It’s been a frustrating week, mechanically speaking.

I’m not a complete incompetent when it comes to figuring out things mechanical, but things that don’t work when I don’t have the time or tools or knowledge to tinker with them get my goat.

Take my coffee maker for instance. I’ve been noticing it was getting a little slower at brewing lately and a few weeks ago when we had company for breakfast it was very noticeable: My poor little drip machine wasn’t keeping up with these folks’ coffee habits.

Finally this week it seemed to be taking half the morning to get two cups so I figured it was time to find the cleaning instructions and give it a good cleaning.

I regularly change the oil in my cars. I even did it myself until they told me I needed to have an agreement with a hazardous waste transporter to dispose of the old oil. But I’ll admit I neglected the faithful little kitchen gadget that spews forth the java every morning.

The cleaning instructions said I should be cleaning the machine after every 80 pots. Twice that frequently — every 40 pots, if the water is hard. I think we fall closer to the latter category. Scratching my head, I tried to remember the last time I cleaned it. Then I remembered — I’ve never cleaned it.

Oh sure, I’ve washed the pot and the basket out faithfully every morning and wiped it down but I’d never done that vinegar brew thing they recommend.

I guess that would be a little bit like putting gas in the tank of my car and washing and shining the fenders but never changing the oil.

Anyway, I poured the prescribed amount of vinegar into the coffee maker’s reservoir and put the filter in as instructed and turned the machine on. It said to put four cups in but to stop it after three cups had brewed. I figured I needed to watch to make sure I stopped it quick enough.

I waited and the machine made several guttural noises akin to those a two-pack a day smoker makes in the morning as it heated up. Soon my sinuses were clearing because of the hot vinegar but only a few drops of hot vinegar hit the carafe. A half-hour later, a few drops was still all she wrote.

I contemplated calling in a heart surgeon to try and isolate and bypass the blockage but instead decided I could accomplish the same result as an angioplasty with a straightened out clothes hanger.

The procedure failed. The patient gurgled a few more times then went silent.

It’s sad, but I figure I’ve brewed an average of six pots a week for nearly three years with that machine. Wow, that’s 936 pots of coffee. I didn’t know I was that addicted to the stuff until it quit flowing.

Applying a little more math to the problem, I figured I should have actually done this cleaning process about 15 times by now. Relating that to the the recommended interval for changing the oil in a car, which is every 3,000 miles, that would be like driving 45,000 miles between oil changes.

I’ll probably take the thing out to the garage tomorrow and place it on the shelf next to the coffee maker it replaced. Then I’ll go to the store and invest in a new machine.

I’m also going to take my car in this week for an oil change. While I’m there I’m going to ask if they could give me about 15 or 20 of those little windshield stickers. I’ll slap one on the coffee maker every time I clean the new one.

I think a town really knows it has arrived when it’s been immortalized in song. Lots of cities never make the cut.

My boss, who manages the Clovis, Portales and Tucumcari newsrooms for Freedom New Mexico, recently put out a plea on his blog for media references to the city of Tucumcari for a history project he’s working on.

With Tucumcari being a second hometown for me, after living there 13 years, I knew I had run across lots of references to the city over the years, but only a few came quickly to mind.

The first thing that popped into my brain was a song written by Lowell George of the band Little Feat and made popular in the 1970s by Linda Ronstadt called “Willing.” Everybody’s heard the song and remembers the name of the town because of the song.

It’s a bit of a trucker’s anthem and the chorus with the Tucumcari mention goes like this:

“I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari

Tehachapi to Tonapah

Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made

I’ve driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed

If you give me: weed, whites, and wine

And you show me a sign

I’ll be willin’ to be movin’”

The next most well-known Tucumcari reference is in the Bobby Troup song, “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” You may have trouble remembering it because it comes after the break:

“You’ll like the aroma, of Tulsa, Oklahoma,

Albuquerque and Tucumcari, make New Mexico extraordinary!”

The other biggie is a song by Jimmie Rodgers called “Tucumcari,” that nearly everyone who’s lived there knows, because a morning radio show used the song as a theme for years.

Rodgers sings about getting back to a yellow-haired girl in Tucumcari and counts down the miles to Tucumcari in the verses.  Unfortunately, the yellow-haired girl turned out not to be the girl of his dreams.

http://www.imeem.com/marmasbad/music/h8ayekWv/jimmie_rodgers_tucumcari/ 

The song references don’t end there though. I knew they didn’t, but it took Google to refresh my memory and bring up a few new ones.

• The rock band Better Than Ezra included it in the chorus of a song called “Coyote” in the 1970s.

• A country song called “The Ballad of Hi Jolly” also rang a bell. In it, songwriter Randy Sparks includes a verse about pretty gals in Albuquerque and pretty gals in Tucumcari too.

• Back in the trucking genre, Dale Watson had a song “Tucumcari Here I Come” where the line goes, “Get the load I carry to Tucumcari.”

• John Denver mentions Tucumcari in a forgettable tune called “Last Hobo” where an out-of-work iron worker drifts down to the eastern New Mexico town, then begins to ride the rails.

• A song by cowboy songwriter Dan Roberts gets the prize for using the name the most times — 15, I think, in his “Tucumcari Woman.”

• A song by someone named Freedy Johnston entitled “Tucumcari” also came up.

• A dubious distinction for the city may be the song titled “Tucumcari” by the band Cex. (I think it’s pronounced “sex” judging from the album title, which I can’t repeat here.)

• Finally, Pat Duran of Albuquerque combined with Jim Jones to make a country album entitled “Tucumcari Tonight” after the town’s famous billboard campaign.

Who woulda thought one town could get so many lyrics. It seems from my research, Portales only has “The Streets of Portales” by local musician Andy Mason to claim. Clovis, which bills itself as city linked to music and Buddy Holly, only has one song that pops up — “Clovis, New Mexico” by Hank Williams Jr.

We’ve got a lot of ground to make up on our neigbor to the north.

I briefly turned my back on the pan of gravy to start another pot of coffee and it erupted like a white volcano from the stove.

Seconds later the smoke alarm was going off and both dogs were nervous and one was barking his head off.

A manageable problem in a normal day, unfortunately it occurred with overnight house guests sitting at the dining table waiting on breakfast with a front row seat to witness my mishap.

My wife displayed great concern at the time but later admitted she was laughing inside because she’s normally the one setting off the smoke alarm.

Ben Franklin said house guests and fish start to smell after three days. In my house they could start smelling like burnt gravy the first morning.

Regardless, we had a great, though quick visit with a couple we knew from Colorado. The breakfast turned out great, despite the boiled over gravy. The friends didn’t seem to mind that the trundle bed didn’t work either.

I always obsess over getting the house somewhat cleaned up before guests arrive. My wife, also known by the name Oscar Madison, doesn’t really care and can dirty it back up before they get there if I don’t watch her.

We’ve had our share of misadventures over the years while hosting people in our home, to be sure.

My mother-in-law’s first visit to see us in Colorado stands out. She came out for Thanksgiving, and arrived on the bus in a snowstorm for a week’s stay.

It snowed hard and by morning things had pretty much shut down. By the next morning it had turned cold, 20-below cold, and the water to the house had frozen. I spent all day in four layers of clothes laying in the snow attempting to thaw out the pressure pump with no luck.

That afternoon I took a harrowing drive into the hardware store where I purchased water containers and a drop light to put next to the pump to thaw it. After a couple of days we finally had water again, but not until the house guest and the rest of us started to smell.

Another good house guest story was the time my parents came to visit. Dad decided to go downstairs to bed early while the rest of us stayed upstairs to talk.

The dog followed Dad downstairs to the bedroom and bath and we never thought anything about it until we heard my father holler at the dog. The dog came up the stairs really fast and as he hit the landing he smiled at me — with my dad’s teeth. The little rascal had swiped the dentures off the nightstand and made off with them.

We hosted an exchange student from Thailand for several days once. My wife worried because the petite school teacher was hardly eating anything she put on the table.

Finally, the last night she was there, I suggested we all go out for ice cream. Her eyes lit up and soon she was devouring a sundae.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, so we buy ice cream.”

Well said, Ralph.

I’m starting to learn the problems that pop up with house guests are never the end of the world or even a friendship. They’re going to happen, you just get through them. The most important thing is to maximize your time with friends and family.

Even if they stay the regulation three days, that’s a short visit with someone you like.

I think I  got a little clue this week about what’s ailing our nation’s health care system — lack of personal responsibility.

Earlier this month I got a bill from a health care provider, which I thought was a bit strange, since we hadn’t been there in a year. Even though I had never received a bill from them previously, the statement they sent tracked charges going back to 2005 and showed we owed $60.

Rather than just pay the bill and go on, I decided to take a trip to the provider’s office and see if they could explain what was up with receiving such a tardy bill.

The person at the front desk couldn’t decipher the four-page bill much better than I had. The billing office was summoned on the phone and they explained it was for unpaid co-pays. The reason for the tardiness — a new computer system picked up the missed co-pays and billed for them.

I didn’t dispute the bill because I knew that would require finding a receipt or canceled check or something to prove my case and I think it is possible that we didn’t pay them. But it did make me wonder, co-pays are designed to be paid at the time of the visit and nearly all medical offices I’ve been in have a sign proclaiming that fact. It would therefore be very sloppy business not to have collected those three co-pays for a couple of years.

Another example is the discovery that one of my health care provider’s computer systems generates a new account number with each and every visit. When I paid my bills through the online banking tool Bill Pay and used a previous setup, the money was never credited to the right account.

It seems our health care system has become overburdened with the paper trail it creates. The provider or insured has to submit a claim, then the insurance company sends paperwork back that marks stuff down or out  or asks for more information. The insurance company also sends me an explanation of benefits statement telling me what methods they’ve employed to beat up my health care provider. Then a couple years later, the provider sends me a bill for what the insurance didn’t pay for.

After my wife was hospitalized a few years ago, I kept most of her paperwork for awhile. By the time the main followups were done, I had a stack about two-feet high.

No doubt, that episode would have clearly sent us into bankruptcy without health insurance and very nearly did with the insurance, but something needs to be done to simplify the system and assure people they won’t be dropped out.

We’re depending too much on an insurance office worker in another state looking at our medical bills and deciding what is proper and what is not. I think the solution to health care problems, even if we don’t want to hear it lies in making people more directly responsible for the bill somehow. Insurance is essential, but the disconnect from paying the bill is screwing things up for everyone.

Bills have become inflated because health care providers have to employ extra people to fight the insurance companies. If suddenly that fight was taken away, and the doctor was paid immediately, it seems the cost and confusion could be reduced immensely.

I think there is no way New Mexico is going to come up with an answer we can afford and I believe a special session of the Legislature is foolish.
There is some bipartisan action by a group of former Washington lawmakers who will offer up recommendations for a new president next year. That sounds hopeful.

I think a solution is going to need to offer regulation designed to simplify the insurance process and assure people can keep their coverage. New bureaucracy, including socialized medicine, would be folly and just add to the paperwork.

I don’t think I ever really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Maybe I still don’t know. Or maybe I haven’t ever grown up. I remember wanting to be a professional baseball player at one point when I was little. I recall wanting to be a farmer and raise pigs. I don’t ever remember wanting to be a fireman, policeman or astronaut as most youngsters of my generation, though. As I got into junior high and high school the Vietnam War was on television every night and I knew I didn’t want to be a soldier. Through high school I never really figured out a career path so I wound up meeting with my college advisor with no real solid plan in mind. I told that person that I wanted to be a wildlife biologist and also utilize the journalism skills that came pretty easily to me. They looked at me like I was crazy and loaded me up on the basics for a science degree. After several semesters I was still adrift and at one point switched the major to geology, reasoning there was bigger money there. Alas, it seemed they wanted a chemistry background for either biology or geology. Eventually I just drifted into journalism without the degree. Amazingly enough, that dream I had as I started college has been realized, sort of, from the opposite direction. Twice this week I’ve been able, as managing editor to put myself in the middle of wildlife related stories. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to do that fairly often. Last year I was able to cover the High Plains Prairie Chicken Festival for the first time. While the idea of getting up at 4 a.m. to watch birds flap around in the predawn spring chill doesn’t appeal to most (or any) of my staff, for me it’s heaven. I went back to the festival this year, hoping to get that exclusive interview with a prairie chicken rooster but instead settled for watching the chickens and interviewing the people like myself who get a kick out of watching the birds. Over the years, I’ve written about walleyes at Ute Lake, quail and deer in New Mexico, redfish and geese in Texas, trout, bighorn sheep and elk in Colorado and deer, coyotes and assorted varmints and varmint chasers everywhere I’ve lived and it never gets old. I don’t know that any of those stories have directly helped the cause of conservation in this country but I don’t think any of them have hurt either and I thoroughly enjoyed writing them. I have enjoyed hunting and fishing pretty well all my life. These days, more and more, I like to hunt with a camera and pen instead of rod, rifle or shotgun. I think there is probably nothing better we as humans can do than work for the protection of prairie chickens, mule deer, gila trout, wolves or whatever species is in danger. I’m realistic about conservation though. We can’t just lock the gate on a species to protect it. We need to help it find its niche in the world as it exists today. Highways, oil fields, hunting seasons and ranchers with calves and lambs are all a part of that world. Teddy Roosevelt had the right idea when he kick-started modern day conservation. He knew it was important for the common man to have a connection with nature and the creatures that roam the earth. I never got that biology degree but I embrace T.R.’s ideals because I’ve had the chance to make that connection. I also consider myself fortunate to be able to write about it.

It’s a familiar request I hear in the mornings from my wife and I wasn’t surprised to hear it on my day off this week.

“Can you come here a minute,” she called from the bedroom.

I don’t even have to ask what she needs anymore — I know she’s lost a contact lens.

It’s a been a fairly frequent occurrence throughout our nearly 26 years of wedded bliss. Some mornings I even get the call twice. Friday I answered the call three times. That could be the first time that’s ever happened.

Over the years I’ve become an expert contact hunter. My record, if I had been keeping it all these years, would be something like 527-1-1.

That’s right, I’ve failed to find a lost contact only once. The other black mark, which I’m not sure I’m to blame for, is one of the hard lenses that was found, but crushed in the process.

Actually, to be fair, the first call was to remove a contact that had been placed in the wrong eye and wouldn’t come out. We have one of those little tiny suction cup plunger looking things to grab one with. I was overjoyed. I hadn’t got to use it in ages.

The wife’s eyes are super-sensitive and she can’t get the peepers to stay open or the eyeball to stay in one spot, so grabbing a contact out of her eye is a little like a video game. You have to nab it as it floats past.

I’ve never had contacts of my own because for years they couldn’t fit my prescriptions. Now they could fit my prescription but I need bifocals so I would have to wear glasses anyway. But thanks to my wife I know a lot more about contacts than most non-contact-wearers.

She started wearing contacts out of vanity. One look at the high school photos of her in the cat-eye glasses confirms it was a good decision. The bad part was she always had to wear hard contacts.

In the 1990s the optometrist diagnosed her with an eye disease called kerataconus. Her contacts became a lot more cup-shaped to fit the misshapen cornea that develops as the disease progresses.

We’ve spent literally years trying to get her fitted correctly. We’ve had one eye doctor we felt pretty good about but put her in expensive contacts that ended up scarring her cornea. Another had no patience and gave her the worst fitting ever. Another tried hard and made some progress but ended up throwing in the towel and referring us to another doctor. That guy finally nailed it and she’s seeing better than she has for years.

When she had a stroke in 2002, the therapists and nurses told us we would have to get her a pair of glasses. I told them glasses wouldn’t work for her but they said we needed to try. The eye doctor confirmed that he could try but she probably wouldn’t see very well out of them. He was right.

She continued in therapy but couldn’t improve her reading after the stroke because she couldn’t see with the glasses. Finally we decided the only thing to do was for me to learn to put the contacts in and take them out for her. The first day with her contacts in, the occupational therapist at first believed she was witness to a miraculous recovery. My wife assured her that, no, she really wasn’t seeing very well through the glasses.

She quickly got to where she could put the contacts in herself. Some mornings are better than others for stroke survivors though — that’s when my special ability for finding contacts comes in handy.

If you had told me when I was growing up that in the future we would all be concerned with living green — I probably would have thought you meant we would be living in outer space and sporting a Martian suntan.

But here it 2008 and living green (environmentally-conscious) has moved into the mainstream. How do I know this? Wal-Mart this week devoted their advertising circular to green products. Their newest slogan — “Save Money. Live Better.”

Wait a minute, saving money, so we can live better, we were doing that back when I was growing up it just hadn’t been made sexy by marketing back then.

The mass retailer was touting a line of green, “all natural” cleaning products. They have a whole line of T-shirts made from recycled material and earth-friendly organic produced cotton sporting Earth Day and recycling messages printed on them.

Fair Trade coffee and seafood produced under environmental stewardship standards are also featured. And you can now get your Campbell’s soup in a 100 percent recyclable can with a green label. Paint with low VOC (volatile organic compound) and compact fluorescent light bulbs are among the many other items that made the advertisement.

I don’t quite understand the buzz. New products that work better and save money have always been good and growing up on a farm, everyday was Earth Day.

My parents and grandparents were “green” before green was cool. I’m not just talking about growing a vegetable garden, though they did that as well.

One set of grandparents used a washtub and everyone bathed in the same water. When everyone was done grandmother would likely hand wash a few dainty items in that water. Then it went outside to water the flowers or vegetables. The other set of grandparents had a bathtub but only drew a full bath a couple of times a week. To conserve water they only took what they called a foot bath the other nights — a few inches of water in which everyone could wash the days dust and sweat off.

Going to bed and getting up with the chickens was another way they were saving energy way back then. You didn’t need a lot of lights on if you went to bed after sundown and got up when it rose the next morning.

Granddad mostly used manure for fertilizer on the crops. Imagine that, he knew about raising crops organically way back then. When he did use chemical fertilizers it was all about avoiding using any more than was absolutely necessary. That stuff cost real money. Money you might not see again if a hailstorm wiped out the cotton.

Later in life my grandmother really got into recycling. When the doctor told her to take regular walks for exercise she thought that was sort of a waste of time until she discovered she could take a sack with her and pick up aluminum cans people had thrown out on the highway. She made extra money, cleaned up the highway and got her exercise.

Even my dad was into recycling. Yeah, I think he was guilty of salting grandma’s walking route with Dr. Pepper cans but he had a bigger role too. That barnyard fertilizer I mentioned, he turned it into a business. With loaders and a fleet of spreader trucks dad was one of the earliest “green” businesses in the county. Of course, in that business, green wasn’t always a good thing. Let’s just say a little drying time was preferable.

I lived for a time in Colorado what is supposed to be the environmentally-conscious center of the universe. I’ve got to admit there were a lot of folks there with really good ideas and technology. There were also a lot of other folks who talked a great game and made little real difference.

We had a solar institute in that town whose big project was promoting solar ovens for third-world countries. I faithfully maintained my solar panel heat system one of the few in town left over from the tax credits offered during the 1970s energy crisis. It seemed strange that they were ever put up in a coal mining town. At the same time, some of those promoting solar lived in the old houses that weren’t energy efficient at all. They couldn’t afford anything better or they would have been in a new house with the latest solar technology.

There was also an outfit there that purchased an old ranch on land worth several million dollars that billed themselves as a sustainable living institute. A sustainable living model on some of the most expensive real estate in the world just didn’t make any sense to me. I knew that sustainable living was making stuff grow well on a dry, chalky (but affordable) piece of land in eastern New Mexico.

I became even more jaded toward all things green while attempting to sell “green” janitorial supplies in Colorado.

The products were great and once you correctly figured concentrations, the stuff I was selling was even competitively priced. I thought when the city of Aspen announced they wanted to “Go Green,” it would be a slam dunk to sew up their business. In the end, as environmentally-conscious as they said they were, it came down to price and convenience.

I contend the whole “green movement,” in the end will hinge on those same two things, price and convenience. If light bulb makers prove to me that compact fluorescent bulbs that cost four times more per package will really last 10 times longer and I can see to read by them they’ll make a sale.

If they can sell it to Wal-Mart I suspect sooner or later I’ll be buying it myself.

Roosevelt County dairyman Mike Mitchell looked at home and relaxed this week as he drank a cup of coffee and munched a cinnamon roll in his office at Grande Vida Dairy.

Things were a lot different when I finally caught up to him in March of 2007, a day after a tornado wiped out his dairy.

He was obviously stressed and close to broken. He was trying to settle what was left of his herd into someone else’s dairy and he was worried about his family, employees and injured cows.

As incredible an act of God as the March 23, 2007, tornadoes were — the acts of kindness and caring that residents of eastern New Mexico bestowed on their hurting neighbors was even more incredible. If it had to happen, at least we live in a community where people care about others.

For several weekends after the tornado, people - from other dairy owners to Eastern New Mexico University football players to church groups - were at Grande Vida to help clean up.

Mike told me later that he thought they could be back to milking at Grande Vida in four months, but I thought that was a little optimistic considering the damage. The Mitchell’s were able to move their herd home in July.

In Clovis, the scale of the disaster was even greater. After driving through the city the Sunday after the tornado, I thought it might take years for things to look normal again.

Thousands of volunteers helped with the cleanup and I think that community effort is, no doubt, what made it possible for Clovis residents to gather their wits and begin the process of reconstructing their lives.

That night and the long weekend will be something I’ll always remember. Somehow, I knew the storm brewing in south Roosevelt County that Friday afternoon was different, and I went out to chase it.

Though we never got in the right location to photograph the tornado that evening, there are things about the storm I’ll never forget.

As we headed out the Dora Highway just before dark, the hail and intense rain we ran through is still easy to recall. I thought it was going to beat the roof off my truck.

After the storm went on toward Arch, we headed out the Clovis Highway and finally decided to turn back before we got to Cacahuate Road. I figured we needed to get back to the office and be ready to help the Clovis News Journal staff, because I knew the storm was going to hit Clovis head-on.

As we drove back to Portales an incredible gust-front swept across the highway from north to south — the opposite way in which the storm had been traveling and counter to the wind direction we had experienced all evening.

It was an eerie feeling as the wind drove rain, tumbleweeds and other debris across our path. I knew that wasn’t a good sign.

I didn’t get home until sunrise the next morning. But at least my home or business wasn’t in the tornado’s path. Other’s weren’t as fortunate.
The sun came out bright and clear the next day but the wounds on the community looked bad. Really bad.

Somehow, in a year’s time, most of what was destroyed has been resurrected by this Easter Sunday.

Faith and tenacity have hopefully won out for most of our neighbors.

If you haven’t been to see the Veterans Traveling Tribute at Clovis High School, you should do it before it leaves on Tuesday (March 18).

The exhibit’s centerpiece is the 80 percent scale model of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I’ve never had the chance to visit the memorial in Washington so I was eager to see the model.

People say visiting the memorial in Washington rarely leaves the visitor unchanged by the experience. The traveling exhibit has the same effect.The sheer number of names — 58,256 — on the wall is what stunned me most.

I had heard that number before but to see all those names etched on that black wall was hard to deal with. But deal with it we must.

In front of the Vietnam Veterans Wall was a display called The Cost of Freedom. That exhibit contained the names of the nearly 4,000 American soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq since the War on Terror began after 9-11.

Another display showed the cost in American lives of other wars and conflicts in our country’s history. The striking thing is that the American Revolution saw the loss of only about 4,400 American lives. Nearly 300,000 were lost in World War II and approximately twice number died in the Civil War when both sides are taken together.

With the high price we’ve paid in the last 230 years for our freedom we should not take that benefit for granted. At numerous times in our history, if our citizens hadn’t been ready to defend that freedom, it could have been lost.

At the same time the display reminds you that those lives lost should always be upfront in the actions we take to defend our freedom. That cost is so heavy.

Those with entrusted with the power to make war need to spend lots of time in front of that wall before they act.

K, maybe I’m not officially an old geezer yet but recent events have got me a little concerned about the inevitable.

In the last week or so my younger brother (the one with a lot less hair than me), called me to let me know how old I was getting. He wanted to know if I had heard that the rock band Kiss was going to be playing at AARP’s (American Association of Retired Persons) 50th anniversary party. That would be the young virile rock band of my youth.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he told me rock band Foreigner’s latest tour was going to be sponsored by AARP. Boy that’s a wakeup call.
Still, I’m exactly a year and 15 days from getting that AARP card myself. My wife has refused to send for hers, as if ignoring the senior discounts it would provide will make her seem younger.

In the barber shop this week I became guinea pig to a young lady’s first day at the local shop. The mother of a one-year-old had cut at one of those family franchise joints but it was her first taste of a mostly men’s barber shop.

After I sat down, she and her new boss began talking about her adjustment to the new shop and the comment was made that “She would have to get used to dealing with old men.”

Boy, that stung a little.

With my receding hairline trips to the barber are hard enough, now I find out that the barber’s cloth they wrap around me is to keep me from drooling on myself, not necessarily to keep the hair out of my collar.

After my brother’s call, I happened to be in the waiting room at the hospital. (OK, all the time I spend in medical waiting rooms may be another subtle clue here.) I made a point of picking up the current issue of AARP magazine, you know, to catch up on Kiss tour information.

The cover story was on Jack Nicholson and how he was aging. Granted, he’s a couple of decades older than I am, but still, he was playing young leading roles, like the one in “Easy Rider” as I was growing up.

Inside was an article penned by Erica Jong about her grandchildren. Jong, authored the steamy bestseller “Fear Of Flying.” about the time I was in high school and was in the forefront of the “sexual revolution.” Granny Jong is a little hard to imagine.

In the AARP magazine issue before Nicholson’s, the cover was about Caroline Kennedy. OK, that one’s dead center on my generation.
A list on the AARP Magazine Web site reveals that Ellen DeGeneres, Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, Prince, Madonna and Viggo Mortensen all turn 50 this year.

Dennis Hopper, another star of “Easy Rider,” is constantly on TV these days in commercials for a financial firm urging our generation of baby boomers to reach for the stars and not be satisfied with a rocking chair. He mumbles something about 60 being the new 40 and 50 being the new 30 or something.

I’ve got to admit as I approach 50, some days feel like the new 30 and other days feel a lot more like the coming 70.

The first official baby-boomer, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, received her first Social Security check last month. A part of that generation, my first check is due in approximately 16 years and 45 days. Lets just hope it’s not an IOU instead.

As depressing as researching this column and sharing it with you has been, I think I’ve hit on a new career path just in case Social Security doesn’t work out. I’m sending writing samples to AARP magazine back with my reply for the AARP card.

I can’t wait to interview Gene Simmons, and Michelle Pfeiffer.