No Bother: A Basementing Birthday

This is an open letter to my wife, meaning devoid of my true feelings, which, frankly, are none of your g.d. business:

So, now you're IN your thirties. That's fine. I'm like, what, 50? You'll always be referred to as "his young wife."

So, you live in a basement. So did Laverne & Shirley. That's fine. They were like, what, 50?

People will take you seriously now. When you're in your twenties, everyone smiles a lot and says, 'Hey, that's good initiative," and then, behind your back, they gather with their thirty-and-up associates and chuckle over what idiots twenty-somethings are. And teenagers? Good god, are they still around?

You are thirty-something today and should begin getting my Timothy Busfield references. Oh, and Peter Berg (he made a few appearances on "Entourage").

Look who else is 31! Bitsie Tulloch, the girlfriend with the weird face on "Grimm"; Rapper Pitbull (he don't play football, but he's touched down everywhere. Everywhere? Everywhere!); Bryce Howard ("Two Slice Hilly"); and Megan Hilty, aka "Marilyn Nomore."

You're in good company. I don't mean with them. I mean with me.

All right, the rest of you, back to your Facebooks!

Basement Metaphors 1.0: The Underworld

 

Let's get dark right away. The basement is underground (mostly -- it's a daylight basement with a big window onto the world; I will address this further in a post on our parallels with "Laverne & Shirley"). But mostly, it's a subterranean domicile.

The word "underground" conjures THE DEAD, as in "dead & buried" in the ground (well, it doesn't literally conjure the dead, just thoughts of them). And then, of course, deeper lies the UNDERWORLD! Hades, Sheol, Yomi, Xibalba, Hell. HELL! That's the worst! Not all "underworlds" of the our cultures hold negative connotations (see "Annwn" in the pre-Christian era). But Hell? Forget it -- it's awful!

If you believe in that sort of thing. But why does "underground" get such a bad rap? Is it just a fear of darkness? Why is Hell down? Why not, oh, just a bit to the left? Lenny Bruce puts it best:

"And I'm confused about the direction of Heaven. It's not up there, because the earth revolves, and sometimes you can go to Hell at 8:30, and Heaven at 12:06." (From his autobiography "How to Talk Dirty & Influence People.)

Seeing as how our soon-to-be new residence in the basement does offer a street-level view, we're sort of in between "Heaven & Hell" -- in Limbo. Between Here and There. Really between There and There. Which would be Here.

So forget all that metaphorical nonsense (at least until my next "Metaphors" post) -- wherever we go, HERE we are!