Mrs. Aldrich Has Got Her Migraines Again...

... so I shut her in her room with a handful of bouillon and called Dick Shepherd. He took a taxi over from the rest home and we watched some television. He only has half a tongue so I offered him half a beer.

As we all know, the Olympics are on.  And I hate the Olympics.  Without the Soviets, it's like watching an Andy Hardy movie. They knew how to train athletes.  Fourteen hour days, seven days a week, thousands of miles from home - all before your tenth birthday.  And when that powerful Soviet National Anthem came up, you knew your ass was beat badly.  And they would sneer and stick out their chest.  Soviet athletes were men - even the women.

So Shep wants to watch the Olympics.  Okay, fine.  The black golfer's is hurt and not on, so fine.  We'll watch it. The first thing that came on my television was the most pitiful fucking thing I've ever seen.  And I'm not talking about female weightlifting.  No, no... I like female weightlifting.  If more women could lift heavy things like that we wouldn't be in the middle of this damn energy crisis.

What I'm talking about is...

...MEN'S SYNCHRONIZED DIVING.

When is see things like that I often think of war and wonder if this was what we were fighting for.  Shep made some stupid remark about their little swimtrunks calling it a "Battle of the Bulge" - Shep's gonna die soon, so I laughed at his joke.

I thought about an ice storm in December of 1943 where the ice would hit you like a dart in the face.  And I thought that if Tony South Shore would have waited for me and Eddie Dykstra to synchronize our dives into the Rhine to save his ass, he would have been sucking German mud before we did our first toe touch.

Look at those freaks.  They stand there on the diving board in their little trunks with their hair combed.  Then they dive, wait for their score and then sit in a Jacuzzi hot tub waiting to do it again.  You know what we got to sit in once we finished shooting Germans?  Our own filth.  You know what Old Shep's sitting in while watching Men's Synchronized Diving?  His own filth.  Where's the sport in that?

Men don't need to dive the same way at the same time.  If they did, it would have been in the Bible.

I'll talk at you next week....

Lester Aldrich is a freelance columnist for Octogenarian Magazine.  Manka Bros. Studios is not responsible for any action by our freelance writers.  If Mr. Aldrich actually kills someone, that's his problem. Manka Bros. cannot be held accountable.