Suckers!

My wife was lamenting the fact that the lemon drops of her childhood were impossible to find. I looked in the supermarket; I looked in the drugstore. I bought some Lemonheads, by Ferrara, but they were not the ones she wanted. She said the ones she recalled fondly had a dusty sugar coating, but were not too sweet, not too sour, and then I figured it out.

First, a little backup: In the 1970s, there was a big, nostalgic, small-town-values movement in American culture, as people disgusted with huge corporations and corrupt Washington and failing cities and artificial stuff in general wanted to return to the roots of good old-fashioned decency. From this came all sorts of things, shows like The Waltons, songs like "Sweet Home Alabama," foods like Ben & Jerry's, slogans like "Pepperidge Farm Remembers," presidents like Jimmy Carter. (Okay, he was a one-off.) Candy too was given the old-fashioned look, and the kind of lemon drops my wife likes best were the type shown here, not too hard to find right up through the 1980s.

When the 1990s hit, all that went out the window candywise, and we entered the Jolly Rancher era -- strong flavors, sours, crazy colors. Such old-fashioned stuff got harder to find, and remains so.

Claeys has continued to make its old-fashioned candy, as it has since 1919. But I can't find it in the local stores. Fortunately, using the newfangled Internet, I was able to order their lemon drops, and a real old-time fave, horehound candy. (Claeys has its own Web site, but it looks like it was designed in 1919; you can order through Amazon, CandyWarehouse, GroovyCandies, et al.) One taste and my wife said these were just the lemon drops she wanted.

As for the horehound: Horehound is a mint, botanically speaking, but not minty. I'd sometimes seen horehound candy mentioned in old books, and was curious about it. Well, I finally got a bag. You see on the package that, unlike lemon drops, the horehound candy is sold as medicine, "Soothing to the throat." It's quite delicious, almost like the mild-mannered brother of Ricola herb drops. Would it help a sore throat? I'll let you know, if the bag holds out until I get sick again.

So there you have it -- old-fashioned quality candy available for delivery by Internet-age technology. Server farms remember.

They only brought out a few to make their point.

No doubt on their way to work at Clown, Inc.

Mints pie.

My wife has an astonishing knack for liking products that go off the market soon after. Look at me! She liked me and I went off the market three years later.

No, really; over the years she has come to like products like Saran Disposable Cutting Sheets (gone), Diet Coke with Lemon (outta here), Bounty Paper Towels with Dawn (kaput), and Ragu Italian Cooking Sauce (è morto).

One of the most recent products she likes that is now fading away is this:

Centrum VitaMints were introduced with great fanfare four years ago;  advertising blitz, free samples on request, coupons out the bazooty. They started with a Cool Mint flavor, then added Wintergreen and Raspberry. They had all the vitamins and minerals of a typical multivitamin, plus a refreshing mint flavor, perfect for those who take their vitamins after dinner. Wintergreen was her preferred, so I bought those. Then they became hard to find, and I could only find the Cool Mint, so I started buying her Wintergreen from Amazon. And then Amazon on its "Buy It Again" feature said the Wintergreen was discontinued, and I found out that all the VitaMints have been discontinued. Alas!

You may find it fitting or weird that the Vitamin Fred blog is krexing about vitamins, or that my family even goes in for vitamins at all, as many health professionals say that a multivitamin is unnecessary for anyone with a healthy diet. Well, health of our diet aside, I'm not even sure how we got on the habit, but my family was always a One-A-Day crowd, the thought being that it was worth the money to avoid any deficiencies in nutrients. But this entry is not about that so much as it is the mourning over discontinued products.

I'm certain that every product, however lousy, has its fans who are crushed when it disappears, just as every TV show or movie has its defenders. And I'm sure everyone in America has at some point seen a personal favorite vanish. I have friends who thought Zima got a screwed, who lament the end of Whitney's yogurt, who even still miss Koogle almost fifty years down the road. Zima was brought back in limited release in 2017 and 2018, but seems to have returned to the beer graveyard for good. Koogle lovers will have no such luck -- it was a Kraft product, and Kraft has a corporate policy against bringing back brands from the dead. Kellogg's, which made Whitney's, also tends to not bring things back -- Mr. Breakfast's Cereal Project site lists many that will never see the light of day again. Meanwhile, ice cream hippie weirdos Ben & Jerry's don't hide its flops -- they even have a Flavor Graveyard.

We all have mourned the loss of some product that we liked a lot. What product did you love that has gone to Product Heaven? Did you write angry letters? Try to start an Internet campaign to bring it back? Join a support group? Or just say the hell with it?

We're closed-garage people.

During my time here in outer suburbia, I have made a study of the natives, and I have come to realize that family tribes come in two varieties: open-garage people and closed-garage people.

Open-garage people are, as the name suggests, people who leave the garage door open all the time. Doesn't matter what the weather is; doesn't matter if the garage is neat as a pin or stuffed to the rafters like a hoarder's nightmare; doesn't matter if the garage is a tricked-out workshop or just a covered parking spot. That door stays open. It only gets closed at night -- maybe.

On the other hand, closed-garage people keep their garage doors shut as much as possible. Some may park in the driveway and never open the garage. Are there dead bodies stacked up in there? Who knows? Some of them will park in the garage and shut the door fast, like they're ashamed. Some are so ashamed they may try to back out of the garage without opening the door; this never ends well.

Are they afraid of having things stolen? An invasion of wild animals? Is this a survival instinct, indicating a stronger such instinct in these groups than in open-garage groups? Possibly. Maybe the remote opener is just busted.

Pictured: Closed-garage people.

It would be simple to make the deduction that open-garage people leave the door up for easy access to the house, if that's the primary way in and out. I have observed that that is not necessarily the case. Families that use their back decks constantly, park on the driveway, go in and out the front door to get to the car, and have a keypad entrance to open the garage if needed, still leave the garage door open all day. Why? Well, I have yet to penetrate the origins of this behavior.

Closed-garage people, in contrast, will leave that door shut as much as they can, even when it's a major inconvenience to have it closed. That's just how they roll... or don't, if they're parked inside.

Both types of people can annoy their neighbors, because being annoyed by each other is what neighbors do, but I suspect the open-garage people are more vexatious to closed-garage people than vice-versa. Open-garage people can pop out at any second like a Whac-a-Mole, usually when Mr. Closed is hoping for some peace and quiet or trying to get his dog to pee. Some of the open-doorers have garages so full of crap that leaving the door up lowers property values. Closed-garage people may seem unfriendly or standoffish, but that's passively rather than aggressively annoying.

My final observation is that, like morning people and night people marrying each other, open-garage people and closed-garage people invariably find themselves living next to each other. In the former case, I still follow my Saber-Tooth Tiger Survival Theory, which states that morning people and night people are evolutionarily suited to get married so that someone will always be alert in case a saber-tooth tiger wanders into camp. But I can't figure out why open/closed-garage people wind up in proximity.

I'm working on a Survival Theory of the Distribution of Annoyance, but I'm still gathering field data. If you have access to a huge pile of grant money, please get in touch c/o this blog. Thank you.

Poets doing ad copy.

William Blake

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
On the highways of the night;
When E is what the gas gauge pecks on,
Pull into your friendly Exxon.

📜

T. S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like stromboli laid out upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted malls,
The hungry stomach calls
Of cheerful nights with pasta bowls tremendous
A family restaurant with bread sticks endless.

📝

Emily Dickinson

Because I could not brush with Crest –
It kindly brushed for me –
The Toothbrush held but just Ourselves –
And not one cavity.

📚

Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
   starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the strip-mall streets at dawn looking
   for an Egg McMuffin,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
   to the tasty hash browns and the coffee freshly brewed.

📃

William Shakespeare

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st, I recognize,
The charter of thy four wheels gave me blessing;
My rental of thee, thanks to Enterprise.

📖

Walt Whitman

I sing the shaver electric,
The razors of those I love unfuzz me and I unfuzz them,
Norelco will not let me off till I go, respond to them,
And dis-hirsute them, and charge them full with battery.

🖋

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel each
And be one traveler, long I stood
And peered at my phone as best I could
To Google Maps, to find the beach.

Same with my old office.

One group text was all it took, and Clown, Incorporated's productivity was shot to hell for the day.

How have I been wasting time?

Summertime, the silly season, the time to waste time. Even though the seasonal aisle in the grocery store says it's Halloween, we all know it's still summer. So how've I been wasting time?

Not too well, I'm afraid. Summer's been okay, and I have been appreciating not wearing coats and mukluks and big woolly hats, and not having skin that cracks like an egg whenever I move, and I bear these things in mind when the bugs annoy the hell out of me. So that's good, but appreciating/not appreciating doesn't take very long.

Funerals and other death-related things have taken some time, sad to say, but that can happen in any season.

I've been wasting time on room-escape games. Par for the course. I do enjoy these games, which are usually free on the app store, and sometimes the translation from the Japanese is almost decent. My wife likes a good hidden-object game. So she's a treasure-seeker at heart and I'm a... guy who wants to run away from everything, I guess.

I've also been wasting time on a trip down memory lane, reading the Attack of the 50-Year-Old Comics blog. Back when I fancied myself a collector, I loved the Silver Age books the most. This blog reminds me of some books I had, and shows me some I never got. I sold my collection a long time ago and have no intention of starting up again, but it's fun to read about this stuff. Seemed so important to me back then, especially on hot summer afternoons. (A couple of years ago I was reading through Benton Grey's Greylands blog for similar material, but he seems to have shut it down for the time being, alas.)

I've done a little reading, but not too much. Started another book on World War II. Maybe you've heard of it? It was in all the papers at the time (1939 to 1945). I mean, if you're not a modern journalist, or a college student, you probably have. The book is interesting, but I keep looking to read it before bedtime and I seldom get many pages in before I'm asleep. No offense to the book; I'm just tired. I'll be glad to put in a plug, but I have to get a little deeper into it before I can tell if it's plugworthy.

I was thinking about rereading Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, which I haven't read in decades but remember as being fun. Will they still hold up? Last year I read a book by Zelazny's sometime collaborator Robert Sheckley, a book I remembered fondly, and it was pretty bad and very dated. Had its moments, but it was hard not to think Man, lay off the drugs for a week, all right? I had a lot more tolerance for that stuff in high school and college.

I've also been working on my own book, and having spent an extraordinary amount of time hammering out the plot, I discovered a second act problem and a shortness problem. Eventually I realized that the solution to the first also would solve the second, but for a while I looked like a strange visionary of some sort as I walked the dogs, blank eyes, seeking answers from the clouds and the trees.

We didn't travel again this year, for two reasons: 1) The need to buy a new car ate into the budget a wee bit, and 2) We've yet to find a kennel we really like, and you can't ask someone to look after your two gigantic hairy dogs for a week. Nor have we found any kind of vacation place that says "Please come visit and bring your multiple gigantic hairy dogs." A few look promising until you find out that they only allow dogs small enough to fit in the average handbag. Well, Samsonite doesn't make a bag big enough for our guys.

Plus. my preferred destinations -- Bedrock City, Storytown USA, and the World of Sid and Marty Krofft -- were all unavailable this year. Phooey!

So I've been working. Not even a staycation. I'm glad to be able to work, but as a freelancer, if I don't get work I don't get paid. It's one of those immutable law of nature -- gravity, light, matter, money. And if you don't think money is one of the immutable laws, try telling high school physics teacher you're cutting his pay. You'll get an equal and opposite reaction, all right.

It doesn't bother me that fall is on the way, as evidenced by the aforementioned candy and the baby Muppet fruit I've been seeing.

I love the fall and enjoy the weather. But I feel like I just put away the Christmas stuff. Well, in four months I'll be hauling it out again. What the heck?