Captain Bananas' unassailable Saturday truths

*There are only a few seconds' window between the time you put your left leg in a pair of pants and the right; if you take too long, over you go and it doesn't matter how many times you've put on a pair of pants. When you fall, somewhere a flamingo with a webcam in your apartment is typing LOL to another flamingo.

*It doesn't matter how many different and careful ways you try to take off your pants or how cheap or expensive they are; unless you remove all the change from the pockets first, the money will rain and scatter all over your floor.

*It is one of life's great injustices that one has to make coffee before one has had coffee.

*It is possible to shatter your coffee beaker, buy a new one and shatter that, too, within a week's time due to lack of coffee. It is best not to try and remember to wear socks in the kitchen for the next few weeks, instead accepting the fact that each foot's big toe, heel and ball will locate extraneous shards of broken glass and you can have fun yanking them out with tweezers while wearing a wife-beater and smoking a Lucky Strike under a bare lightbulb.

*Your house has a plan to devour you, and it's winning. Every time you leave, the objects move a few more inches toward the couch, bed, desk.

*There is a man in your building who, when you told him he doesn't have to ask why he hasn't seen you at the gym every single time he sees you, didn't talk to you for two years. This man said "Thank you" when you held the door for him the other day, but that may have been because he forgot he decided never to speak to you again.

*The biggest insult you can give an artist isn't criticism, but indifference.

*In your life, more than once, more than twice, some powerful media person is going to call you at home, express great interest in your project, offer to help you in a few ways, make a date for lunch the following week, and you'll never hear from them again even though their mother or wife isn't in the hospital, they didn't have a lot of money in the stock market and their workload is what it is.

*Anti-clutter affirmations printed out and taped to your bathroom mirror and kitchen cabinets may not produce a more orderly household, but they make you feel as though you are trying to do something about the fact that you can't find one of your own CDs to send to someone and have to call your wife at work and ask her if she knows where one is.

*When you get a Lamborghini Gallardo and take it on the West Side Highway on a Friday night when the Lincoln Tunnel is closed because of an incident, you have to drive it 5 miles an hour for 40 minutes the same as everyone else, and the universe doesn't care that a Lamborghini Gallardo gets 9 miles to the gallon.

*Sometimes you find $140 cash and the Verizon bill in the pocket of a pair of pants you haven't worn since August and it compensates for having to look for your newly written Uncle Al bio for 20 minutes on your computer because you didn't name it something obvious like "Uncle Al Bio".

*You can learn how to talk to a cop who has just pulled you over by watching political debates and paying close attention to what politicians say when asked a direct question.

*Your wife's hair looks amazing.