Fifty Shades of Arugula at the Psychiatric Salad Bar

By Robert C. Hancock

As a follow up, but not quite a sequel, to my book, The Psychiatric Salad Bar: Adventures in Autism and alternative Realities, I had planned to offer up travel tips down the road of raising an autistic child, and to a degree, I have, but I decided to branch out and cover the plethora of roads leading to and from other crazy towns....because, well, there are so many out there.
What we’re talking about here is being driven to the edge and left there teetering with your hair on fire. Anyone who has had a bad customer experience with the monolith Comcast knows what I am talking about. That appears in the piece entitled, “Comcast...Love it or List it.”
“It’s enough to give you gas,” is a piece about the year and a half journey to convert from oil to gas heating. The stories of consumers getting screwed are legion. But it’s more than that. Saving the life of a baby robin, left behind, by feeding it baloney and cheese sandwiches...or the piece about the post retirement hobbies of learning the guitar and offering up an homage to Jimi Hendrix not just by eating a six cheese pizza off the strings, but a fifty shades of arugula salad as well.
The book is filled with a diverse collection of rants, like “Entropy Now” in which we learn that smart appliances aren’t really all that bright especially when a nearby lightning strike can convince your refrigerator that it is a microwave oven; cooks all the food and invites your Facebook friends over for dinner.
There are observations and flights of fancy, conjecture about what could have been. If only there were a different mix of animals at the “First Parish’s First Annual Blessing of the Pets” aka, “The Running of the Hamsters,” it could have gone viral. There’s something for everyone. Enjoy.

SQ Adams

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert C. Hancock
• Release date: Nov 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310324604

Robert C. Hancock

Robert Hancock and his wife Marianne, until late, lived in a very old, very large house in southeastern Massachusetts.This provided him with an ample “To do list,” and it is with personal pride that he did not let this three hundred year old house fall down during his watch.Though it is still officially winter, outdoor tennis is "game on". As a senior citizen, he is now dedicated to doubles tennis where he has staked out a small area of the court, formerly dubbed his: “Area of Responsibility” from which he has vowed never to stray. That pressure proved to be too great and he has since downgraded that area to the “Cone of Concern”. He's concerned, but not actually responsible. Once he gets accustomed to playing in a full hazmat suit, he could be a force to be dealt with.

Book preview

So you’re retired. Now what?

I have had so many re-inventions in my life that it makes Edison look like a layabout. These sabbaticals from the work world should make one wonder: which retirement, and how do we define retirement. No matter. The most recent iteration is more in the spirit of casting about for a hobby (which doesn’t involve the perfecting of mixed alcoholic beverages) than an actual celebration of a culmination of having amassed an amazing amount of arcane minutiae, about which nobody gives a rat’s ass.

My wife, who actually had a career, and recently retired, hasn’t gotten the memo and continues to work just as many hours as before. I don’t get it. I had pictured her continuing with her watercolor studies. First of all, I think of it as a low impact hobby. Not that much of the world’s precious water supply is used, and as far as I know, unlike taxidermy, no animals were scared shitless with what came next. And besides, what’s the worst that could happen? If your work is really awful, the viewers could develop a case of Crap Eye, a condition brought on by viewing way too much crap.

Now there are legions of hobbies that get dismissed out of hand. I, for one, had always dreamed of being that guy on the flying trapeze, but then I wondered, Will my high tensile AARP approved aluminum walker interfere with my sticking the landing? I could go on and on about all the ones that got away", and then I decided to resurrect my deep and heretofore unfulfilled desire to be a musician. Back in the day, in college, I bought a guitar. Had I known then what it would be worth now, I would not have sold it, and could have stuck with the original plan of spending my time perfecting the martini on some island beach.

Back then, the guitar was not a musical instrument. It was a prop used by every guy who owned one. Think of the guy in Animal House, sitting on the stairs, serenading several enthralled coeds. John Belushi’s character knew it for what it was and smashed his guitar to smithereens.

I finally found a guitar on-line, a Guild, which did not require a mortgage and began to scour YouTube for songs to learn. My artistic goal was to achieve a level of excellence which would propel me beyond gigs for the hearing impaired. Fortunately, my church would provide such a fertile ground for this post- post- career launch in that they are very accepting, very forgiving, all inclusive to the degree that I don’t know what you would have to do to get banished. I mean, when we were looking for someone to run our nursery ,the board of directors did not dismiss out of hand the possibility of a convicted sex offender filling the post.

For my first open mike church-based appearance, I plan an homage to the master, Jimi Hendrix, by eating a six cheese slice of pizza off the guitar strings. Now, Jimi made famous the playing of his guitar with his teeth. Ergo what about a full buffet right there on the strings: low E to high E, no capo required. Wrack o’ ribs… go for it. Alaskan crab legs...you got it. French onion soup….no so much.

I worry, though. Would folks know that this was not simply performance art gone horribly wrong? (By the way, there is no such thing as horribly wrong when it comes to performance art.) You could fart into a balloon and play Stairway to Heaven and the art world would be enthralled. But being a musician is a complicated thing. Aside from competence, you really need a shtick. So for me, it’s the all-you- can- eat buffet off a Rickenbacker featuring fifty shades of arugula and the all- you –can- eat endless whacked out Psychiatric Salad Bar. Therapists are standing by.

The Book Tour

I am really looking forward to the book tour. I have been informed that publishing houses like to create a buzz and how that’s done is, in part, left up to the author. Given the choice between a Hulk Hogan look-alike throwing yellow, red or purple boas to the crowd of adoring fans, and two six foot three inch supermodels wearing incomprehensibly complex lingerie, I have chosen the latter.

While I don’t think I would have had to wrestle the Hulkster, that is exactly what I am hoping for in the case of the lingerie models. And if a one- on- one game of hoops is not out of the question either, then I feel it would be prudent to be prepared for anything.

So I went to Payless and bought some new Chuck Taylor Converse black high-tops, and made a side trip to CVS where I did some in-aisle research into the wide variety of enhancement, products. There were the old standards like Cialis which from what I can tell will greatly improve my passing game; beyond that, I’m not sure. And then, wrapped in gold leaf was the Viagra Plus 2 package. Since I had left my glasses in the car, I could only imagine what the hell it all meant. Did the plus 2 refer to minutes or inches? It was all very vague. All I know is that I will need all the enhancement I can get if this lingerie model thing works out.

I’m guessing that the tour will start in some down on its luck mall in some receding neighborhood, not actually in Newark but in a place that would make Tony Soprano look over his shoulder. Perhaps I should have checked the lingerie models CVs for some martial arts training. Here again, I can use all the help I can get as I know deep in my heart, if I have trouble wrestling a sentence from a word processor, what chance do I have against the baddies who might harbor the mistaken notion that I am mister Smarty Pants incarnate?

As you can see, a lot of this is mere conjecture. I’m just not sure what it will look like when it actually happens. Now that I think about it, it won’t look like anything. There is no tour. There are no book signings. It’s an e-book. Never mind.

The Running of the Hamsters

News from the pews

The First Annual Running of the Hamsters was by some accounts a resounding success. This Blessing of the Pets Service was held outside on the grounds of First Parish Church on the Sunday after the last Sunday of the Church year. (I’ll get to that later.) Except for the drone of some construction equipment across the street.…(by the way, what were they doing working on Sunday ?), the day was picture perfect…blue skies, no humidity and no distemper in the audience. And few if any type A personality puppies in the group.

After some inspirational readings about animals, the pets lined up, their compliance suggesting they were all proud graduates of obedience school. The good reverend blessed each and every one while trying to restrain her own canine which, while not overly aggressive, was dragging her to and fro like a rag doll, which made me think a regimen of Doggy Downers could be in that pup’s future.

All in all, it was not the freak show that I had hoped for. It did not deliver on the implicit expectation of total calamity, chaos to be viewed safely either on YouTube or at least four rows back. Oh what it could have been...sigh…this running of the Hamsters at first Parish. It coulda gone viral and replaced Pamplona. We coulda been contenders.

First of all, what ever happened to diversity? Where were the cats, the turtles, the iguanas, ducks, chickens and Boas? And what about the yaks, an occasional 1200 pound Bengal tiger? This was not the ark I had hoped for. I envisioned the event unfolding differently: Yadah, yadah, yadah, yadah, a few platitudes and few nice things about animals and then….. The command rings forth, Release the Hamsters and they dutifully dismount their Nordic Traks, ellipticals and treadmills, to venture out into the lush green world….unperturbed by a single thing until… Read the emancipation proclamation for the cats. Hamster ears perk up… Say what? And then, Unleash the hounds!

The ensuing melee would have been topped off with the final command, Tether the children as the peregrine falcons, were released.

It was with great anticipation that I drove to church that day, dreaming about the cirque du soleil which was about to unfold at this service, the one after the very last service of the year. I found it all very unsettling, this idea that you can have a service after the very last service. I tried not to dwell on the news that there is a whole new paradigm…services right through the summer. It upsets the equilibrium. It goes against the cornerstone of the entire religion: to wit

We take the summers off, damn it! I think it might also be in conflict with our mission statement and has the potential to tear a hole in the universe.

To save the Universe and a fine age-old tradition of refreshing one’s spiritual batteries either at the beach, the mountains or simply lolling around flea markets in a quest for the perfect knock-off accessories, I formed a committee to combat this over-reaching threat: the Beach Chair Coalition. I thought my recruiting campaign might begin amid the mayhem of the cats chasing the hamsters, the dogs chasing the cats, the falcons trying mightily to tear loose an appetizer tethered to a mooring. But no, it will have to wait ‘til the service after the service after the last service of the year. By then I will have organized a sit-in, in beach chairs with coolers and drinks with little umbrellas right there in the chapel, with our own a cappela version of every cut on the Beach Boys Endless Summer album.

Everybody say: Pass the nachos, please.

The Birdman of Bristol County

Yesterday, I saved a life. So it was outside our species, but still. Okay, you may be the Eggman, or the Walrus, but I am the Birdman….of Bristol County, a title I had to confer upon myself in that the knighthood office was not just difficult to find, but further inquiries on my part could easily create a trajectory ending in a stay at the Nervous Hospital in Bridgewater for observation. Yesterday, my efforts were realized when the baby robin nesting on my front porch flew off to a new and exciting life. In no small part, I was a key partner in this enterprise.

Every year, our house is turned into an aviary. I