Navigating Life in a Whackadoodle World
Installment One: A Perfectly Normal Morning
After a month’s vacation, I’m back and ready to start another cycle around the guideposts. I thought that I might try something a little different this cycle, and share with you my latest book: Navigating Life in a Whackadoodle World. Yes, it was a book before it was a website with it’s weekly lessons. Here’s the ‘back of the book’ description from Amazon:
While riding the bus one day, a retired self-help expert is confronted by the Fourteen Rules of Life that she once taught. When their demands to know why she's been ignoring them received an unsatisfactory answer, the Rules take over and insist on telling their own story, resulting in a unique, insightful, and humorous guide to getting the most out of our turbulent times.
They named the guide they wrote together Navigating Life Through Turbulent Tides.
Two years later, our retired self-help expert is once again accosted. This time by her student, who claims that after two years of pandemic, a second impeachment, a Capitol riot, a war in Europe, economic forecasts, mounting gun violence, and multiple weather disasters, the world was no longer merely turbulent, it's down right Whackadoodle. She has questions, and she requires answers. Together, they decided to read the original book, and allow her to ask questions at the end of each chapter.
Navigating Life in a Whackadoodle World contains the original text of Turbulent Tides, updated by their discussions making it’s contents even more relevant to our current times.
And now, without further ado, THE BOOK...
A Must Read Prologue
In which we introduce a Whackadoodle pair
Her voice came to me out of a dream. “You’ve been writing books about me.” Even to me, she sounded a wee bit irritated.
“I beg your pardon?” I replied in a haze.
“Two of them. Two books. Both featuring me.”
It took me a moment to open my eyes.
“And articles,” she continued, her young face frowning down at me. “A bunch of them, all featuring me.”
“Yeah, so,” I said shaking myself awake. “I always feature my students in my books,” I admitted groggily. “Conversations are the best way to teach.”
“You wrote about our private lessons,” she added accusingly.
“Of course I did,” I said, trying to sit up. “I felt they were important. I felt they might be instructive. But I protected your identity. I never gave you a name. I never described you well. I just wrote about how much we taught each other.”
She sat down on the edge of the couch where I'd fallen asleep the night before. She was still glowering. “You should have told me.”
“What would that have done?”
“I could have read them,” she glared at me. “I could have been part of it.”
“Oh great,” I said, thinking of coffee. “Now you want to be part of it?” I looked her hard in the eyes and said as clearly as I could, “You are nothing but a construct of my imagination. A girl that I envisioned during the first months of the pandemic, so I could teach some lessons in logic that I wanted to teach.”
“What?” Her face was a mixture of hurt, anger, and surprise. “So I don't matter?”
“Of course you matter,” I said, rubbing the night’s crust from my eyes. “I just hadn’t invented you yet, and I don’t know where you'd fit in now.”
“Well, I know where I could fit in,” she insisted. “We’re going to read your book together, and I'm going to ask all the questions that a student like me might ask.”
“And what kind of student are you?”
“A student who was on lockdown with you for over two years. A student who wonders why an eighteen year old kid can be a buy an assault weapon when he can't buy cigarettes. A student that you spent an entire summer teaching logic to, so she could call out illogic only to find…” her voice trailed off.
She’d left her sentence unfinished, so I prompted her, “Only to find what?”
“Oh, how illogical everything is,” she finished at last.
“So are you regretting our gift of critical thinking?”
“No,” she murmured. “I like seeing past the crap. I just wish there was less of it.”
“You and me both sister,” I mumbled, finally getting my feet to the floor. “Unfortunately, people don't work that way.”
She watched me as I shook the last vestiges of sleep out of my head.
“So can we do it?” she asked at last.
“Do what?”
“Read your book together.”
I rubbed my eyes again. “Exactly which book did you want to read with me?”
“The one about Navigating Life Through Turbulent Tides. The one I'm not in,” she said, reminding me. “I mean, I've been reading it and I have questions, so I figure that we could go through each chapter together and then you could write about the questions I ask.”
“Oh,” I said mockingly. “So now you want me to write about our private lessons?”
She gave a huge exaggerated sigh and said, “Oh shut up and just answer me. Can we do it?”
I was too tired to think so I just answered, “Sure, sure, sure, if that's what you want, sure.”
She stood up, suddenly full of excitement. “Okay, so when can we get started? I mean, obviously for some reason you decided to write your second book before the pandemic even started. Like you were trying to re-explain your earlier book.”
“Update,” I interrupted. “Not re-explain. Update.”
“Sorry,” she nodded. “Update. So why did it need an update?”
“Because times change and the examples no longer felt relevant.”
“But it was more than that. You decided to personify your rules, to give them personality, character, even humor. Why was that?”
“I don't know. Maybe because nobody listens to a know-it-all, and I thought it would be funny if I let my rules all yell at me. I thought maybe they could teach me something new. I felt that if I could just ask the right questions, I might finally find the right answers.”
She took that in. “So is that what we’d be doing now? Another update?”
“Probably,” I admitted, closing my eyes in defeat. “But can we start tomorrow? I was just pulled out of a wonderful dream by an overly excitable student, and I would like to get back to it if I can.”
“Sure, sure.” She sat back down on the couch and began rubbing my back. “You go back to sleep. I'll see you tomorrow. We can begin reading your first chapter then.”
“Great,” I said ironically. “This should be fun.” Then I punched my pillow and went back to sleep.
* * * * *
She arrived early the next morning. Her smile as bright as her frown had been dark the previous day.
“So how do you want to do this?” I asked her.
“Well, I’ve given it some thought,” she said, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. “And I think that our success will have to do with editing.”
My eyes narrowed. “So now you want to be my editor?”
“No,” she rushed on hastily. “I meant that I need to know when it's okay for me to bust in with my questions.”
“And do you have any thoughts on that?”
“Plenty,” she started pacing with excitement. “I'm thinking that it would be bad for me to interrupt the flow of your story, so maybe at the end of each chapter, we put in a new section where I can ask questions.” She looked at me hopefully.
I returned her look skeptically, “And you think that a new section featuring your questions after every chapter in my story won't interrupt the flow of my story?”
“Okay, fine, it will interrupt your flow, but if people know about what we're doing beforehand, they can just skip my sections and read your original book—just like you wrote it. But then if people want to read the updates, they can read my sections as well.” Her hands came together, half pleading, half prayer. “Think about it,” she added breathlessly. “It would be like having two books in one.”
“I’m afraid that it might become three books in one.”
“How do you mean?”
“What if they read everything together?”
“Would that be so bad?”
“I have no idea. When it comes to readers, I'm always amazed at how often they misinterpret my words.”
“But that's where I come in,” she stated emphatically. “I’m your chance to set the record straight.”
“If you say so,” I mumbled.
Her face sank. “So you don’t want to do it?”
“No,” I reached for the book she was holding out. “I said we would do it, so we will, but I don't guarantee that I'll publish it.”
Her face lit up again. “You won’t regret this,” she assured me.
“If you say so,” I repeated. “Shall we begin?
“Absolutely,” she grinned.
And so we did.
* * * * *
Navigating Life in A Whackadoodle World
Chapter One: A Perfectly Normal Morning
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
John Lennon, from his final album, Double Fantasy, 1970
I had been feeling increasingly pessimistic, frustrated, and even frightened by the world around me on the day that they visited. I'm not sure why they picked that day. It had begun like so many before. I had been able to sleep through most of the night, only waking twice to help change Mom's pad. Puck had greeted me on my way to the coffee machine, demanding his morning chow with a wailing MEENOW. I took two phone calls while getting ready for work. The first came just as I was doing up my pants.
“We are calling with some important information about your current credit cards,” said a robotic voice.
“Liar,” I mumbled, hanging up. The second call came while I was brushing my teeth. I was just able to spit out the froth to answer in time.
“Hi, this is Leah from Island Hospice,” said a cheery voice. “I just wanted to let you know that I'll be there to bathe Miss Nancy at about 11:00.”
“Great, thank you. I'll tell her,” I choked back.
A quick wash of the face, a brush of the hair, and a change of my clothes followed, and I was ready to gather my daily artillery—a backpack, iPad and iPhone. I already had my ears plugged into the Morning News as I went to assemble my mom's morning pills.
My niece Tanya, who had moved in a year ago to help with mom, was up early. She raced me into the kitchen as I came down the hall. “Oh my God,” she said as soon as I was near. “It’s jumped again,” and she began pounding me with the newest coronavirus statistics. Statistics which, I might add, she had been dutifully reporting to me every day since the first case had been announced in China. “Now there is someone in California who has it, and they don't know where she caught it,” she informed me as she poured an entire pot of coffee into our largest mixing bowl.
“Planning a cleaning day?” I asked with a half smile.
Tanya always drank a large bowl of coffee in preparation for a cleaning day. I didn't wait for her answer, half listening to Tanya and half listening to the newscast coming from the earphones in my ears, I reach for mom's pills and began sorting. When I was finished, I turned to my niece and concluded, “It's no longer if the coronavirus gets here, it's when it gets here.” I moved out of the kitchen and into the family room, where my mom laid in a hospital bed planted firmly in front of the television.
“Morning mom, the bath lady is coming at 11:00,” I said in a voice loud enough for Tonya to overhear—so she'd know to be ready with the clean sheets and towels.
“Morning,” mom replied. “Any news?”
“Pretty much the same,” I told her, setting out the morning routine of pills, yogurt, cake, and Sprite. “The Democrats are blaming the Republicans. The Republicans are blaming the Democrats. The president is saying that we’re in great shape, and we’ll be able to control what many people are warning will be a global pandemic. The world as we know it is falling apart, that’s all.”
“I'm gonna need changing,” she said, accepting the first of seven pills. Yes, the morning had been perfectly normal, and then they showed up.
* * * * *
“So,” I said looking up. “You can't have too many questions about that chapter.”
“Well, actually I do have one question.”
“What do you mean?” I sounded amazed even to myself. “The chapter is like two pages long. It's obviously exposition. It's just meant to be a hook for the next chapter.”
“But when did you start writing it?” she asked intently. “When did you start writing this book? I think it's important because it puts everything that comes next into context.”
“Context?” I repeated with a critical eye.
“I snuck ahead,” she admitted at last. “I have read the entire book, and I know how important context is to you, so I think you should explain what was going on when you started writing. Why were you so pessimistic?”
I considered her question. “What was going on, huh? Why was I so pessimistic?” I closed my eyes to remember. “I could see something coming, but it seemed like my niece was the only person reporting on it. The news was busy covering an impeachment trial.”
“But didn't the impeachment happen like a year later?”
“I'm talking about the first impeachment. Funny how one came so soon after the other.”
“But what was the date you actually started writing?”
“Dear God girl, don't you know how to use a search engine? What was the date that the first person was diagnosed in California?”
“Why didn't you date the story at the time?” she asked, pulling out her iPhone.
“Because I thought people would never forget.” I paused for a moment, then added. “I was wrong. People live to forget.”
“You don't mean that,” she retorted, still plugging words into the screen.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know you.” She stared at her phone for a few minutes and then reported. “If you began writing when the first case was confirmed in California, then you began writing on January 26th, 2020.”
“Good to know. So are we ready for the next chapter?”
“Sure,” she smiled.