Late last night, on our way home house hunting, we stopped at a car wash to feed N. It was really creepy.

“I consider [President Bush] a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people,” Scott McClellan writes in his recent book. With this sort of assurance, that no one will think any less of me even if I commit egregious errors, maybe I’ll just take this opportunity to spin my own sort of fundamental decency exercise:

FOR SALE: Live “green and simple” in a 3-bedroom, 1.5-bath townhouse with doubly insulated attic; bountiful kitchen counters and ample cupboard space with recycling bins* and an energy-conserving dishwashing arrangement**; alternative laundry drying system***; gas-free**** and all-electric lawn care equipment; global-warming combating, carbon-reducing decor*****; heating system with optional air conditioning alternative******; entirely free nighttime lighting*******; petrol refueling centers, fine dining, major grocery outlets, public education, and liquor store all within walking distance********; all-natural, cost-free, super-sensitive burglar alarms*********; local food production area**********; and much, much more. $175,000 or higher offer.

*where the dishwasher used to be
**without a dishwasher, you have to wash the dishes by hand, in the sink
***yeah, we took out the dryer, too, so use drying racks or the outdoor wash lines
****a reel mower with dull blades
*****all plants need watering weekly
******you provide the window fans
*******thanks, out-back mega-market
********you bring the sidewalks
*********they bark with the slightest–or no–provocation
**********swampy only part-time, shaded, upstream from the dogs

The comfortable gliding chair we bought at a yard sale several weeks ago is today up on the auction block, so to speak, if my pickup’s tailgate parked along the street counts.

We should have known not to buy it in the first place, since the lady selling it lit up right in front of us, but it was only $20, and, out in her yard, the cushions’ smoky aura really didn’t seem that bad. And we should have known not to buy it because we’ve done this sort of thing–claimed as our own cheap or free used furniture–before.

For example, the free couch I received for helping a cat lover move really had looked like it could be cleaned up and left to freshen in the summer sun, but I ended up putting it out along the road with a big “free” sign on it.

The same thing happened when we brought home a nice-looking swivel chair that someone gave us. The soon apparent smell, we eventually figured out, came from the gobs of cat hair under the cushion. Vacuuming it all up didn’t help either, except to spread the bad smells all over the house whenever we vacuumed. A “free” sign worked again, for that.

Today is a little bit different, however, since the sign I pinned to the chair says “$25.” A little profiteering won’t hurt us, will it?

Except for the fact that so far, the chair is still ours.

But wait–just now some other neighbors have returned from their camping trip, and I’m excited to know that they have a teenage son who just might want the chair for his room…

UPDATE five hours later: A man rang our doorbell half an hour ago, introduced himself, and said he’d like to buy the chair–and handed me five fives. I saw a friend of the neighbors’ teenage son help him load it up, and return a bit later, presumably after helping the man unload it, too. I’m guessing the buyer is the friend’s dad.

The funniest part? The man lives on the very street where I bought the chair in the first place.

I confess, I have a few hedonistic tendencies.

Last night, with the gift card from the mother of a child M babysat, a gift from a sister in law, and a few of our own funds, M and I indulged. At Olive Garden we ate bread sticks and salad, and then wine-baked beef rib tips and a golden fish fillet. N sat on my lap or in her car seat quite contentedly until we were nearly ready to go anyway, were just sopping up the remains of the wine sauce with the last of the bread sticks.

After resting in the car a few minutes, letting N recover from the restaurant hubbub, we walked the fifty yards to a Cold Stone Creamery.

The guy who dished my large “apple pie a la mode” must know what it’s like to be a guy, because he heaped that dish so tremendously full that I felt like an eight-year-old just handed a full half-gallon box. We didn’t finish it all until today’s lunchtime dessert.

But somehow I consider taking pleasure in food in a category far distant from current trends of entertainment dependency.

For example, our teenage guest this past week kept her cell phone ever handy in order to text her friends and, meanwhile, carry on a semblance of conversation with us, mostly about what her friends were writing to her. Which was basically mind-numbing chatter aimed at funny quipping to satisfy the hedonistic use of “friends” as entertainment to fend off boredom. (We did disallow texting at the dinner table; I wonder if we should have disallowed the phone totally.)

There was, literally, no good reason for her to constantly stare at her little screen and thumb messages of inconsequence, and yet somehow that pastime proved addicting. (Well, OK, so maybe M and N and I are just boring, but at least we have some good books on our shelves!)

Now, multiply that one-person scenario by pretty much our small church’s entire youth group, and you get a church row full of bulky teenage boys, each huddled over his phone throughout a sermon they desperately needed to hear without distraction. This is perhaps hedonism in its most innocent and pervasive essence: gadgetry that isolates users from immediate surroundings while posturing as human connectivity.

Now, extend the text-messaging phenomenon to video games, personal entertainment devices, and theme parks, and a strikingly flat picture of our machine-based, gimme-gimme world jumps out like a jack-in-the-box surprised at the vibrancy of the real world and eager to be stuffed back in his case of easy thrills.

I realize I sound like an old person complaining about the young generation. “At least they’re not digging the Beatles, or swinging their pelvises like Elvis,” some of those particular old farts might have said, much to the indignation of the now-adult rockinouters who today run much of the world.

The current question remains, however: Into what will this new generation amenable primarily to thumbed messages and roller coaster thrills mature? On what sort of resume does “purely hedonistic” look good? Will these youth be fulfilled, ever?

Or even filled?

Country singer Randy Travis’s “1982” proclaims that “hindsight’s twenty-twenty.” Too often that perfect vision is, well, hindsight, which leaves many golden opportunities for profound intervention out to dry as forever past tensical.

Today by randomchance I remembered a meeting for new teachers at my school. It was during the first part of my first year of teaching, and the meeting was the one shot our “mentor” took at doing anything at all with us. There were donuts, I recall.

Among our group of initiates was one unfortunate character, unfortunate because somehow he received–at times duly invited, certainly unwanted–distaste and even scorn from others not interested in his highly professional background that, to many, appeared somehow to place him in a self-appointed “wise one” category. It didn’t help that our mentor was–still is–a rather crass jokester with haranguing the unfortunate character on the brain.

Before the unfortunate character entered the meeting room, the mentor passed around party favors: lottery tickets. But for the unfortunate character, the mentor chortled secretively, there was not just any old real ticket, but one touting winnings of $30,000–and directions to pick up the prize at the Easter bunny’s house.

When the meeting was officially convened and we shared pennies to scratch and win nothing, the unfortunate character was at first stunned.

“Oh, My, God,” he said, dead serious. “I just won $30,000. Oh my God!”

I don’t remember what followed–perhaps giggles around the room–as he turned the card over and read the back’s fine print.

“Oh,” he said then. “I really don’t respond well to that.”

Ever since then, I have regretted not acting when I could have so easily intercepted the moment’s hurt and cruel glee.

If I could rewrite that story, I would have, unbeknownst to the mentor, switched my lottery ticket with the fake one at the unfortunate character’s seat. The risk of doing this would have been tremendous (What if the ticket originally mine really was the big winner of the week?), but certainly well worth the look on the mentor’s face when I could have jumped to my feet screaming, “I won! I won!”