the first work thoroughly compelling: an empty cardboard box on the floor as you enter the gallery. That was only outdone by the yougurt container tops affixed to the wall in the first room. I could have spent all day studying those for their beautifully rendered expiration dates, but nooooooo, the ladies in my life had to move on to more important things, like the Tim Burton exhibit, which was AWESOME!

To be continued …. bed beckons.

Oh, come on. Please. Who among you doubted that that the New Orleans Saints Necessarily So would vanquish the Indianoplace Dolts? Well, you can hang your hangdog head in shame, justifiably so. The Saints just ain’t about to be denied.

This arguably was one of the bestest superbowl games in the annals of bestest superbowl games. You wanna fight about it, homie? Bring it on, baby boobie!

Oh, well, the NO Saints only won by two touchdowns, yes? You cain’t have ev’ry thin’, kin you?

Playing with great relish the role of truculent network TV executive Arthur Jensen, actor Ned Beatty bellows across a forbidding boardroom slab of wood at posthumously-awarded Best Actor Peter Finch in the film classic “Network”: “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!! Is that clear?!” Later in his show-stopping diatribe, he says, “That is the natural order of things today.”

I have my own natural order of things, except I insist they also apply to others, not just to me. They include being a sensible, mature, well-mannered motorist who parks where there are parking spaces and puts on headlights when necessary so other cars can see mine because that’s one good reason God gave us headlights.

I don’t deny it’s an Obsessive Compulsion I possess — or am possessed by — one of several (”My name is Bruce and I’m an OCaholic”). It’s when people step outside of MY norm, which can mean something as seemingly inconsequential as parking outside of the yellow lines or parking inside the blue disabled parking lines without the requisite permit. This stuff, I am sorry to say, drives me batty. I’m sorry, that is, for the objects of my scorn, not for myself. I’m sorry they are Rudimentary People, to paraphrase the title of Judith Guest’s bestselling 1970s novel-into-film that won Oscars for Best Picture, for director Robert Redford, for supporting actor Timothy Hutton and for writer Alvin Sargent.

Rudimentary denotes something simple in the extreme, or in the first stages of development. It also can be seen as a slightly euphemistic, softer way to say, “rude.” That’s how I view the inconsiderates who park in the middle of driveways at public buildings, like the Starbucks in Yorktown, where I recently jawed at whom I don’t doubt was a very nice woman behind the wheel but whom thought nothing of planting her SUV in the driveway to effectively block those entering and prevent two cars from passing in opposite directions, as the driveway is designed to allow.

Such folks, without meaning to ostensibly, create disorder.

My disorder disorder includes cryptic voicemail messages that say nothing except, “call me,” or that, instead of telling me the topic of the call, waste the caller’s breath and my aural cavity on superfluous, gratuitous, hypothetical reasons about why I might be excused for not calling back (”deathbed,” anyone?).

Gee, thanks for the cheery thought, as well as for proscribing the acceptable limits of my behavior. Of course, I know the caller was jesting about the deathbed remark, but don’t forget, I’m talking about a disorder here on both ends, wherein humor is in the mind of the phoneholder.

My response to such rudimentary behavior as cryptic calls is simple: none. Am I being a big baby about it? That’s a definite probably. That’s what happens when an immovable brat meets an irresistible baby: stasis.

I ran into a rudimentary person of the third kind at food boutique Iron Tomato on Mamaroneck Avenue in White Plains Friday afternoon. My bosses Carla Chase, Frank Rich and I had just finished a very productive meeting with a Westchester County government official and went to grab lunch.

At cafeteria-style Iron Tomato, you first get your food, either from a deli counter or a shelf, pay for it, then find a table. There is no wait service. It was 1:00 p.m., high lunch time, and so three open seats together were scarce at first. When I spotted a couple of tables-for-four with only one person seated, I told Carla I would grab one of them while she finished the transaction and Frank was parking the car.

I approach a window-side table where a lovely young knitted-capped woman is reading a paperback and thoughtfully has her boots perched on the seat directly across from her and her coat draped on the chair next to her. As I quickly discovered, they really were symbological signs that read, “Stay Away.” That’s usually my cue to invade the space of someone so presumptuous to think they own a public space that is readily capacious and available to others as well.

“Anybody else sitting here,” I ask rhetorically and with a modicum of patience evident in my tone because I know her type, who also can be found on Metro North trains where a certain kind of rudimentary passenger thinks nothing of putting a briefcase on the seat next to him even during rush hour when seats are scarce, or doing the same with a piece of clothing, both of which belong on the overhead rack. That’s another case where I purposefully would take the seat occupied by a briefcase to make my point that such a person was not going to passively intimidate me into not sitting there. I’m not sure I ever said it, but I know I used to think to say to one of these beauts, “Maybe I should try to sit on the overhead rack so you can keep your briefcase on the seat.”

Miss Iron Tomato Paperback already is not suffering my presence gladly, to say the least. She fixes a kind of stare on my visage and actually says to me, “What do you want me to do about it?” The subsequent exchange was not at all pretty, but also not loud, although I peripherally noticed some patrons enjoying our ultimate bickering contest. She says I’m rude not to ask her permission to sit there. I reply, “I don’t think so.” She says she didn’t realize it was a “community table” (when in fact at a cafeteria, that’s exactly what it is). I ask if one person like her controls all four seats at the table and tell her I don’t need her permission to sit there. She says she sits there every day. I resist the urge to say, “Well, you’re the most convincing undercover security guard I’ve ever seen” and instead say, “Good for you.” She moves to another table rather than bearing to sit across from yours truly the rest of the time.

Both she and I make a mutual point of glaring at one another for good measure, both of us (I am convinced) trying strenuously not to let the inevitable subcutaneous smirk surface, because we both realize how ridiculous is the entire episode that just transpired.

As I take momentary leave of our newfound acquisition (being the table) to get some condiments, I see my new best friend going over to chat a bit with Carla, no doubt assuring her I’m the only one in our party she thinks is rude. Well, thank goodness for small favors.

When Paperback Polly is leaving, she says to Carla, “Nice talking with you.” I turn to her and say, “Have a nice day!” I was not being facetious. She understandably ignores me. I would too if I were her, but I’m not. I’m an old(er) guy who has learned once I vent, even to a stranger, life is too short not to quickly put it aside and get on with the niceties of existence, precious as they are. One day, I’m sure she’ll feel the same way. At least I hope she does. And I hope that day is today.

Please go to the “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty” page for today’s Bruce the Blog. Thank you and have a nicer day than yesterday but not as nice as tomorrow.

Wall Street. Sixth Avenue. Easy Street. Main Street. Which one doesn’t fit?

Hmmm. Let’s see.

Wall Street is where investment banking treasury mints like Goldman Sachs of Moolah deem it a hardship when, as it just announced, its impoverished workers will just have to make do with only half-million-dollar annual bonuses. Oops. There goes the country club membership, Cougar Plum, at least the backup country club membership when we’re in West Palm. How will we break it to the kiddies when they’re back from their study abroad program at the Etoile d’ Bratwurst in Fleur de Lis?

Sixth Avenue is where wiseacre mediocre media monkeys dispense tens of millions of dollars to middling TV personalities who actually refuse job offers and whose appeal to begin and end with is 90% time and place and booking agent and production values, and 10% personality.  

As a talk show host, Leno is a world-class stand-up comic. As a talk show host, O’Brien is a world-class comedy writer. They both embody The Peter Principle of performing talent, which is to keep rising past your skill set’s glass ceiling until cracks appear in your smooth facade, much as when a TV actor releases an album to cash in on his or her celebrity in the hopes the gullible audience won’t notice they don’t have much of a voice.

But don’t mind me, because I don’t fully get Will Ferrell either. He’s parlayed extremely broad humor and a recyclable shtick of familiar frat-house shenanigans into a blockbuster film career. Only in Hollywood.

Have you ever seen Craig Ferguson on CBS at 11:30. Have you ever been able to stomach him for more than 30 seconds? If you have, I’d like your recipe for Pepto Bismol, because it must work wonders. This guy mugs so shamelessly, broadly and relentlessly, if he were a blogger, he would be me, but probably would have enough sense not to admit it. If success on these amnesia-lovers’ plugathons were dependent on more than a 10% personality quotient, Ferguson would have been canceled before his opening show’s opening monologue.

Craig the Fungus, Conan the Barber and Jay-Won’t-Lay-Low are the avatars of 1960s broadcasting executive Paul Klein’s watershed theory of audience indiscretion that posited couch potatoes slouch towards their LOP as much as their lap: that is, we channel surf like boob-tube zombies until we alight on the Least Objectionable Program. Although I always found him to be more a MOP.

Easy Street is where all the above dwell.

Main Street is where they pave their way to stardom and riches and neuroses when the first falters and the second stagnates because the first falters and the latter sends them into a downward spiral of unproductive maturation.

Main Street is where some of us don’t get the fascination with the people who live on Easy Street. That includes me, by the way. I don’t get my own, albeit dwindling, fascination, with people in “The Show Business.”

Modernity has brainwashed us into seeing that locution as awkward, yet it’s wholly in keeping with how we still converse about every other business, isn’t it?

We don’t go around talking about “auto industry” but about “the auto industry.” We refer to “the banking business,” not “banking business.” Although we do say “consumer electonics” rather than “the consumer electronics.”

In yesteryear, the show business was no business archetypically ambitious immigrants wanted their children to mess with, a la seminal talking motion picture The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, which was autobiographical.

Today, people will sell their souls to be rich and famous the Hollywood Way. Or, as in Conan O’Brien’s case, the show business bossman will sell his soul to give his employee a windfall so there are no hard feelings after the employee has upped and told the bossman to go shove his offer of a high-profile TV show five nights a week.

It’s times like this I thank my lucky stars that someone like Conan O’Brien likes little old me so much he wants to entertain me a half-hour earlier, and was even willing to lower himself by accepting tens of millions of dollars to free himself up to practice his craft somewhere that would pay him even more than that to have his way.

What did we do to deserve this? I shudder to think.