Blue
Slips of paper have been appearing on our living room wall. I ignored them at first, but they keep appearing. Sometimes there are four, sometimes three, sometimes only one. But they all have two things in common: 1) none of them ever stays up for more than a day, and 2) they’re all shades of the color blue.
It’s either a natural phenomena—in which case I have a whole lot to learn about physics, or biology, or whatever science deals with paper spontaneously appearing on walls—an unnatural phenomena involving oozing space monsters, or my wife wants to paint our living room.
I can only assume that whatever is causing this likes blue.
I asked my wife and unfortunately a blue paper-excreting monster from Venus is not loose in our living room, damn it. She wants to paint.
Excuse me, typo. I meant: Damn it, she wants to paint.
Sure, just painting a living room sounds innocent enough (a little taping off here, a little spackling there), but so did the German invasion of Belgium to start World War I (a little machine gun fire here, a little mustard gas there). I think that war started when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s wife wanted to paint the living room blue. The war was less trouble.
There are rules in life that, for some reason, only men pay attention to:
Rule 1: Men and women don’t think the same way.
Rule 2: Men and women don’t like the same things.
Rule 3: Women love colors. Men view colors as something nature created out of spite and should only be brought out in public during car accidents.
Many of the troubles between the sexes could be solved if women just realized Rules 1 through 3. Four through 10 are pretty good, too. They deal with all sorts of things like which way toilet paper should roll from the wall and why men appear to be so itchy.
Rules 11 through 25 involve things like oil changes, the International Space Station, and the 1981 Cincinnati Bengals, which, when translated into You’re Talking Too Much, sounds like, “Are you ready to go home now? I sure am.”
The main point is that men and women don’t have the same tastes in home decorating. Well, except for those guys on home makeover shows, but I’d never invite them over to watch a ballgame. They know nothing about the 1981 Cincinnati Bengals.
By the time I walked from the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom to the living room, the blue paper strips on the wall had changed again. I suddenly felt cold.
I like one color for my walls and it’s not blue, it’s white. White walls are guy walls because guys don’t care about white and tend to ignore it. We care about red, blue-green, and gray because that means we’re somewhere we don’t want to be, like stuck at a traffic light, Sea World, or jail. White just means bathroom, and we’re all comfortable with that.
“So what do you think of these blues?” my wife—who caused this mess—asked our four-year-old son.
He looked at the strips of paper on the wall for a few seconds as if he were contemplating man’s place in the universe.
“I think they’re dumb,” he said.
Hmmm. Maybe he was. That was a pretty deep thought for a preschooler.
I took a closer look. The color strips were labeled Cozumel Aqua, Cloudless Sky, and Nimble Blue.
What do these names really mean? Are paint makers banking on the fact that, percentage wise, so few real Americans have been to Cozumel we won’t know this color isn’t what the water there looks like? That Cloudless Sky and Sky Blue from Crayola are exactly the same? And in what universe is blue ever “nimble”?
I’m just waiting for my wife to start painting. I bet a nice shade of Shipwrecked Lovers Gazing onto the Azure Horizon all over my living room will be just fine … for an Italian restaurant.
Waiter, bring me a beer and a shot of testosterone. I think I’m going to need it.
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Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to the Show-Me State’s Most Spirited Spots,” is available from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or tsup.truman.edu. Visit Jason’s Web site, www.jasonoffutt.com, for his other books.