Classic Content: Brain Farts, Clown Suits and Detergencies

Detergency. It’s a funny word.

This column was written for LEO Weekly in February 2005 for my series known as Brain Farts. I still think “Detergency” would be a great name for a detergent. Few agree. Also, one name has been omitted to protect those who wanted nothing to do with this in the first place.

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Before I get into how sometimes I just don’t get things, I want to share a new word with you all. The young lady I see on a regular basis (see, I’m so emotionally fragile that I can’t even type the word “girlfriend”) stopped off at a local department store earlier today, as I had run out of laundry detergent at my house.

I needed to wash some clothes so I wouldn’t look like a complete slob for work this week (not that anyone would notice), so to me it was a fairly important errand. I needed detergent. And it was, in a sense, an emergency.

“Hey,” I said, “we’re having a detergency.”

She looked at me as if I were suddenly wearing a clown suit.

Anyway, that’s just a preface for some angst I began feeling last week: that I just don’t get it. My good friend Andrew and I were having our weekly Thursday night chat over drinks and wings, when he began telling me how his oldest son, Griffin, is able to understand the conversion of base numbers. The kid is only, like, 7.

I told Andrew, “Heck, I’m almost 40, and I don’t understand base numbers conversion.” You see, I was trying to be supportive. But Andrew, for some reason, took this as a challenge and started trying to explain it to me. I told him there was a reason I hadn’t had a math class since I was a freshman – in HIGH SCHOOL, for crying out loud – and that only strengthened his resolve.

“Say you’ve got the number 10,” he said. “The second number represents ones, so 10 means you have a zero number of ones. So the one therefore represents tens, meaning you have what? Yes, one of tens. So let’s say you have the number 57 in base 10 and you want to convert it to base three …”

It was at that point that I’m pretty sure I had a mild stroke.

The very next evening my young-lady-friend-who-I-see-on-a-regular-basis and I were attending an art opening of a friend of hers. She had created what she called “sky wheels,” wooden tubular things with all sorts of sky scenes (clouds, sun, stars, etc.), and beads and other items of corresponding color attached and dangling off the sides.

She loved them; she couldn’t stop marveling at their beauty. To me they looked like oversized artificial bait. I started craving sushi. But she was into the art, so I waited and just kept my mouth shut.

Then she said, “They remind me of different days in my youth. Each one reminds me of a different day.”

To which I said, “They all remind me of a day when my grandfather took me fishing for crappie.”

Clown suit.

But when we left, I explained that I just don’t get certain art media. To me, I said, the sky wheels were like math. You know, base numbers. She said she understood but that she still wanted to attend art openings. I told her that was fine with me, because she still watches football with me even though she doesn’t really understand the West Coast Offense.

And then it dawned on me … maybe it is OK that some folks don’t get this column. Maybe. Hmm.

(Detergency. Get it?)