MATTBAXX: something to read

Hiatus

2011-05-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

You have been very patient, and for that I am quite appreciative. If I could offer something more substantial than a simple thanks, I would. But some of you live far away, and some of you would prefer that I not violate the terms of the restraining order.

I understand. I’ll just sit in my kitchen and thank you from here.

It is true that sometimes a writer writes just for himself, and I do a fair share of that. Dear Diary, this morning when I got my regular cappuccino, the barista gave me the biggest smile ever. It really made my day! Stuff like that. But sometimes I writer wants to be read, and that’s where you have come in. Like I said, thanks!

But I feel a need, a strange and unexpected need, to stop. Not necessarily to focus on more financially rewarding writing, and not to punish you for taking out that restraining order, but just to . . . stop. Hiatus is a good word. It means a break in something where there should be continuity. And there should be continuity here, because I enjoy writing and you (in theory) enjoy reading.

In its first incarnation, as an email offering called FreezeFrame, this column ran from May 1997 to February 2000 with nary a week off. One hundred forty-five in a row.

When new life was breathed into FreezeFrame in June 2005 it was a pleasure to return to my weekly task. I have always enjoyed watching my students or my children to find something to write about, or perusing the news if that suited, or making something up out of whole cloth if I felt like it. Not a few times people have asked the ever-patient wife “did that really happen?”

Usually she nodded sadly.

So we have hit mid-May 2011 and I calculate that 310 Mondays have passed since the rebirth. You true aficionados will no doubt want to point out that I missed February 19, 2007—and you’d be right. And also a little nasty. You might want to cut down on that whole nastiness thing; it doesn’t become you.

There are still things to write about, of course (your nastiness comes to mind). There must be, because even though Borders has filed for bankruptcy and the Kindle has presaged the end of paper books, people are still reading. So I will keep writing and let the words fall where they may. Only time will tell if any of them fall here again.

I am no stranger to walking away unexpectedly. I took a hiatus from a cushy corporate job way back when to be a stay-at-home dad. Turned out to be permanent. Who in their right mind does that? Foregoes the money and the power? Well, me.

Then I left the cushy sofa cushions to which I had become accustomed to be a kindergarten teacher. What right-minded male does that as he nears forty years of age? A room full of five-year-olds? C’mon, who? That’s right, me.

I will now walk away from a loyal following that waits with baited breath for each of my weekly eruptions (don’t dispel the myth by telling me otherwise) just as I reach international status. Who does that?

You guessed it.

The hiatus is not simply abandonment. Whether the break ends up being temporary or permanent, it is often beneficial to pause and consider. To think. Not “should I be doing this?” or “what else should I be doing?” but “hey, I wonder what would happen if . . .” So this will be it for me, for now, for a while, forever, for goodness sake I don’t know!

Please feel heartily encouraged to pick something to take a hiatus from in your own life, and reading this blog doesn’t count. You can’t just piggyback on my hiatus, you’ve got to come up with something else. Feel free to return to your thing after an hour or a year, or not at all. Just pick something you want to test for its true meaning in your life. Okay?

Ready, get set . . . stop.

Bonus

2011-05-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

Hello! A mid-week message from me; perhaps unexpected, but here nonetheless. Thought I'd pass along a link to a column I had in the newspaper recently. If you ever went to a prom, or you have children who have or will, you should read this.

I could have saved it and used it as a regularly scheduled blog post (saving me valuable hours of sitting at the vanity and writing something new), but for reasons that will become apparent next week I couldn't.

So I didn't.

Bucket

2011-05-08T18:26:00.000-07:00

Back in 1999 I checked out a Web site called Death Clock to see how long I was expected to live. It was a completely unscientific and arbitrary process, but I learned that at the age of 37 I had about another 37 years to go. That seemed pretty good. February 24, 2036 was the predicted date of my demise. I could plan on that, get my affairs in order in plenty of time, and daughter Kelsey would be sure to remember each year because it is the day after her birthday. Cheery!

Of course now twelve more years have passed, and facing age 49 in a few more days I revisited my old friend Death Clock to read the good news. Lo and behold I was given the same exact day to cease breathing: February 24, 2036. What? Are you kidding me? I drink less, I eat better, and I actually have spent the last twelve years running marathons.

Maybe it is as unscientific and arbitrary as I first believed. All it asks is gender and birth date. No questions about diet, exercise, lifestyle. It is no more accurate than “what’s your name . . . okay, that means you’ll live to 103.” Still, I think I should pay attention.

Time is of the essence. I’ve apparently got only 25 years to go. The days and weeks are winding down, and it is imperative that I get going on those “accomplishments” that people can recall when I am mentioned in memoriam. It can’t just be “he was so handsome” and it certainly won’t be “he did so much charitable work.”

I need me a bucket list! One of those lists of things I want to do to prove that my life mattered. Never mind the long-term marriage and the three great kids. I need Machu Picchu, windsurfing on Walden Pond, and a motorcycle ride around the rim of an active volcano. I need to get a tattoo, live on a dollar a day for a year, and learn how to play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 on a harp.

If these next 25 years are going to measure up, the more outlandish the goal the better. That’s what these buckets are always full of: narcissistic, look-at-me goals by which we can feel superior . . . even if we never achieve a fraction of them. I’d be seriously interested in a study that determines how successful these bucket list makers are in completing the dream.

Perhaps it would be better if the bucket list was comprised of honorable and selfless goals, rather than just a badge of cool things accomplished in a life. Lunch with George Clooney or hammering with Habitat for Humanity? Skydiving over Papua New Guinea or helping illiterate adults learn to read?

If it sounds boring, don’t do it! If, however, it would just be the greatest thing you could ever do in your life, then go ahead and schedule that lunch. Just let George pick the restaurant.

Another quandary: is the bucket list containing just one item (even if it is super great) less impressive than the bucket list of 100 more inferior ambitions? Is this all merely another ego trip? I fear that we will start to be competitive and attempt to determine whose bucket list is best. Because if someone’s is best, I should no doubt be reading it over to see if there is something I can take from it to add to mine. Eventually someone’s bucket list will include the line item “have the world’s best bucket list” and fistfights will ensue.

I’m 49 years old next week and I’m pretty sure 50 comes after that. I am in no mood for a fistfight, over this or any other issue. Whether Death Clock is right or not with regard to the date, my time is certainly finite (like yours, I daresay). I ought to have a plan for what I want to do with whatever time is left. I will watch my three offspring grow to be exemplary adults, and the wife and I will travel and play Gin Rummy and walk to the library.

The thrilling events will no doubt happen here and there, but for the most part I think I will simply live. I’m beginning to think that perhaps my bucket list has only one entry: never make a bucket list.

Goblin

2011-05-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

Every time I look up over the top of my computer, I am greeted by the dull countenance of my most combative foe. In the words of the high priestess Britney Spears, oops I did it again! Just now. Looked up. Caught in the glare of me. It can be frightening.

That’s what I get for setting up shop on a small wooden vanity with a large mirror. My ugliness is not so readily apparent at first glance. I’m not saying compare me to Brad Pitt (okay, then, compare me to Brad Pitt, I dare you!) but I can make my way through life without causing passersby to cower in fear. Like most people, I keep my ugliness well hidden. That way I don’t get insulted, or slapped, or arrested.

After all, ugliness that is strictly physical will get insulted by unkind people. Ugliness that is behavioral will get slapped by offended people. Ugliness that is criminal will get arrested by official people.

Able to avoid most of that unpleasantness, I manage a garden-variety ugliness that is only witnessed by those closest to me (oh, how lucky they are!) or by me when I look in the mirror.

The latter used to be a rare occasion. Once I passed through the morning lavatory routine, I rarely had occasion to look at myself in a mirror again. A brush of hair and tooth and I was ready to roll.

Now my writing station has been set up in an extra bedroom, the computer sitting atop the aforementioned wooden vanity. It is a family heirloom, with seven drawers and a soft brown finish. Originally from my grandmother’s house, it has been passed around our home for many years, from kid to kid, depending on who needed a little extra storage.

It is not the world’s perfect desk, though. It is about the right height, but is woefully shallow and spare of top space, making it suitable only for the laptop, two small speakers, a cool beverage on one of grandma’s knit coasters, and room for a sheet of paper or open book (should I be plagiarizing). The knee hole (I actually had to look up the name for the area between the drawers where the knees go—the knee hole!) is narrow, accommodating my legs but only barely. The arms of the desk chair preclude it from ever being pushed inside and out of the way.

The mirror, though, is the biggest problem. I always figured famous writers look up to contemplate their prose, with a view through a large picture window toward a lake, or a spring meadow, or a winter forest. Something that expands the mind. Looking up and seeing what at first appears to be a grumpy goblin seems to limit my mind and stifle my creative process. And that is why famous writers don’t mount mirrors above their writing area.

Ah, so that’s why fame eludes me! For a moment I thought it might be the quality of the writing.

Despite the fact that I sometimes startle myself, having a place to write does help me get the writing done. Right now, in fact! Whilst tapping away at the keyboard (never looking down as a good typist should) I watch as the words flow effortlessly onto the screen. In a perfect world I won’t forget to save the document every once in a while. If I have to look something up online (such as “knee hole”) it is only a mouse click away. The ugliness only presents itself if I pause for too long.

A brief pause in typing gives me a chance to reflect on what I have just written, and to consider what comes next. Any longer, though, and my head rolls up and my eyes look forward—into my own eyes about eighteen inches away. Goblin! Oh wait, it’s just me again.

No wonder I think about myself so much when I write. The furniture piece is called a vanity, after all, and thus comes with a mirror attached for all the reasons a person might sit at a vanity. Therein lies my problem. I’m not sitting there to use a vanity, I’m sitting there to write. And every time I look up, I look back at myself and am clearly not writing.

Oh, the vanity. In more ways than one.

Easy

2011-04-24T11:05:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, there was a grocery store nearby that we could reach by car or bicycle without spending a single moment on anything other than residential streets. It was called Wings, though I don't know why. Maybe it was Wing’s. Facebook has a tribute page for a Wing’s Grocery but it appears to be from Texas.

Elsewhere online I found a Wings Grocery supposedly in Hayward, California, but it appears to be located in a residential area. Not sure I want to be poking around the produce section in someone’s house. The only currently operating Wing’s Grocery I discovered were two in British Columbia and Alberta (in Canada, don’t y’know) and I’m not sure I’m willing to travel that far down memory lane.

Anyway, Wings—with or without the apostrophe—eventually became Nob Hill and then Nob Hill moved across the street and the old Wing’s building became
Big Lots!, where one can by all sorts of cheap plastic crap. It seems like Nob Hill could have just done a little updating and remodeling rather than truck all of their food products across the street. I wonder how much ice cream melted on the way . . .

The upgrade mindset of the common man (new car every three years, new house every ten, new wife every . . . oops . . . never mind) is repeated by large corporations like Nob Hill. There’s a national drug store chain with an existing location in a strip mall in San Jose that is building a new and more grandiose building . . . in the front of the parking lot of the same strip mall! It seems to me it would be easier to just stay where they are.

I generally seek out the easy over the hard. I mean, I’ll run a marathon or climb Mt. Whitney or motorcycle 700 miles in one day, but generally on the day-to-day business I want it all easy. And I have happened upon a rather easy life with the kids and the wife. There are moments of difficulty, of course, what with me being a stubborn and argumentative soul, but the overall picture, the CliffNotes™ if you will, is like the big red button at Staples Office Supplies: easy.

This begs the question: has Staples ever made the decision to close a store just to open another within a stone’s throw? That might disprove their claim that they are the keepers of the ease. I’ll have to look into that.

Meanwhile:

My easy life has come under attack by yet another grocery store taking their business elsewhere. When we moved to our house in 1992 we were pleased to have a grocery store just about a quarter mile away. Sure, when I was a younger man and not so eager to live easily, I usually drove there, but in recent years I have taken to walking for a couple bagfuls of food whenever we needed something.

The trip to Safeway was not much longer than my long ago sojourn to Wings, though I did have to cross a five-lane boulevard. Nevertheless, I made my way safely by foot many times, as did my kids. Yes, I have trusted my children out in the great big world without me hovering over them, worried about every possible catastrophe. It is . . . easier . . . that way.

Safeway didn’t want to do it the easy way. Rather than remodeling my existing space (they preferred calling it “their” space . . . whatever) they found some other poor building made vacant by another failed business and remodeled it, moving with much hoopla and pomp and a ten-dollar coupon for me to use at the new store.

The only problem is I can’t walk to their new store to use the coupon. Instead of making my life easier, Safeway has made it more complex. Their new store is very large, it offers tens of thousands of items when I can generally choose well from about one hundred, and the parking lot is large to match, and that brings too many of my fellow citizens to the store at the same time.

I have a few alternatives. The now-empty Safeway’s neighbor is a drug store that sells many of the non-food items I used to buy at Safeway. I can walk there. There is a discount grocery not much further in the other direction that sells some trustworthy food items (and some knockoff brands that look positively scary). I can walk there.

And then there are all of my neighbors’ refrigerators, which are well-stocked, and I happen to know that many of those people leave their homes, sometimes for hours at a time.

Some solutions may not be nice, but they are easy.

Choice

2011-04-17T11:44:00.001-07:00

I am pro-choice. Yes I am! I think we should all have the choice to choose where and how we live, and who our friends are. We should be able to make other, more personal, choices as well—such as what we want on our burger, how often we want to bathe, and (unless you are a high school student in an Honors English class) what we want to read. Sometimes, though, I think we have too many choices from which to choose.

A closet full of clothes may seem like a good idea, but I’ve seen too many people spending too much time dithering over the proper outfit. If there were fewer to choose from, perhaps the process would be streamlined and we could actually get somewhere on time for a change!

[note: yes, a bit of a rant on the wife, but let it be known that she isn’t really a clotheshorse, and she doesn’t a have a stultifying number of hangers in the closet, but she does regularly suffer from decision-itis]

By way of comparison, I have one pair of jeans and one pair of shorts. My leg covering choice is a function of (1) how’s the weather and (B) where am I going. Surely this is just as extreme as having too many clothes, but in the battle of “how fast can you get ready” I’ll win every time.

Elsewhere on the choice front, and as mentioned just above, I like to be able to adjust my hamburger from the way it is offered on the menu. When I was a kid I had to wait extra time for my McDonald’s quarter-pounder because it always came with cheese and I didn’t want cheese. They had to make it special, and the pimply-faced clerk seemed put out by my request. But at least they would do it.

Restaurants that don’t allow for substitutions are nothing less than Fascist regimes. Feel free to charge me an extra buck or two if need be, but if I want to exchange the baked potato for some curly fries I should be allowed to! Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us . . . that kind of thing.

But to provide choice to the point that the actual ordering of the food is delayed, then we have crossed the line. There’s a burger joint near our house, one of a small chain actually, that boasts of providing over 312,000 different combinations. Four different kinds of meat and non-meat patties, each of which comes in three different sizes, are topped by one of twelve different cheeses, up to four of thirty different toppings, and one of twenty different sauces.

By the time I’ve waded through all of that information I cannot be expected to pick which of their five different buns I’d like. Just bring me another beer and I’ll drink my misery away.

Choice is good, up to a point. Abundant choice is not good. It gives the feel-good illusion that we are in control, and yet it makes what should be relatively easy decisions ridiculously complex. Choice is supposed to make life better, not worse.

That’s the one thing I like about warehouse superstores. I don’t need a three-quart container of cashews (although they look delicious, don’t they?) nor will I ever seek out a container of laundry detergent that would keep a small apartment building in the suds for twelve calendar months. But I do appreciate the fact that there aren’t eleven different catsups and 43 different kinds of cookies.

I may not need 64 ounces of mustard, but I’d prefer that over an entire row of different mustards. And I can always find a desirable cracker within an available selection of three or four different kinds. I don’t need a forty-foot aisle with five shelves of crackers and cracker-like products.

Yes, even the store must make a choice. If it is going to provide anything that anyone might want, I will have to choose to shop elsewhere. I prefer a smaller store, with fewer patrons inside, and some quick decision-making. No more will I be stuck behind a gaggle of shoppers with their too-full baskets, standing in mindless awe of microwave meals or the vinegars (balsamic and otherwise) or the loaves of bread.

Nope. Just me and my snap decisions. What’s that? I bought the wrong mustard? Heck, it’s not my fault, they only had one kind!

Zero

2011-04-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

When I have to mow my lawn, I push a lawnmower. I say “when I have to mow” because I often don’t. During the summer I don’t water it, hence, it doesn’t grow. And as Johnny Cochran said as he stood in front of a grinning O.J. Simpson, “If it doesn’t grow, you mustn’t mow.”

Or he said something like that.

Sometimes Mother Nature prefers that my front yard not be an arid wasteland, so she dumps rainfall by the bucket. This spring has been particularly wet, hence, whatever groundcover was clinging to life in the soil has been thoroughly resuscitated. Lush, green, and lawn-like. What a pain.

Mostly it is a pain for my son, because when the lawn needs mowing, he is more than likely the one to do it. On occasion I would have to badger him, but eventually he learned that there was no escape, and he could either do it now or later. Later just ensured that it would be longer, and while your garden-variety power mower has no problem with long blades of grass, the push mower does exactly as its name implies.

You push the mower, the mower pushes over the tall grass rather than clipping it, and as you pass the grass stands tall and seems to give you the finger . . . a long, thin, green finger.

With the warming weather we are reaching the point when we can once again store our mower for nearly six months. It fits neatly along the wall of the garage, sticking out barely twelve inches, and is forgotten—except perhaps by the wife who has to make sure she doesn’t stub her toe on it whilst climbing into the car. But, hey, twelve inches! Try being a little more careful.

If we had a riding mower it would be much more difficult to store, though much easier to avoid stubbing a toe upon because it is just so damned big. Our front and back yards are not of sufficient size to warrant a riding mower, but I’ve seen folks with not much bigger plots than mine who own such a mechanical beast. Probably too much disposable income, or they like their toys, or they just aren’t burning enough gas in their SUVs driving a half-mile to the grocery store. Some people like to burn gas.

When I bought my most recent push mower it was an easy decision because they only sold two models. There were a dozen or more gas or electric models, but the quasi-Amish had a very limited selection. I stuck with the trusted man-power option because it was what I grew up with. Choosing between the two was easy: I went with the cheapest.

If you are going with a riding mower, however, beware: you will spend as much time choosing your mower as you spent naming your first-born. And you will spend as much as you spent on your first car. These things are rated by horsepower, cubic centimeters, width, length, and maybe even girth, and priced accordingly. A hasty decision is not recommended.

Five speed or only four, anti-scalp wheels (whatever those are) or not, CARB-compliance for those of you mowing in California, it is a heady mix of choices. You can even buy spiked tires à la Mad Max to aerate your lawn as you mow . . . or to effectively staple your neighbor’s foot to the ground if he should accidentally trespass while trimming the hedge you share.

The latest method of one-upmanship between mowing madmen (and let’s face it, we are talking about men here; most women are sensible enough to hire someone to do the work should their yard be of too-large size) is the turning radius of their suburban tractor. Like you (perhaps), I thought a zero-turn riding mower meant it only went in a straight line. Useful if your lawn is four feet wide and a hundred yards long.

What it actually means is that the vehicle has a turning radius of zero inches. It will pivot through 180 degrees without leaving a circle of uncut grass. None of this back and forth to line up the blades and overlap the last cut. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. If the square footage of the lawn in question warrants the ownership of a riding mower, surely there is enough room to operate a mower that turns more like a 1968 Plymouth Valiant.

After all, when I mow the lawn, I have to turn the push mower around and take a moment to line it up.

I mean, my son does.

License

2011-04-03T13:43:00.000-07:00

The Department of Motor Vehicles does more than just issue licenses and register boats. It also teaches patience. Like a good Zen monk, the DMV asks the unanswerable questions. What is the sound of one hand waving you forward after waiting in line for over an hour? What moves: the flag or the wind? Because it certainly isn’t this line!

I have sat around the DMV quite regularly over the past few years. There was the purchase of two new vehicles for the wife and me, and then the three children all reached the age of licensing. Followed shortly thereafter by the purchase of several used vehicles for people who don’t deserve new cars.

In other words: teenagers.

With all three kids I took a few moments to discuss the benefits of going to the DMV to transact business. Even at a young age they had heard stories, probably from whiny adults they had come in contact with, of how horrible it was to have to go the DMV.

“Balderdash!” I would say. Gesturing toward the orderly folks at the Appointment line, I pointed out that they had planned ahead. The much longer Non-Appointment line, while full of people with last-minute business or an inability to schedule a visit weeks in advance, was still relatively calm.

“That, my dear child, is the sound of one hand clapping.”

Rather than treating it like an uncomfortable inconvenience, I choose to view the DMV as a place for some quiet introspection. Like the proctologist’s office, it can be either an intrusion or welcome relief. It’s up to you.

Last week I actually went to the DMV twice. The first time was on Wednesday, when I had two matters to deal with. A vehicle needed an updated annual registration, and though I could have done that online I also had to go to renew my own driver’s license. After many years of just renewing by mail, they were finally requiring a visit. To verify that I had a still had a pulse, perhaps.

What better way to achieve inner peace than doing two things at the DMV without an appointment! I waited in line for about fifteen minutes before receiving my queue number, and then found a molded plastic chair to wait some more. After thirty minutes I was at the counter and shoving a number of papers at the lady. She must have been a bit distracted because she processed the vehicle registration in whole dollars. I could have paid just over a buck but instead I spoke up like an honest Zen master and paid just over a hundred bucks.

For the first time in my life I had to pass the vision test with spectacles, and my driver’s license shall forevermore be stamped “corrective lenses.” Not only does that show my age, but two days later I went back to take my son, the third and final Baxter child, for his driving test. I must officially be an old man if all of my offspring are old enough to drive.

Kyle had excelled at the original written exam and been practicing on the roads with a driving school and his very patient parents. What else can you be but patient when hurtling down the open roads, an inexperienced child at the wheel, without a second brake pedal at your disposal?

Kyle’s driving test was on Friday, April 1, and you are no doubt aware of the joke-making that can be had on that particular day. I anticipated a bunch of comedy at the conclusion of the exam.

Funny:

“Sorry, you didn’t pass. [pause] April Fools! You passed!”

Funnier:

“Congratulations, here’s your license. [pause] April Fools! You didn’t pass! Better luck next time.”

The proctor was in no mood for jokes, though. Kyle passed, and she told him simply that he had passed. Very boring. But he was excited, and I was excited, and I offered him a burger or caramel macchiato as a reward for a job well done. He preferred cash, as it was date night at the movies, so I gave him some cash. And he wants a car, but that just might take a little extra while to earn.

I have now unleashed three young drivers on the open roads, and I would like to officially absolve myself of all responsibility for the mayhem they have or will perpetrate. But I don’t know if I get to do that. Instead, I will simply focus on my breath, and think calm thoughts for them. And for all other new drivers out there. Maybe chanting will help.

Om.

2011-03-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

It seemed like a reasonable thing, to communicate a thought to the wider world that could be easily distributed to folks interested in what

Okay, let’s try that again . . .

If there was something important that I wanted to impart to the general public, I would have to choose the most effective medium, and given

Hmm, perhaps I should have given this a little more thought. It’s hard to get a cogent idea across to discerning readers in 140 characters o

Damn it.

Those of you who use Twitter must have learned how to get a point across more succinctly than I. Those 140 go by fast.

I suppose the most successful tweets (those are the Twitter messages) get rid of clutter. Like “I suppose” and parentheses. Totally useless.

Whew, barely made it on that one. Clearly punctuation must be the first thing to go.

In 2006 the madness started, and Twitter has continued to gain popularity worldwide. Witness 190 million users, generating 65 million tweets

a day (sorry about that, a little carryover from that 140 character limit). Fortunately tweets can start with a lower case letter.

As opposed to a properly crafted sentence. One with subject/verb agreement. And with a point. Tweets often lack a reason to exist.

That’s because “followers” (the folks who sign up to receive your tweets on their fancy cell phones and other mobile devices) want to hear

Hmm. Probably should have lost the quote marks on that last one. And the long parenthetical statement. It didn’t really add much to what I w

Followers want to hear everything you have to say. Breakfast cereal bowl contents, your stupid job, nothing is off limits.

Where you are. What you are doing. It was assumed that anyone who might follow you would want to know this stuff.

There was the famous Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN Twitter war in 2009, when we had the race to one million followers.

Ashton won.

Now Charlie Sheen (the first and last time you’ll see that fellow’s name in this column, and no, “tiger blood” comments don’t count) tweets.

As his life recently imploded he racked up a million followers in twenty-four hours. I assume because he had many interesting things to say

Which seems unlikely. A better use of Twitter would be the peaceful civil unrest in Egypt, for which Twitter has received some credit.

I don’t know if it is true or not, but it gives me some hope that we aren’t on a steep slope into a totally servile relationship with our te

Hiccup. Our technologies. Man, at 140 characters there just isn’t any time to establish anything of consequence.

You can’t write anything of great importance. “Run, the building is on fire!” doesn’t count. By the time you’ve tweeted you’re in flames.

In a glib, pretentious, and simulated world, Twitter stands out as a great advancement.

And most folks, including me, are at some point glib, pretentious, and simulated. The thing is: we get past it for the majority of our lives

Twitter doesn’t fit with the real world. It is an aberration. It is what you do on a crazy Vegas weekend.

You eventually come home and return to whatever counts as your normal life. What happens on Twitter, stays on Twitter.

or something like that

Most of us haven’t tweeted, and probably never will. I figure those who have eventually tire of it. I mean, come on . . .

Writing this column and keeping it to 140 characters or less for each thought-provoking point I’d like to make has been a huge pain in my as

Ran out of space there just before I got vulgar, eh?

If I am wrong, and Twitter continues to grow in membership and usage and popularity, I will sign up to send one and only one tweet:

long form of written communication dead - along with it, me - i cannot sit idly by and watch u all kill off worthy composition - long live b

Court

2011-03-20T10:32:00.001-07:00

Downtown San Jose is not too far from where I live, but I don’t venture there often. Once or twice a year for a footrace, and perhaps occasionally to meet friends or go out with the wife. Mostly I am safely ensconced in my nearly suburban home, wondering what it would be like to be a city dweller.

Those downtown places are plagued with things I don’t like: traffic, crowds, one-way streets, hobos, etc. In the past I would have included Superior Court of California—County of Santa Clara on that list, seeing it as nothing more than a bastion of criminals and criminal behavior and, of course, jury service.

Like any good American, I have been programmed to avoid jury duty at all costs. Exaggerate my prejudices, invent financial or personal hardships, whatever it would take. Twice I used my young children to get out of jury duty, but now they are grown. So, summoned for the fifth time in my life, I showed up and tried to make myself appear unfit to serve.

Dear prosecutor: I find your questions insulting. Of course I know what the burden of proof is! I read the book “The Burden of Proof” by Scott Turow a long time ago. And I know all about “innocent until proven guilty” by watching a lot of documentaries on television. Or perhaps they were just TV shows.

Dear public defender: I think you would say anything to get your client exonerated, including claiming his innocence. He wasn’t there, he didn’t do it, or he was and he did but it was self-defense. Make up your mind!

Dear accused person: I have already rushed to judgment and decided on your guilt or innocence based on your demeanor and the way you have dressed. And since most people arrested are guilty, I have found you to be just that. Guilty! Bring in the next case!

On the other hand, jury duty did give me the opportunity to sit around the house for two days waiting to be called. Finally I was asked to attend the Wednesday morning inquisition. In the hunt for twelve fair-minded men and women, about eighty of us were called into the courtroom. The laborious task of separating the wheat from the chaff (so to speak) would begin.

“Anyone here requesting dismissal for hardship?” the judge asked. A dozen or so hands went up, so the judge asked that they stay behind while the rest of us were sent away to return again on Thursday. One hour of jury service.

On Thursday morning I couldn’t tell how many of the hardship cases had been relieved of their civic responsibility, but the gallery was still packed. Standing room only, in fact. Everyone wasn’t seated until the first eighteen prospective jurors were called forward for the grilling.

It took two hours to figure out the older folks thought people in this country should speak English (the two accused had a translator speaking to them) and the younger folk had not watched enough episodes of Law and Order: Trial by Jury to understand the process . . . but to be fair it was cancelled after only one season. These youngsters asked questions like “what’s the difference between civil and criminal?”

Sheesh. Out of the mouths of babes.

Those of middling age were obviously trying to be excused by any means necessary. Oh, this is a case regarding assault? “Hey, I was beat up thirty years ago in seventh grade!” Ah, if found guilty the defendant will receive some sort of punishment? “Hey, I can’t sit in judgment of another human being.”

Every ninety minutes we had to schlep from the fifth floor courtroom to the second floor jury waiting room and fight for a seat. Then we’d be called back. A few jurors would be booted and replaced by some of us in the gallery. More questions, more booting, more replacing.

And still I sat.

After eight hours there were eighteen prospective jurors still being weeded through and forty or so of us waiting for our chance to make a crazy comment and be dismissed. The judge called a halt to the proceedings, announced that court would not be in session on Friday and that we were all to return on Monday morning at nine a.m. The groans were palpable.

“I know this is an inconvenience,” the judge said, “but it is the cornerstone of our judicial system. I am sure the jury selection process will be completed on Monday.” She wished us a good weekend and sent us on our way. As we descended the stairs yet again, the potential jurors were making wagers on whether the Friday cancellation was due to a golf game or other court business.

Hey, it’s Daylight Saving Time. Her Honor probably has time for both!

Girl

2011-03-13T16:30:00.001-07:00

Now that we are safely exiting cookie season, I can bring the following horrible truths to a discerning public without fear of retribution from the pint-sized, green-clad scouts who torment us all. They knock on my door, they have confronted me on the job and in front of many stores, and recently I even found them in a hotel lobby.

They may sound sweet and innocent when they ask, “Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?” but behind their eyes you can see the venomous hatred that will flow your way should you say no.

February and March is “cookie season,” the longtime fundraising activity for the group. Folks love the cookies, and are willing to pay the not inexpensive prices because it helps a friend’s kid, or a neighbor’s kid, or a coworker’s kid, or just because those Thin Mints are so darned good.

It started out as a good thing, but seems to be devolving into nothing but controversy. Thus, it has become time to end the abomination. Say no to Girl Scout cookies (well, say no next year). They are no longer just sublime sweets and have clearly outlived their usefulness. I say this to warn you, though it puts me at great personal risk of scout-style retribution.

Earlier this year, in Savannah, Georgia, the Girl Scouts had to fight for their right to sell their famous cookies on the sidewalk in front of their founder's birthplace, because a city ordinance prohibits commercial sales in the public right of way. Civics lesson for the day: take a hike, kids! Eventually they received a “special exemption” and were allowed to peddle their treats, but we won’t know how badly the children were scarred by this event until one of them injects a lethal amount of ketamine into a box of Lemon Chalet Crèmes.

Then there were the Girl Scouts who got the idea to sell their cookies online. They’ve used YouTube, Facebook, and even their own web pages to do so, until the parents of less-creative Girl Scouts complained. Then the organization told all of the Internet entrepreneurs to cease and desist before coming up with their own brilliant plan: girlscoutcookies.org.

Most recently, two female roommates in Florida brawled because one supposedly ate the other’s Thin Mints. Weapons included a board, a sign, and scissors. Aggravated assault was the result, and $10,000 bail. If only they had worked it out reasonably, they could have saved the bail money and bought more Girl Scout cookies!

Of course not a lot, because when we are not fighting over Girl Scout cookies we are complaining that they cost too much. The price creeps ever upward while the weight of each box slowly decreases. We’re sure that each year we get fewer cookies, but maybe we are just inhaling them more quickly.

No, the group fully acknowledges the economics of the situation. Manufacturing costs have climbed steadily upward, and they have tried to save money by reducing the packaging (they claim this is a move to help the environment, but won’t it just make it easier to inject the ketamine?) and selling fewer types of cookies.

It was another economic lesson for little girls, we are told. When seventy-seven percent of sales are just from five varieties, it was easy to blame it on the recession and make it easier on the bakers. Going into retirement this year: Dulce de Leche, Thank U Berry Munch, All Abouts, and Sugar-Free Chocolate Chip.

They don't want to have to deal with a surplus of less popular cookies, but who are they to decide? This is nothing but the food police telling us what we can and cannot eat! Some reports say it is an economic reality, others claim it is just marketing, which is another good lesson for little girls who’s career goals include teen mom or salon receptionist.

Cookie sales always take place in late winter, although I think I’ve made a good case for this being the last year that ever happens. Last fall was the first time I found Girl Scouts trying to raise money by selling nuts. Strategically placed on the calendar so as not to compete with cookie sales, the happy little girls in front of the grocery store seemed to attract more puzzled looks than serious buyers.

Girl Scout nuts: let the jokes commence.

Hotel

2011-03-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

If I didn’t remember those good old days of business travel, when the price of lodging and eating was covered by a reasonable expense account, my current situation would not be so disappointing. I used to be able to take the forty bucks allotted for the evening meal and consume nothing more than tiny liquor bottles from the hotel room fridge and cans of macadamia nuts in the pantry.

Sure, I’d wake up feeling sick to my stomach with hunger, but sometimes that’s the price to be paid for debauchery and stupidity. Plus I’d have a few bucks left over, and after scarfing down more than my share at the continental breakfast I could buy a carton of smokes. What a life!

Now when I travel I don’t get to stay at the posh suite places. Or I choose not to, because otherwise I blow my entire budget on the roof over my head. I don't have to eat a lot of expensive Hawaiian nuts, but I do need at least a few bucks to buy myself a burger. And the four teenaged girls in the next room want to eat as well.

What’s that, you say? What unpleasantness are you talking about, you freaky old man? Who are these girls and do their parents know you have squirreled them away in a dingy hotel room?

First of all, don’t insult my friends at Travelodge. It is a lovely place to stay! Second, the foursome was my high school senior daughter and three of her friends. Kelsey wanted to visit a couple of colleges, so we planned a trip to San Diego and Long Beach. It would be a one-nighter since sixteen hours driving in one day would be more moronic than surviving on liquor and snack foods.

One friend wanted to join us because she hadn’t gone on many college tours. That seemed fine. She’s a nice girl, and hasn’t caused me a lot of problems. Then another friend was interested in going, even though she hadn’t even applied at one of the two schools and didn’t think she’d choose the other even if she were accepted.

Kyle wanted to take the last seat in the car, which makes perfect sense. I remember being a junior in high school, and even though there was no chance I would ever be able to date any of my older sister’s friends, they smelled nice and while sitting near them I could pretend they liked me.

Kyle lost his chance to go, and not just because Kelsey forbade it. A third friend, one who had recently visited the same two universities, was in the mood for another road trip. In a moment of weakness I agreed to the entire gaggle, and off we set.

For a while I listened to a little talk radio. Nothing like some rabid conservative puffery in the morning for a good laugh. The girls hated it, and spent the time texting each other from their magical telephonic devices. They’d giggle and shush each other and refused to look me in the eye because they were so obviously guilty of something.

The phones went away when they gained control of the radio. Kelsey connected a variety of iPods, none of which apparently contained a single song I wanted to listen to, even though they hold, like, a gazillion. There was hip hop (ugh) and John Mayer (uninteresting) and plenty of show tunes (jazz hands!). An hour later, exhausted from their screeching—I mean singing—and our early departure, they fell asleep.

I kept the car nice and warm to encourage deeper slumber. A little more talk radio and the kids were nicely comatose, though they did wake briefly for a potty break and a burger.

At San Diego State we found hundreds of students camped out in line, waiting for basketball tickets to go on sale. Some had been there for three days. Good role models. At Long Beach State the girls were astounded with the amount of brick. The older buildings were all brick, the newer ones had brick accents and brick features, and even the sidewalks included bricks occasionally in different patterns and designs.

It was all they could talk about. Brick, brick, brick. As though the construction material is what really makes a good college. I pointed out that a much better way to determine if a university provides a quality demonstration was whether the students were willing to sleep outside in record cold temperatures for the privilege of buying tickets to a basketball game.

At the hotel I tried to get a room at the opposite end of the building from theirs, but we had already been assigned adjoining quarters. I asked the girls to either be quiet in their room, or take their loud party attitude out to the pool or any all-night diner or city park they could walk to. I don’t honestly know what they did during the evening, but I assume they were quietly resting in their room.

Really, they were super quiet. Either that or they weren’t there. I didn’t hear them come in late, but my heavy drinking might have deadened my senses.

As far as traveling with four female high school seniors, it wasn’t the worst two days of my life. But I think it might have been a whole lot more thrilling if I had done it thirty years ago.

Month

2011-02-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

I am so glad this month is over! Not only do I have to make a special attempt every single year to figure out exactly how many days I have to wait until March 1, but I get a bunch of grammarians (perhaps they would more accurately be called pronunciationists, but I’m pretty sure that is not really a word) telling me, “That’s not the way you say it.”

Sure it is. February. I’ve been saying it that way since I was a kid.

“You’re saying Febuary,” they say.

I know. February.

“It’s pronounced ‘Fe-broo-ary.’ There are two Rs.”

I know how to spell it, for goodness sake. I also know how to say it. February.

“You’re still saying ‘Febuary.’”

Febuary. It is how most of us say it, unless we are trying to be one of those effete elitists. FebRuary. Ugh.

Never mind all that. Let’s talk about something else. How about the fact that the whole leap year trauma, when I wake up and have to figure out if it is February 29 or March 1, will enjoy an unfortunate twist just before my 138th birthday in 2100 . . . which I do plan on being around for.

Taken from the Internet without proper attribution: “Years that are evenly divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they are also evenly divisible by 400, in which case they are leap years. For example, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Similarly, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2500, 2600, 2700, 2900 and 3000 will not be leap years, but 2400 and 2800 will be.”

Great. Just great. I have to trust the printers of 2100 calendars to remember not to include February 29. 2100 will be the first leap year not to actually be a leap year in two hundred years. This is Y2K all over again. Traffic lights will go on the fritz; elevators will plummet from the tops of skyscrapers. All because we will be inundated with inaccurate calendars. Maybe that’s why the Mayans didn’t make calendars after 2012. They were just sick and tired of worrying about the leap year nonsense and went back to building temples out of shoddy construction materials that would eventually turn to ruins and committing ritual acts of animal sacrifice and bloodletting.

Go Mayans!

And while I complain about the lack of uniformity when it comes to the month of Febuary, excuse me, February, I don’t know why we have to make a list of which years include twenty-nine days for the second month. To make the statement that 3000 will not be a leap year means that you think someone is jotting down right now what is being discussed and that note will be found in the back of some futuristic kitchen drawer just in time to remind everyone.

Trust me, that’s not going to happen. If there is anyone still alive in 3000, I’m pretty sure they will be too busy flying around on their cloned pterodactyls to care about leap years. Daily information (date, weather, historical fun fact, plus that evening’s TV programs) will be automatically uploaded to their iBrain™ upon waking, and the global economy, like global warming, will remain an unfulfilled prophecy.

Until that time, people born on any given leap day will have to wait four years to throw a legitimate birthday celebration (except for the poor saps born on February 29, 2096: they’ll have to wait eight years for their first party). February is just one big messed up month. (Except for daughter Kelsey’s birthday of course. The 23rd. If you haven’t sent a present yet it’s not too late. Hallmark makes plenty of belated birthday cards.)

February is to the annual calendar what Ringo Starr is to the Beatles. Really! See: February has the fewest days, and Ringo wrote the fewest of the Beatles’ songs. It makes perfect sense. Of course, at this point Ringo is quite possibly going to be the last Beatle standing, and will happily be the winner of their unexpected musical tontine.

Ringo can be a shining example for February. It just has to outlast the rest of the months. By 3000 February could be the name of the entire calendar.

Or Febuary.

Coit

2011-02-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

Some folks take their daily exercise on a treadmill, while others would rather perambulate on nearby neighborhood sidewalks. Both help improve general fitness levels, I suppose, but the former is just slightly more passive than the latter. I mean, the treadmill actually takes each foot backward for you as you throw the other foot forward to break your fall.

The stair climber at Club Expensive doesn’t do any heavy lifting for you, but a duller machine I cannot imagine. If I am going to climb stairs for fifteen or thirty minutes, I want to get somewhere. The viewing platform in the Statue of Liberty’s crown (if it was still open to the public) or the top of the Eiffel Tower (if someone is willing to pay for my flight to France). You know, somewhere that is actually up.

In June I hope to combine the real world alternatives of the treadmill and stair climber as I take part in my fourth sixteen-hour exercise regimen known as the Night and Day Challenge. Starting at four in the afternoon on a (hopefully) mid-temperature Saturday, my teammates and I will move ourselves around San Francisco to find as many of the sixty mystery locations as possible.

San Francisco, you’ll recall, is not a flat place. Sure, every once in a while you can walk there for five minutes without heading uphill, but generally when you take a step your forward foot is above or below the one in the rear. The wear and tear factor is thusly increased.

Doing this for sixteen hours probably seems foolish. It certainly does to us, my teammates and I, especially around one a.m. when we are just past halfway done. It seems like the morning will never come. But after a few months the pain is a distant memory and the next adventure beckons us as though it were a siren on a craggy ocean shoreline and we were scurvy-ridden buccaneers.

The first time I did the Night and Day with my brother. Then twice with a friend. As we put together our impressive 2011 team, either or both might be joining me, and I am working feverishly on adding team member #4.

D— thus far is unimpressed with the notion. He has been known to walk around San Francisco for hours at a time, but always during daylight hours. He knows his way around the city, but he is uninterested in doing so all night long, and he definitely has no desire to do any amount of running.

I thought there had been a time when D— expressed mild curiosity at the possibility of participating, but he has assured me that I am woefully mistaken. At no point had he expressed mild curiosity, and he is now on record as stating that he is considering a restraining order. Some might cower in fear of his emphatic speech, but I keep asking.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought it up, however, as D— and I recently approached the Filbert Steps in San Francisco. We were strolling around the city—not competitively—looking for beer and dim sum, and found ourselves near the 1300 block of Sansome Street, in the vicinity of the Embarcadero as it approaches the shopping mecca that is Pier 39.

The steps rise from just about sea level and eventually reach Coit Tower, a famous SF landmark that you can learn more about elsewhere. There are approximately 400 steps and they climb near 300 feet up, in a distance as measured by an overhead map of only 0.2 miles. That, my friends, is a 25% grade.

“Hey,” I said to D—, “I remember these steps! We had to run up them back in 2009!” Then I made the mistake of mentioning that we couldn’t find the mystery location situated about mid-climb, so we had run to the top, back down to the bottom, before going up once more to find what we were searching for.

It wasn’t the best way to convince D— that we were the team to join. It might seem like we were easily lost and that our map-reading skills might be sub-par. I could argue the point that we came in first place in 2009, but that was only when the point totals were broken down into subcategories. There were groups on bike, groups on foot, and groups using both. There were groups of men, and groups of women, and groups of both.

Yes, we came in first place out of all foot-based mens teams. Of which we were the only one. If I have to spell it out for you, that’s first place out of one; no other competition. That’s like still being in the pool when all of the other swimmers have already finished their race and gone home and spent the weekend sharing their various awards with friends and family.

Out of all foot-based teams in 2009 we came in third place, and there were only four. That’s like not losing, but only beating the losers.

Perhaps D— will end up competing in the 2011 Night and Day Challenge after all. On a more impressive team that doesn’t get lost on a staircase.

Run

2011-02-13T09:04:00.000-08:00

“I gave my love a cherry without a stone
I gave my love a chicken without a bone
I gave my love a ring that had no end . . .”

. . . I gave my love a footrace and made her run it by herself.

Okay, that sounds worse than it really is. At least from my perspective. You’ll have to ask my love what she thinks about it. Or read her nonexistent humor column.

Kristin has participated in a few footraces since my obsession began in 1999. She’s completed a number of 5Ks, and even ran a hilly trail 10K a couple of years ago. Okay, she didn’t “run” the trail race, but neither did I. Did I mention it was hilly? We finished together, as we often have. If I participate in a race with Kristin or one of the kids and the point is to do it together, I stick with ‘em through the end.

On occasion, if she has other company, I’ll run my own race, like we did in San Carlos a long while back. I run, finish, rest, eat, drink, rest, pace around the finish line, and here she comes! Of course I cheer loudly for my wife, being very proud of her and her accomplishment.

Last year I heard about a race in Oakland that we couldn’t assimilate into our busy schedule. It’s called a Couple’s Relay and is run around Lake Merritt. It intrigued me because in ’09 I spent twelve hours running around Lake Merritt and racked up 54.2 miles. This year this particular Sunday morning was open, so I signed up Kristin and me to participate in the Couple’s Relay. The only problem was I didn’t tell Kristin.

We are scheduled to run on Sunday, February 27. Consider it a late Valentine’s Day present. We have to get up to Lake Merritt by 8 a.m. and then Kristin will run around the lake, I believe in a clockwise direction. Hopefully I send her off facing the right way. When she completes the approximate 3.1 mile distance (the standard equivalent of the metric 5 kilometer) we will tag off in some manner and then I will run the same circuit.

Judging by our recent running, and the results of other teams in the same race last year, we won’t come in last place. That’s always Kristin’s concern. She doesn’t want to come in last. On January 1 we started the new year out right with a 5K in Palo Alto, and Kristin was worried that she’d come in last.

She didn’t, naturally, because she is determined. She even thought all of the 10K runners, who only started fifteen minutes earlier than we did, would beat her. Some did, but certainly not all.

If you think of this as a Valentine’s Day gift, you might think me daft, inconsiderate, sophomoric, or just plain cruel. Certainly unromantic. Which is fine with me; I don’t think I have ever been particularly romantic. Not like the Latin lovers in those movies I’ve never seen. I don’t take Kristin to the latest romantic comedy every mid-February. Usually I am trying to convince her to go see the latest Sylvester Stallone shoot-a-thon.

Not to say I’ve never done anything nice, I just don’t want to catalog them here. I’ll leave that up to your imagination.

Meanwhile, I am making post-race plans. We will either go to a movie theater to see “Just Go With It” starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston (which sounds horrible) or maybe eat at Chez Panisse in nearby Berkeley (which sounds expensive) or, barring either of those because I’m too sweaty for public interaction, we’ll go home and I’ll sit on the couch for the rest of afternoon.

Hey, what can I say? It will be nearly two weeks after Valentine’s Day. Surely I can be forgiven some selfish behavior at that point.

So I say she is going to run the footrace by herself, and this is true. To a point. She will run without me, but Kristin is well able to make friends everywhere she goes, and I have no doubt she will find someone of a similar pace and will be able to complete her lap at a rate that does not preclude a little friendly conversation.

Perhaps Kristin deserves a true valentine in advance of our sporting spectacle. If only I was still a classroom teacher I could regift a box of chocolates or little stuffed animal I’d get from a student.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Surprise

2011-02-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

Nothing says love like going behind your wife’s back. Trust me. I speak with authority on this topic. If you can go behind her back with solid faith that it won’t all blow up in your face . . . that’s love, baby!

In 2006 Kristin went out of town for a couple of weeks. Something about visiting her parents in Las Vegas. I don’t know. I wasn’t really listening. All I know was she was gone and she wasn’t back for dinner. Nor the next dinner. I kept cooking and putting it on the table, and eventually she was there to enjoy it. She said, “Thanks!” and told me about her trip.

I was smart enough not to say, “Oh, were you gone?”

Walking into the garage for the first time since her return, Kristin was startled to see a motorcycle. I had one when our matrimonial union was sanctified by good ol’ Reverend Scotty of the First United Methodist Church of Campbell (he who soon after left town with a new wife of his own) and Kristin and I had spent a goodly amount of time on it. Even made it to Canada in 1986, where I learned I could no longer apply for Conscientious Objector status.

We’d sold the bike, however, in the mid-90s. It was no longer practical with three small children needing constant chauffeur service. I was willing to take them on the bike but their feet didn’t reach the back footrests and their tiny heads just banged around inside the large helmet.

Now I had gone out and purchased a new one without any discussion with She Who Should Be Involved In All Major Decision-Making (she gave me that title to use for her, I didn’t make it up). Surprise! It could have ruined the mood of her homecoming, if only I wasn’t so clever in my surprise-making. There are many women, I am sure, who would browbeat their husbands if they brought home a motorcycle.

My wife is great. She said, “Let’s go for a ride!”

Of course, this was to be expected. She had dealt with other surprises over the past twenty-five years similarly. When I said, “Surprise! Let’s have Kyle’s six month picture taken in the same dress as his sisters when they were the same age,” Kristin went along with it. When I said, “Surprise! I hung up a dart board in the family room,” she just made sure to duck every time she entered the room.

Back in the garage, she was admiring the sleek lines and the shiny parts of the new motorcycle and I waited for the other shoe to drop. Because the motorcycle was the first shoe, and there was another shoe in the garage. Not the ones that were on our feet. And this mysterious second shoe was about to drop. Am I making the metaphor painful to read?

Well, then, let’s move on . . .

Turning to go back into the house she realized there was something to her right. A large something, and yet the Mazda was in the driveway. She looked and the next half-second stretched out in slow motion. Then she screamed.

The new Subaru scared her. Surprise again!

So yeah, I bought a new motorcycle while my wife was out of town, but the day before that I bought a new car. No input or advice or opinion from the spouse. And she didn’t kill me, which means I still stand in good stead. I am the kind of husband who can pull this kind of thing off and live to tell the tale. Many men are jealous of that fact.

This is no testament to the wonderment of Matt, however, it is the beneficence of Kristin that allows us to survive in a relationship where clearly one of us cares little for the feelings of others. I’ll leave you to figure out who I am talking about.

Of course, Kristin moves the household furniture around all the time without consulting me, which is sort of the same thing. Unless you consider how easy it is to move a couch from one wall to another and how easy it is for me to move it back after I stop yelling.

It is slightly more difficult to deal with a 4000-pound behemoth—not that Kristin was ever going to return the car once she found it had seat warmers.

Stupor

2011-01-30T14:06:00.001-08:00

First of all, let me first and foremost apologize to my brother for tying him up with the front yard hose. It was really foolish, I was just trying to copy that older kid from up the block who did the same thing to many of us while chanting, “You can’t hogtie me!” It seemed like a good thing to do at the time.

Of course, as we all know, you decided to try to hop into the house whilst well contained within the rubber tubing. Who knew I could tie such a good knot? I certainly never did during my short tenure as a Boy Scout. You got as far as the garage before falling, and wouldn’t you know, that rubber kept cinching up like high quality Chinese handcuffs. You couldn’t put your hands out to break the fall. Say hello to a nice chipped tooth, courtesy of your older brother.

Sorry, dude. Even though more than thirty-five years have passed, it remains high on the Top Ten List of Things I Shouldn’t Have Done When I Was Younger. In annual voting it regularly beats out “trimming the cat’s whiskers with scissors” and “asking people to call me Bobby Sugar.”

I’ve spent these past 3+ decades trying to make it up to Scott. I helped him empty a storage unit when he moved back to San Jose from Chico after college, even touching an old and greasy Human Crouton costume. I have stood in the street during Super Bowl parties playing catch with a football, even though I prefer playing with a Frisbee. I even agreed to go on a long bicycle ride in San Francisco and Marin to help celebrate his impending wedding though I was woefully out of shape.

The one thing I haven’t done lately, though, is that throwing and catching of the football. Scott and I haven’t watched a lot of regular season profession football together over the years, but we almost always congregated for the Super Bowl to dine on chili dogs and beer. Then last year we were faced with a lack of viewing options.

Both Scott and I were strictly antenna reception fellas, and when the digital revolution or the high def takeover or whatever you want to call it happened in mid-2009, our TVs went fuzzy. We both declined the offers to buy converter boxes or upgrade our television sets or subscribe to cable or satellite service. Come early 2010, we realized we couldn't watch the Super Bowl at either of our homes, and we ended up doing our own thing.

A year has gone by, and Scott and I still do not have TV viewing at home. Our wives and our children (even the rebellious teenagers) have been dragged along in this little neo-Luddite experiment, some willing, some not so much. Super Bowl XLV—as it is called because of their silly Roman nomenclature—will see Scott and me, for the second year in a row, watching it separately.

Like much of the country, we were always willing to celebrate the final game of the professional football season as some sort of national holiday. We watched the extensive (and mostly unnecessary) pregame shows, and we watched as much for the commercials as we did for the sporting contest (unless our nearly hometown 49ers were playing, in which case the heck with the commercials!), and we watched because it gave us a chance to consume copious amounts of chili dogs and beer.

Never mind the fact that sometimes the spectacle did not match the propaganda. A terrible Blues Brothers halftime show in 1997, games that were dull throughout or blowouts by early in the second half, missing the funniest commercials for a bathroom visit or a run to the fridge for another beer. And of course the infamous wardrobe malfunction in 2004.

After the annual celebration, we stumbled away, back to real life. In a stupor from too much food and drink, too much excitement, too much noise and light, too much football. It is horrible to think that we succumbed to the hype year after year, and yet I know if either of us had a TV right now that could show the game next Sunday we would be at his house or mine, sitting in front of the boob tube for hours.

‘Cause it’s the Stupor, I mean Super, Bowl. And it is what we do. Or at least it is what we used to do.

Go 49ers! What? They’re not playing this year?

Never mind.

Bull

2011-01-23T09:57:00.000-08:00

Hopefully the recent upheaval in the astrological business has not turned your entire life upside down. Many folks are beside themselves with the announcement that a thirteenth constellation has been added to the rotation because of a shift in the alignment of the sun. They are also upset about the Mayan end-of-the-world prophecy for 2012 and because their Magic 8 Balls keep repeating “Reply hazy, try again.”

This new astrology symbol, this snake-riding fellow in the sky, Ophiuchus, covers a certain section of the calendar late in the year, in essence bumping Sagittarius and affecting the rest of the star-figures as well. By my calculation, most of the days of the year are referenced to a new astrological entity. This has caused serious heart palpitations in people who read their daily horoscope with great interest.

These are the people who actually think that when the newspaper says “let someone else take the lead for once, allowing you to regain your equilibrium before the next decision needs to be made” it means they shouldn’t even decide to get out of bed. They’ll wait until they’re told “today is a day for action!”

Other folks just don’t care about Ophiuchus. Easy for me to say, because May 15 is one of the few days that maintains its astrology sign in the new system. I was a Taurus last month and I am a Taurus still. The myth of the Taurus being a stubborn bull is nonsense. I would still be stubborn even if I had been magically transformed into a Pisces.

Which begs the question: now that the wife has moved from Gemini to Taurus, are we destined to be constantly combative, never backing down because our actions are governed by the stars and we have no freewill? Can two married Tauruses live in a house without driving each other crazy?

I don’t know. Ask Oscar Madison or Felix Unger.

One daughter has changed from Sagittarius to Scorpio. The other has morphed from Pisces to Aquarius. The boy was Capricorn and is now Sagittarius. Suddenly none of their actions make sense and I fall prey to calling them the wrong name (not like I ever did that before). “Kate . . . Kelsey . . . Kyle . . . you know I’m talking to you ‘cause I’m looking at you!” I can’t tell them apart anymore. It is madness!

The peacemaker has become the combative one. The quiet one won’t shut up. The adventurous one won’t try anything new unless the horoscope calls for it. The former Sagittarius and the new Sagittarius haven’t been seen in the same room at the same time since the announcement of Ophiuchus, which begs the question: did the shift in the zodiac cause a space/time confluence that merged them into one being?

Or is it because one of them moved to Arizona?

The solution to this non-dilemma lies in the way you approached the astrology business before the kerfuffle. It is all a matter of choice. If you believe following your daily horoscope helps you make better decisions, then so be it. If you think your astrological sign actually defines who you are and how you behave, you probably still will. If you think it is nonsense, it still is!

I can understand the confusion to a certain extent, because if the question ever came up in my life I knew I was Taurus. It was one of those constants, like my adult shoe size, my address, and my love of professional wrestling. It didn’t come up every day, but when I learned that Andre the Giant and Jimmy “Superfly" Snuka were both Taurus, it gave me a little piece of mind.

When Ford introduced the car of the same name I thought it was funny. Certainly there was never going to be a car named after Libra (or so I told my brother who, now a Virgo, still won’t have a car in his honor). I don’t particularly care that I’m a Taurus, but at least I know that I am a Taurus.

I never gave two cents toward any daily horoscope because I thought it was silly. And I still do. I find that you can generally take such prognostications and prophecies, for any of the twelve—I mean thirteen—signs, and make them true for yourself in one way or another. They are written in a vague manner that can be taken myriad ways to justify your existence. Easy for me to be so dismissive, though, because I’m still a Taurus.

Will the rabid horoscope followers be able to deal with these changes? My Magic 8 Ball says, “Outlook not so good.”

Questions

2011-01-16T10:43:00.000-08:00

Late in 2009 I morphed my online humor column FreezeFrame to blog form. There were several reasons to do so, none of which are worth going into at this point, and one big reason not to. I didn’t want a blog. I didn’t want to be a blogger.

Nevertheless, here we are.

I like being the guy without a cellular telephone, and I like being the guy without a microwave oven, and I like being the guy who doesn’t have cable TV, and I like being the guy without things that seem to be ubiquitous. It is my rebellious nature.

It seemed at the time, and still does, that “everyone has a blog.” You can find these damned things all over the Al Gore Internet and their number dilutes their importance. I don’t even like saying blo…, bl…—see, I can’t say it. Good thing I can write it: blog. But it makes me feel dirty even when I only write it.

These blogs, these web logs, are not evil on their own. Some are informative, some are interesting, and some are designed so people can stay in touch with family and friends. Of course they could use Facebook for that, but I don’t have one of those, either. I do, however, regularly visit a few different blogs as a source of reading material.

One thing I have noticed that is common on blogs is the frequent use of a question at the end of most posts. This is presumably used to increase the number of comments that readers make, thus making the blog more trafficked. And if you have more traffic you can more easily turn a profit, because everyone knows the end-goal of a blog is to make enough money that you can quit your day job.

Blech. Everyone also knows that you are as likely to make a bunch of money from the Internet as you are from selling kitchen products, candles, and other kitsch to your friends at home-based parties. (The only way you make money on the latter is when you convince those same friends to sell those same products and to sign up with you as their sponsor. Multi-level marketing, folks, it’s the future!) So if a bunch of comments from friends and strangers does not make your blog more marketable, what’s the point?

Well, if you aren’t going to make money you might as well cheer yourself up with reading the comments and thinking that you are making a difference in the world. Sure, that’s likely, that blogger fellow who sits in his mother’s basement in his underwear, his fingers sticky and orange from his second bag of Cheetoh’s that morning, is affecting world politics and the entertainment industry and our national banking policies. Every time he offers up a pithy commentary on the subject at hand and thirteen folks bother to reply to his end-of-post question, heads of state are listening.

“How would you help to vote [insert politician name] out of office?”

Then there are the folks—generally in the twenty-something set—who like to pontificate on all of the things that are of critical importance to them. They post pictures of their kids or they write about what they did that day or they rage against something silly like a football game or the price of gasoline, and then they ask: “What do you think?”

“So I told him to take off my high heels, NOW! How would you have handled a problem like that?”

They do this because it is the recommended way to get reader comments, and reader comments are everything if you are a blogger. Thankfully, I don’t consider myself a blogger. And I don’t even call this a blog. It is a collection of finely wrought humor columns, sadly distributed via a well-known blog publisher via the Internet, another entity I would be happy not to be associated with (although it does provide [warning: sales pitch ahead] an easy way for you to order my books).

Since I am not going to cover the expense of actually mailing you a weekly humor column to your home address, we are stuck with this less-than-perfect but utterly free system.

But I can make you this promise: I hereby refuse to ever end a blog post with a question. I might ask you questions if we are talking in person or on the phone, and I hope that if I send you an e-mail you’ll take the time to respond to any sentence that ends with a question mark, but I am not going to use this weary method just to make myself feel popular. I just don’t want to be so manipulative.

Or is it because I just don’t care what you have to say?

Metal

2011-01-09T19:16:00.001-08:00

My brother was a music fan before I was. Perhaps in most families it is the older brother who introduces the younger brother to the wonderful world of radio stations and LPs—I mean CDs—I mean MP3s—but in this regard I failed Scott. He was the first one to tune in our clock radio to KFRC so we could listen to Dr. Don Rose, and he was the first one to ask for record albums for birthday and Christmas gifts.

Scott knew musical genres and the names of the members of many groups. His knowledge was encyclopedic. At the end of each year we’d spend an entire day writing down the entries as the KFRC disc jockeys played the top 100 songs of the past twelve months. Scott would know all of them.

All I contributed to the relationship was tying him up in the front yard with the hose and sometimes pretending he was invisible when he tried to talk to me. I wasn’t a perfect older brother, but I had mastered the torture and humiliation bits.

Scott introduced our little bedroom to rock and roll, and later heavy metal. He had the Kiss album Love Gun and practically wore it out, playing it over and over again. Christine Sixteen, what a song! Almost Human! And who can forget Hooligan?

“I’m a hooligan. Won’t go to school again.”

Now that is a top quality rhyme worthy of Yeats or Poe. Or Simmons (Gene).

About the time I began tapping my toes and snapping my fingers, Scott’s tastes grew more refined. He continued listening to rock and roll but became interested in a larger variety of musical styles. I, meanwhile, grew myopic. And my music grew louder. All I listened to was the head banging stuff. It very well may have been the case that I was trying to annoy society, a popular activity of some youth.

There was some hope that I would grow out of my interest in heavy metal. Evidence included the fact that most of its fans appeared to be juvenile miscreants, and even as a juvenile miscreant I perhaps had larger goals for myself. Certainly the typical fan IQ had to be somewhere south of average. When I started going to concerts (AC/DC, WASP, Judas Priest, Triumph, Ozzy) you might have thought that the youthful audience, as a representative sub-group of the larger “future of America” crowd, spelled doom for our society.

Fifty-year-olds weren’t going to the concerts I was going to. They certainly weren’t standing in the same aisles at Tower Records as I was. The older folks buying the easy listening and the classical music had grown up with such tunes and had stuck with them. It was familiar, which is probably what happens to most people. You are fond of what you remember from your youth.

Hence my current predicament.

Except sometimes musical tastes change. It could be maturity, or a wiser ear, or you are fond of someone who likes something different. There appears to be ample evidence that with maturity comes a more refined musical sensibility. Sure, Scott achieved this when he was still a teenager, but there was hope I’d do the same. Heavy metal was seen as kids’ folly, accused of being loud and nasty and not very musical.

This hoped-for maturity didn’t happen in my twenties, though. I bought a three-inch spiked leather wristband and a silver rat earring. I hung up a poster of Gene Simmons in my bedroom. I made home videos with my friend James, lip synching to Mötley Crüe and Van Halen.

It didn’t happen in my thirties either. I made compilation tapes of the best metal from my record collection for my brother-in-law and sent them to North Carolina, trying to spread the word to the uninitiated. I played the freeze dance with my children as we listened to Marilyn Manson.

It thus far hasn’t happened in my forties. I have inculcated an appreciation for the music in my son, and my daughters know enough about it to impress their friends. When Kelsey was in middle school she knew a kid who wanted to be my best friend because I knew who Dream Theater was.

Now I’m not far from fifty. I saw Iron Maiden in concert last May and have recently downloaded Otep and Sevendust onto my iPod. To quote Slipknot’s 2008 album, in regards to my lack of maturity, “All hope is gone.” It just doesn't appear that I am going to “grow up” and change my musical preferences. I listen to choral music when Kristin sings, and I can tolerate just about any kind of tune (at least for a little while).

But to quote Popeye, “I yam what I yam.”

I was the oddball when I was listening to the heavy metal noise as a teenager. I guess I’ll be the oddball doing the same when I’m an old man.

Tiny

2011-01-02T08:07:00.000-08:00

The Christmas tree has been dragged from our living room and thrown unceremoniously to the curb. It was carted off by the sanitation engineers masquerading in our city as garbage men and will be ground to pulp and recycled as books for poor children and paper bags for grocery carrying.

The circle of life, indeed. I’m sure the tree would not have elected to have already completed its trip around the circle, but no one asked it. I mean, what are you going to say? “Excuse me, Tree, mind if I cut you off at the ankles and shower you with trinkets and tinsel?” Be serious. Even if it had the ability to decline the offer you still would have chopped it down and turned it into the gaudy centerpiece of your living room.

Because our tree is gone, the dog’s bed can return to its normal placement by the fireplace hearth. It is a large bean bag chair, and likely more comfortable than my own sleeping quarters. For several weeks Zen’s bed was crammed beneath the piano so the Christmas tree could stand near an outlet. Gotta have those bright lights burning to help dry out the tree as fast as possible.

With the dog bed returned to its proper place, the coffee table can now sit squarely in front of the couch. It had migrated a foot or so to the left (or to the right if you are sitting on the couch) so that passersby could make their way through the living room without stepping on the dog or banging a shin against the table.

Everything is going back to their original places, which is important to someone like me who desires order more than anything else. More than truth, honor, love, or cash, I desire order.

Okay, hold on a sec, that sounds bad. Makes me very shallow. Let’s go with cash first, then order, then all that other unnecessary nonsense. Truth and honor . . . please. Next you’re going to tell me I forgot about justice.

No I didn’t.

Now that the holidays have been obliterated once again, I have returned to my regularly ordered world, and I recall that we have more room than we need. We don’t have shelves covered in doodads, and there is actually room in each room to walk around. The most egregious example of our un-American behavior is that we can park two cars in our two-car garage. Scary, isn’t it?

In 1992 Kristin and I fell prey to a common illness: buying as much house as we could afford. It’s what the real estate professional said, it’s what the mortgage lender counseled, and truth be told we were greedy enough to swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Even if we could have done with less.

We had one kid at the time and were moving from a small two-bedroom, one-bath home. We didn’t need to go five-three with the new place, but we did it anyway. Yes, two more kids came along, and isn’t it nice that they could each have their own room, and its not like the house is ginormous, but I am firmly convinced we could have lived the last nineteen years just as well with less square footage.

After all, one kid has flown the coop and the other two will soon follow. I have learned to divest myself of the things I do not need and so my pile of possessions has slowly dwindled. I have actually removed shelves from the garage due to lack of use. Kitchen cabinets look sparse to the average American, but hold everything we need. I don’t need separate exercise room, office, sewing room, and guest room.

What I really want to do is downsize in a big way. I truly aspire to live in a tiny house. Less unused space, and even better: less space to put unnecessary things. I am leaning toward the 89 square foot model. That’s right, an entire house in eighty-nine square feet. Smaller than most bedrooms. The thought makes the average American slightly sick to his stomach. It makes me swoon.

It’s got everything: a front room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. There’s even a fireplace, and some sort of sleeping quarters. It could be problematic if you have to sleep in a vertical position, but I suppose I could get used to it. Best of all the whole place comes mounted on wheels, kind of like my childhood Radio Flyer wagon.

Ahh, memories.

There are a few roadblocks before the big move can take place, summarized as wife, two teenagers, dog, and too much stuff. These can mostly be solved by throwing out, growing up, and passing on. Just depends which method should be used for which item. Although I’m pretty sure if word of my plans gets out nothing so drastic will have to take place.

They’ll just gang up on me and make me move out on my own.

Exercise

2010-12-26T08:43:00.000-08:00

Amidst the hoopla of resolving to eat right or exercise more—because January 1 is upon us and we all must now make numerous and uncommitted promises to ourselves to turn from the slippery slope of bad habits on which we are currently slipping—I fear a contraption has entered my home. This was somewhat surprising, as I fervently work toward nothing entering my home. Ever. I am a minimalist, and stuff is my Kryptonite.

It happened like it always does. Someone says, “Hey, I’ll give you [thing]. I’ll bring it over, set it up, provide supplemental parts, etc etc etc.” This is said in an excited tone of voice and you are swept over by the notion of now owning this thing you didn’t know you didn’t need.

There are some cases in recorded history where this did not end in fiasco. I can imagine Ben Franklin dropping off a lovely ink pen set to his friend Thomas Jefferson rather than selling it at his neighbor’s garage sale. Good ol’ Tom could then have used it to write the Declaration of Independence. Sure, this turned out great for the rest of us, but it was still one guy dumping his junk at his pal’s house.

And what of the Wright brothers, you are probably asking yourself right now. Would we be happy to know that their first flight would not have been possible without a collection of scrap gears (and maybe airplane schematics) that others gave away rather than throw away?

Every time, either in these historically inaccurate stories or in real life, such presumed “helpfulness” is really the transfer of crap from one place to another, and I have learned to pathologically fear participating. I have stood firm for many years now. Why, then, is there a twenty-year-old Soloflex in my spare bedroom?

I could blame Kate for moving out and leaving an empty room in her wake, but that was destined to happen at some point, one way or another, so perhaps I should have had a better plan. I suggested to Kristin that we set up a home brewing operation in the room, but the combination of open flame and gallons of fermenting liquid was a deal breaker.

I was talking about fitness with this guy I know, and how running and bicycling is serving me well below the belt, but that my upper body is beginning to wither. Nearing a half-century of use, and no longer doing the heavy lifting common to a younger man. Now I get one of the kids to move the furniture or hoist the box into the garage loft, or I avoid the task entirely.

Helpful Guy said, “Hey, take my Soloflex.” He helped load it in my car, he helped me understand how to set it up, and he helped himself to a good laugh as I drove off.

One heavy piece of stuff that he would no longer need to deal with.

Mind you, he had upgraded to a better workout machine years ago, and had kept the Soloflex in a corner of the room. It was doing well as a dirty clothes organizer but he was happy to get rid of it. The only question was would it turn out to be a sensible thing for me to have acquired, or would I rue the day.

Let’s consider the past. Kristin and I purchased one of those silly riding machines many years ago. I think it was called a Healthrider or something like that. We used it for about a week. Then it started to collect dust and dirty clothes and eventually we found some poor sucker to take it. We inherited a rowing machine at one point and spent far more time stepping around it than we ever did sitting in it.

I had an old barbell from my teenaged years that was shoveled off to one corner or another in one room or another. Kristin’s parents have given us a mini trampoline or two, and Kristin has purchased Pilates DVDs and those big balancing balls. None are ever used.

The fact is that these kinds of items aren’t used in 99% of the homes that have them. They become “stuff.” And everyone ignores their own stuff before they find an easy way to make it someone else’s stuff.

The Soloflex, then, just might be doomed. Kyle and I looked over the poster-sized operating directions and have identified certain exercises we enjoy. Moving the bars and the rubber straps that provide resistance is mildly annoying, so if we have a plan to do exercises that minimize the number of adjustments we are more likely to use the machine.

First, of course, we have to open the door to the room where it hides, and we have to actually use it. So far we are not batting a thousand.

Hey, you wouldn’t be interested in a fine piece of home exercise equipment, would you? I’d be happy to bring it over . . .

Halloween

2010-12-19T16:17:00.000-08:00

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year, with the kids jingle belling and everyone telling you’ll be of good cheer. It’s the most wonderful time of the year” . . . with everyone yelling the Christmas season started way too early and does it really have to be so commercialized and whatever happened to the real meaning of Christmas and can’t we all just get along?

The only reason Christmas has been able to stake out so much acreage on the yearly calendar is its popularity. People love the decorating and the giving and receiving and the glad tidings and Rudolph’s bright nose and the associated winter holidays like Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, and stores and other commercial enterprises are thoroughly thrilled by the likelihood of increasing their bottom line and nothing does that better than great big “Christmas Sale!” signs as early as possible.

Some day we may indeed witness Christmas displays going up just as the Independence Day bunting is taken down. And the only thing that could suitably follow that catastrophe would be the entire city becoming one big year-round Christmas in July gift shop.

It’s not just people who are griping. Other holidays are feeling shoved out of the way and they are beginning to speak up. At a fictitious city council meeting recently held in the city of [name removed], several holiday symbols, including a menorah and a cornucopia, protested a 7-0 vote to drape tinsel on the lights on Main Street in mid-October. No arrests were made, but there was some serious tension when the menorah began waving around its lit candles.

Rather than civil unrest, I think there is a better way. For example, instead of mindlessly complaining that Halloween’s formerly sacred time is being invaded by the spirit of Christmas, folks should adopt some Christmas images for October 31. That will simultaneously prove the point while taking all the air out of Santa’s posturing. It’s so annoying when he struts around his North Pole workshop saying, “Who’s your daddy? That’s right, Santa’s your daddy.”

Next year, if you don’t like seeing Christmas starting up too early, stand up and fight back like the Angry Menorah (holiday symbol trademark pending). Pass out candy to everyone who comes to your front door throughout the fall season. Decorate your house with orange and black lights. And try some of the following ideas in your neighborhood to bring back the miracle of Halloween.

Send your kids out in reindeer ninja costumes, with sharpened antlers and brass hoof plates. Have them team up with other, similarly clad, children. Suggest mild forms of vandalism for them to perpetrate, whilst singing Christmas carols in scary voices.

Plant a few red, fuzzy Santa arms coming out of the front yard. This effect will be enhanced by some nearby gravestones. “R.I.P. St. Nick.” “Here lies Kris Kringle.” That kind of stuff.

Modify one of those now common Halloween decorations, replacing the witch with Santa and his sleigh. It’ll look like he slammed into a tree, no doubt killing the pilot and destroying the many gifts therein. Ho ho ho indeed! Cheerful scorch marks will add to the merriment.

Send Halloween cards to friends and family with a letter itemizing all of the horrible things that happened to you in the last year. Invent your personal catastrophes if you have to! Include photos of a Christmas tree aflame, with your children dressed as little evil elves, standing around the burning Tannenbaum toasting marshmallows made of the heads of little angels.

When setting the scene for this pictorial family memory, remember to watch out for molten, dripping tinsel, as that could cause major burns. Unless you plan to use such a misfortune for next year’s misery letter.

Any Frosty the Snowman rolled up in your front yard (for those of you lucky enough be digging out of October snow) should have a maniacal Jack-o-lantern face, carved out of ice with warmed utensils. A knife stuck in the ice crystal head would be a nice touch, and perhaps a spatter of ketchup.

Try any or all of these brilliant suggestions. No longer do earlier holidays have to suffer the transgressions of Christmas. Labor Day can be celebrated under the mistletoe. Easter decorations can be spruced up (and made more dangerous) with pointy holly leaves. Cheese logs for Flag Day, turkey-flavored candy canes for Thanksgiving, and nothing says Memorial Day like a poinsettia slowly dying on the living room coffee table.

Take that, Santa. Two months later, when Halloween is a memory and Christmas rolls around again, tell everyone you know that the bearded fellow will now be known as Svatý Mikuláš (that’s Saint Nicholas in Czech). It sounds ugly in its native tongue, and he brings potatoes and coal for the naughty kids. Brings to mind Charlie Brown and “I got a rock.” Halloween will have invaded Christmas.

The kids who have been nice will have to fend for themselves. Perhaps by going door-to-door and begging for candy!

Problem solved.

Name

2010-12-12T09:24:00.001-08:00

Yes, I am one of those sorry individuals who has Googled his own name. You might be laughing right now and thinking superior thoughts, such as “I’d never do such a thing!” or “How does it feel finding 0 hits?” or “What’s for dinner?” I applaud your self-control and your lack of involvement in the New World Order.

By the way, the answer is pork and beans.

Sometimes I do it to see if the local newspaper has included my latest column. I write for them once or twice a month, separate from this mattbaxx foolishness, and I like to print out a copy for the “All About Matt” bulletin board that dominates our living room wall as well as forward electronic copies to discriminating readers.

If I’ve never forwarded one to you, don’t be upset. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. You can stop by and see the bulletin board if you’d like to.

Enough about your insecurities, though, let’s talk about mine. I think when my name comes up people ought to be thinking about me. They ought to picture my face (full head of hair, rosy cheeks, wide smile—actually none of the above) and all of my accomplishments and where they were when they met me and aren’t I just the greatest Matt Baxter there is? But it turns out if you Google me you are likely to meet . . . someone else.

First and foremost there is always mattbaxter.com, the web home of quite an accomplished jazz guitar player. When I first wanted to preserve myself on the Internet, I found someone else already had. So I came up with mattbaxx. It was either that or matthewabaxter.info, and let’s be honest, that was never going to trip smoothly off anyone’s tongue.

There’s also Matt Baxter, photographer extraordinaire in Tennessee. His pictures are nice, but he hasn’t updated his blog in nearly a year and a half. Slacker.

Matt Baxter, the head coach at the Portland [Maine] Porpoise Swim Club, also shows up on my self-congratulatory Googling. The Portland Porpoise web page has a picture of Matt with some of his young protégés, and he appears to be young, handsome, and bearded. I can relate. In at least one way.

And though he left one consonant out, Mat Baxter of Sydney, Australia, the former chief strategy officer at MediaCom, was recently appointed chief executive of Universal McCann (in a surprise move, some say). You probably hadn’t heard this news before because it happened in late August, the same time that I was celebrating my twenty-fifty wedding anniversary. Sometimes we Mat(t) Baxters cancel each other out.

In the entertainment capital of the world, Los Angeles, California, a fellow by the name of Matt Baxter was promoted to the position of Vice President, Multi-Platform Marketing. My only concern is that the position was described as “newly created,” which makes it sound less exciting. After all, Big Fish Marketing, his employer, is one of “the entertainment industry‘s preeminent brand marketing and advertising agencies, specializing in the design, creation and production of consumer and B-to-B campaigns.”

I don’t really know what that means, but if the position didn’t exist before, has this Matt sullied the reputation of us all by succumbing to the Peter Principle? Why did a new position have to be created for him? Was he a failure everywhere else? I demand an investigation! And until such time that we can determine the truth, I insist that he no longer be called Matt Baxter. We don’t want to sully the brand name, after all.

Matt Baxter is a Web developer in Dallas, and Matt Baxter is a senior at Kent Island High School in Maryland (running back on the football team), and Matt Baxter is a technician at Mike’s Foreign Car, Inc. in Anaheim, California. This last Matt gets good press on the company Web page:

“Matt has a degree in automotive repair from Automotive Training Center in Pennsylvania. He has ten years in the automotive industry as a Technician for Volkswagen Inc. He attained Expert Technician status through Volkswagen's training program and has the skills, knowledge and tools to fix your vehicle right the first time. The training he received from Volkswagen gave him the ability to be a great Technician!”

I think we can all agree if you need any work done on your 1981 pop-top Vanagon, go to Matt. Matt at Mike’s.

Finally, Matthew Baxter of Colorado (or just "Baxter" as he is commonly known) has been actively researching the paranormal for over fifteen years, dealing with such specialties as UFOs, ghosts, demonology, fraud detection, psychology, and cleansings, among other areas.

Hmm. The rest of us sound all right, as though we might be normal guys, going through life with a most extraordinary name. That last fella seems like a nut, and might just be ruining the name for the rest of us.

I think at the next Matt Baxter club meeting I’ll propose that our membership director (Matt Baxter) begin to take a look at exactly who we are letting in. Perhaps our membership standards should be tightened up a bit.

Haiku

2010-12-05T11:43:00.000-08:00

Here’s a good one (written by a professional, certainly not me):

Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow

Seekers of enlightenment like to find an ancient practice or foreign belief system to adopt. Maybe it must be crammed and bent to fit—because having grown out of an entirely different culture it doesn’t naturally mesh like a puzzle piece—but the enthusiastic seeker has plenty of arm strength. He is happy to beat it into submission.

Chanting and drumming were usurped from Native Americans and hawked at New Age festivals for many years. Folks lined up to beat out their rage and frustration (which worked to a certain extent, probably like scream therapy) or to bring the rhythms of the planet into perfect alignment. That didn’t work so well.

Thankfully, drumming waned, as all New Age gimmicks eventually do. If it doesn’t incorporate well into modern life it will remain at odds with everything else. People aren’t drumming on their coffee breaks or when visiting friends, and as a solo sport it left a lot to be desired. It died on the vine.

Feng shui seems to have a little more life in it, but it might just be another fad. Where to build your building, and how to decorate it by compass points, might make sense from a style point of view, but hoping such decisions affect your good luck and your life energy appear to be misguided. At least as it is practiced in modern America. Here it is put to use as soon as you pay your friendly neighborhood feng shui consultant, and it is unlikely you can buy mysticism steeped in its original glory. Mysticism ought to be something a little more natural, less wallet-based.

Haiku is another Asian hand-me-down that has been warped by modern hands. Originally haiku wasn’t used so much for enlightenment, but rather to more keenly see the natural world, to strip down to the bare essence of something, to increase quiet and increase contemplation. All good things.

Again, from an ancient master:

An old silent pond
a frog jumps into the pond
splash! Silence again

Nowadays haiku is the subject of argument. Is it supposed to be three lines, never more or less? Must it be seventeen syllables exactly? Opponents stand on either side and try to prove their case, except that is so anti-haiku. There are rules, unless the rules must yield, in which case there aren’t rules. Besides, the seventeen-syllable rationale is based on seventeen of something that translates from the Japanese as “syllable” but isn’t exactly that in the original.

I like to email my brother absurd rock and roll lyrics because they annoy him. Recently he turned the whole thing on its ear and sent the lyrics back in the form of a haiku. It almost made me sit down in the lotus position and contemplate it with my mind’s eye, except I was too busy bothering other people with my emails.

Bothering emails
to the corners of the globe
make me laugh ha ha

Okay, that one was pretty weak, but I just made it up. Perhaps the best haikus take a little consideration. Like the ones my brother can twist out of a song. He’s so good at it I put together a blog for them.

http://rocknrollhaiku.blogspot.com

I don’t really want to advertise any of the other modern haiku blasphemies, but you can find beer haiku online, celebrity death haiku, and even online generators that make up trillions of completely random haiku that may or may not make sense. It just depends on how open your mind is, dude:

Ferris wheels whimper
steaming mud waits torn paper
lucid dreams midnight

Yeah, man. You can, like, read “whatever you want” into the poem. It “lives its own life” and, like, can “mean many things.” Yeah. Sounds like a bunch of New Age hippie drivel. You can’t find deep meaning in an art form that requires contemplation if you’re too busy rushing around looking for meaning. I don’t mean to harsh your mellow, dude, but a fact is a fact.

I think I’ll stick with my brother’s higher quality stuff. It’ll take you back to the songs of your youth. Or not. Depends on what you used to listen to. Did I mention the blog already?

http://rocknrollhaiku.blogspot.com

Rock and roll haiku
seventeen cool syllables
subscribe online now!

Prison

2010-11-28T17:36:00.000-08:00

It has always been my goal to avoid prison. At least in regard to going in and not being able to leave when I wanted. I’d be more than happy to visit a friend or family member who might find themselves behind bars. I’d submit to the x-ray and the pat down if necessary to get in (hey! visiting a prison is now a lot like going to the airport!) and I’d even be willing to talk to the prisoner through the two inches of bulletproof glass.

After all, dear friend or family member, it’s the least I can do, as it is likely you have taken the fall for me. Which I really appreciate! I’m working on the appeal right now, so please maintain our code of silence. Remember: given my previous record it was better that you accept responsibility for our crime.

So far I have succeeded in never doing any serious jail time. If there is any reason I might be suddenly and swiftly incarcerated, my attorney tells me I am under no obligation to tell you. Take that under advisement, as I have.

But enough about me. What do you think of me?

Despite my pathological avoidance of the penitentiary, plenty of other people are willingly going to prison. In this case it is not the conclusion of a legal battle, but instead it is a career move. As we Americans have continued to incarcerate more and more of our fellow citizens, we need places to put them and we need people willing to point guns at them if they don’t follow directions.

Communities are thriving with new prisons, or at least they hope to. It is a growth industry, replacing oil production in Colorado, coal jobs in West Virginia, and farming in California. Mississippi and Alabama and others are also seeking their fair share of the criminal element—as long as handcuffs and shackles are used liberally.

There are plenty of ways for people to make money in this new world order. It begins with the extensive construction process and continues through to the day-to-day operation. Ironworkers are needed, as are carpenters. Because these new prisons are so high-tech, they need electricians, too. And the guard jobs aren’t for dummies; they need to be able to count heads in the cellblock and keep track of which gates are open.

Instead of putting on a suit and tie and pushing paper from one side of the desk to the other like the stereotypical modern office worker, prospective prison employees must be willing to holster a gun and pepper spray. Even more important, they must be willing to use them. We are told these are the jobs of the future.

After all, teaching jobs disappear (because the economic horror in [your state or county] has forced all of the parents to flee with their families to other parts of the country) and no one wants to open a bookstore or boutique or tavern if all of the potential customers have moved away. Workers would rather listen to tin cups rattling against the iron bars of jail cells for eight hours a day.

Prisons used to fall under the edict “not in my backyard.” They were unsightly and with the caliber of their population they immediately made the neighborhood a more dangerous place to live (although as George Carlin once pointed out, wouldn’t escaped convicts likely run far from the prison, not hang around to torment the neighbors?) and no one wanted to include “turn left at the prison” when giving directions to their home.

Frustration with crime has led us to be more forgiving. We agree to lock up increasing numbers of inmates, and because we don’t want to become China we must house them in humanitarian ways. This creates lots of jobs, and with that the small town nearby just might come back to life as the newly sworn in prison guards need grocery stores and boutiques (and taverns—I would imagine working in a federal penitentiary would be a highly stressful job and good for the business of selling alcohol).

If manufacturing is never coming back as the great American economic model (as many doom-and-gloomers are saying) and the so-called “knowledge industries” of the twenty-first century are boring you to death, go to prison! This will work up until the point that there are too many convicts for the rest of us to keep under control.

Then we might have to try something else.

Wisp

2010-11-21T08:45:00.001-08:00

The best kind of product reviews are those where the author is highly opinionated, has never actually seen or used the product in question, and instead relies on preconceived notions formulated over many years of being skeptical and sarcastic. It works for movie reviews as well, I suppose, but that’s a bit off topic at the moment.

Let us consider, then, the Colgate Wisp. I first heard about it from a televised commercial. A handsome woman clad in a skimpy outfit and sitting in the backseat of a luxury car parked outside a popular nightclub had a sudden emergency. Her breath was not fresh! Possibly she had shreds of spinach caught in her teeth from her dinner salad as well.

She needed help, and it arrived in the form of a small brush with a pre-applied bit of mouth cleaner. After a quick swipe, she grinned widely in the rearview mirror and went inside the club to dance erotically and probably drink too much. The commercial didn't show her four hours later when the club closed, but I presume she would need to freshen up again.

Sadly, the item she used in the car was designed to be thrown away. No concern for landfills and bulky plastic garbage. Nope, she tossed the first one and probably got another one from her purse later, just in case her kissing bandit showed up again.

The “emergency” that propels people to buy the Colgate Wisp is slightly fictitious, and even if it wasn’t, that particular problem was solved decades ago. I know fresh breath and clean teeth are important, but it seems unnecessary to have them both twenty-four hours a day. As human beings, we sometimes have to eat and drink, and that affects our ability to perpetually smell like sunshine and love.

I don’t eat two dozen garlic cloves and expect anyone to get too close, but here’s the thing: I rarely eat two dozen garlic cloves, and even less often is anyone trying to get too close. Kristin does on occasion, I think it happened once or twice this past summer in fact. But there is usually plenty of time to react.

The folks in the ad who need this product are the ones who are flying around town in a constant state of excitement and, quite frankly, never know who they are going home with. Anyone in a long-term relationship can say, “Hold on, sweetheart, let me take care of something,” and then proceed to look for a toothbrush, mint, or mouthwash. If it takes a few minutes no one cares, because they don’t live in fear of the person running off.

Pity, then, the hot number in the mini-skirt (or his date) who can’t turn away for even a moment for fear that the object of their affection will immediately look elsewhere. A quick check in a pocket or clutch bag and he, she, or it has disappeared. Fresh breath ain’t no fun if you don’t have anyone to share it with.

What they don’t realize is this: it’s not a real emergency if you smell like your dinner. That’s normal. It happens to everyone about once a day and we all should expect that from each other. To have the fish stew and then smell like a peppermint candy is what’s weird, not breathing out the cod. It’s only bad if you don’t like the smell of cod.

Some people like beer breath on their paramour, others not so much. But there have been ways to deal with this for years. The folding camping toothbrush from my youth, for example. I used to take it to school after I got my braces on so that I could brush during lunch. Not because I was making out with any classmates or the teacher, but because I was ordered to by my orthodontist. He was a scary dude.

I’ve seen people dab toothpaste on a finger and swish that around. There have been fast acting mouthwashes—and “curiously strong” mints that can easily override any chilidog with extra onions—available for purchase for many years. We didn’t need this new product, the Colgate Wisp. Certainly our landfills don’t need all the crap generated from just one mouth cleaning, and I’m not even a rabid environmentalist.

I just don’t like stupid.

If you’re worried about offending someone, breathe in another direction. If you are pretty sure you are going to be kissing someone later, but you don’t know who that person is because you haven’t met him or her yet, I suggest you have a bigger problem than bad breath. In the meantime, brush before you leave the house.

And don’t have the spinach salad.

Pact

2010-11-14T12:56:00.000-08:00

The only way to truly keep a secret is to not tell anyone. Doesn’t matter who you tell, or how “besties” you think you are with your best friend. Once you’ve spilled the beans, the beans will eventually be shared, and it will be out of your control. Guaranteed.

The bigger the secret, the easier it is shared, as well. Maybe it is not easy to share, but it is hard to keep to yourself. You want to be the one known for knowing it. You want to be the first. You want to get something for it. When it is an earth-shattering, I-can’t-believe-it kind of secret, it will slip between the lips of whoever you’ve told quicker than you can say, “Hey, listen to this!” and then it will spread like wildfire from there.

That’s why I knew those Chilean miners were doomed. The worst part of their experience won’t have been the 69 days they spent half a mile underground. It is going to be the weeks and months after being returned to the world. Being swallowed by the earth will seem like good times compared to trying to keep their pact to stay united.

Like most people I was captivated by the initial reports out of Chile of the cave in and the subsequent plans for rescue. It was horrific to imagine being in their position, and the aggressive plans for retrieval were awe inspiring. Then the rescue was coming sooner than first imagined, and it went off like clockwork, and suddenly the 33 men were once again living under the blue sky and everyone wanted to hear their story.

The plan to work as a team was to be lauded. They could share in the proceeds of whatever might fall their way, and surely they were due whatever people were willing to pay. After such a story (longest buried alive, tight living quarters, mistresses vs. wives, etc.) they should be able to turn it into a few bucks. The more the merrier. Each penny being split 33 ways was a great plan.

Except it was never going to work. The human animal ain’t built that way.

There was no chance that someone wouldn’t go rogue. Too many agencies, too many publishers, too many offers would be coming from too many different directions. All they had to do was flash enough green and one of the miners would cave (ha!) and like a house of cards it would all implode.

Though these might not be technically secrets the miners are going to disseminate, it is a story that only they can tell. If they do it together, great! If it comes out piecemeal, it will only decrease in value. There are too many variables. There are too many miners.

Sometimes they are in the news as a cohesive group, attending a Chilean soccer match together or being nominated as Time Magazine’s persons of the year or being photographed in matching Oakley sunglasses (donated by the company and worth $180 each, the first payout other than the 48 hours of free medical care when they first surfaced).

Sometimes, though, we hear about dissention in the ranks. One guy was the strong leader type underground but another more gregarious fellow has become the face of the group aboveground because he is always willing to smile and talk. One miner recently ran the New York City Marathon, and unless he paid the entry fee and hotel costs himself, according to their pact his compatriots should have received something of equal value. The same guy was on the Letterman show and was offered a trip to Graceland because he is a big Elvis fan.

Do all the miners get to go to Graceland? Do they all want to? Would some rather visit the Colorado Territorial Museum, where they flaunt their history of 77 executions (45 by hanging, 32 by gas) and inmates such as Alfred Packer, the only man convicted of cannibalism in the U.S.?

I am beginning to sense a strain in the whole team concept. If they can stick together, the group, as a whole, will be better off. There will be colossal amounts of money from books, movies, videogames, interviews and other appearances. It’s not exactly a zero sum game, where anyone’s gain is offset by another’s loss. They could share equally in the bounty.

But the pot of money is in some ways limited, if not in dollar amount then at least in time. The story will be superseded eventually by a political scandal, weather catastrophe, or a surprising upset in sports. And if one miner goes out on his own in an attempt to benefit himself or his family, or because he thinks he is not getting his fair share, instead of hearing stories of triumph and courage we will be told of backstabbing and infighting.

There will be no way to tell if things were fair. Which makes sense, because this is life, ladies and gentlemen, and life isn’t fair. The miners might give it their best effort, but there is possibly too much working against them for everything to go smoothly. They just might have been doomed from the outset.

And I’m not talking about the cave-in.

Robot

2010-11-07T06:53:00.001-08:00

Every day the future arrives and it seems pretty much like the thousands of days that have gone before. Instead of the flying cars we were promised, we get traffic nightmares as cities try to add one more lane to the already congested freeways. And Dick Tracy’s wristwatch with the two-way communication to headquarters pales in comparison to any throwaway cell phone used by fourth graders with permissive parents, but we don't seem better off as a species just because we are talking more.

“But, Matt,” you say as though I were in the room, “aren’t cell phones the modern day equivalent of the Star Trek communicator? Aren’t the Robomow automatic lawn mower and the Roomba autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner the next step in human evolution? Now we can just sit around with TV images being displayed directly onto our video display goggles.”

No. And no. No, no, no! We don’t have food replicators or the ability to transport solid matter from one place to another. Captain Kirk and the Jetsons were lying to us. Our space station barely has enough room for grown men and women to maneuver comfortably. Every time they talk to us from space they are crammed together and look like five or six people trying to use a single-seat outhouse.

The idea of technology making our lives futuristic, culminating in the personal robot servant that roles around on one wheel answering our every beck and call, has not happened, and it never will. We are going to sit on this planet for some time to come (I’ll go out on a limb and predict that we are going to sit on this planet until we are extinct) and find joy in simple things that seem futuristic, like cruise control, web cams, and robotic litter boxes for pampered cats.

The rest is a pipe dream, good for science fiction movies but nothing else. Certainly not for how people should plan to live out the rest of their days.

Advancements will continue as scientists and explorers and inventors tinker with existing knowledge and expectations, but not on the order of the flying car. If we can’t even manage two-dimensional travel without coming up with new psychological afflictions like “road rage,” there’s no way we could successfully deal with adding “up” to our choices of “left” and “right.”

Similarly, those of you expecting moon colonies and x-ray glasses have to get your noses out of your comic books and take a look at real life. Other than having a curiosity for discovery, we humans are just another life form trying to get food into our mouths and finding shelter in inclement weather. We should be grateful that our grocery store clerks only have to drag our frozen food packages over the bar code reader rather than trying to find an iced-over price tag.

We should also be grateful that there are still people willing to do such an interesting job, but as I’ve been saying for many years, in the future we will still need cab drivers and grocery store clerks and soccer coaches. We will not be populated entirely by highly educated and overpaid computer programmers ever.

Ever.

The day when we can fill the grocery basket and simply walk out the door as a scanner instantly tabulates the cost of each and every item (and accurately deducts the amount from our bank account) is not going to arrive. Don’t waste your time waiting for it.

If I’m right, then, what exactly are we waiting around for? Am I all doom and gloom and waiting for the 21st century equivalent of the Dark Ages?

Well, yes. And no. Mostly no.

As our expectations settle in and we become better able to discern between realistic advancements and science fiction buffoonery (even Captain Kirk occasionally walked into a malfunctioning automatic door), we will realize that we don’t want to relegate what constitutes real life to a bunch of unfeeling machines. We (or at least most of us) will not want to be part of the Matrix.

The point of the future is that there is one. Having the next day arrive, be it sunny or foul weathered, is better than the alternative. In the meantime, the average citizen will have to be happy with the fact that they can buy shampoo and conditioner in the same bottle, and that they can track down old high school chums on a social media platform only to discover why they never kept in touch with old high school chums.

That’s the real future, folks. Forget about the robots.

Manicure

2010-10-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

For nigh onto forty years, and possibly more, I have been a self-mutilator of my fingernails. Some sort of nervous habit I picked up when I was in elementary school. Perhaps it was one of those terrible early grade teachers who tormented me with lessons and homework and high expectations and who always wanted me to be quiet in class.

It was hell, I tell you, sheer hell.

Whatever the reason, I was a picker. Not a biter, those people are just weird. My fingers would take turns ripping off the end of any nail within reach, and just as soon as it grew back it would be assaulted again. Many good and kind people have tried to help me over the years, but at some point it became part of my being and would not be eradicated.

About sixteen years or so ago I was scheduled to go on a few business trips for my then-employer. My jagged and sore fingertips would not be the proper way to introduce myself around the country, so I suddenly stopped picking. Stopped cold. Within two weeks they were grown out and I even visited a salon near work to have them buffed and trimmed to appropriate man-length.

I felt a little odd going in, but it ended up being all right. I mean, I never intended to go back, but at least I didn't look like a freak while I traveled. After I got back home for good, though, I tore them all off and went back to the old habit. And I kept at it religiously, at least until very recently.

In just the last few weeks I have once again grown real nails, just like I had in 1994. By stopping the daily picking it was as if they grew by magic. Plus I stopped picking: that might have been the magic. I could tap them on table- and countertops, and could scratch my scalp as I massaged in the dandruff shampoo. My daily shower went from two minutes to five just so I could enjoy the tactile sensations.

Okay, it’s never really been a daily shower, but I was in there as often as necessary.

I had fun for a few days as folks oohed and ahhed, and I felt like I just might have become a grown up. No longer did I rise from a chair to find the floor littered with bits of my nails and flesh. People were impressed with my incredible feat of self-restraint. If I could stop picking my nails, then surely there was the potential for peace in the Middle East.

Now . . . they are just getting in the way! I scratch myself accidentally, they bend backwards painfully after being caught on a door handle or while folding clothes, and all kinds of crap gets stuck underneath them. Peanut butter, grease, dirt, the long nails are always dirty.

It was time to return to a professional, but I didn’t know where to go, so I went to the best source for manicure information available to me: my teenaged daughter. She has a favorite place where they trim and buff and color and stripe her nails and ask her, “You have boyfriend?”

Her manicurist is right next door to Jerry’s Barbershop, where I spent many formative years getting haircuts with extra gel—before I started going across the street to whatever was the inexpensive shop in those days: Cheapcuts or Looksbad, something like that. Nowadays it would have a dot-com at the end. As if you could buy a bad haircut over the Internet!

Silly kids.

When it came time for a second manicure, though, I couldn’t do it. During the first excursion there wasn’t another soul in the shop when I walked in, and I was the only one there during the appointment. Just the way I liked it. Anonymous.

Kelsey’s shop was way too busy, and there was always the risk that Jerry would be standing next to his barber pole when I walked up. “Matt?” I could imagine him asking, “You’re here for a manicure? Hahahahahahahahahaha!” He would double over, gasping for breath.

Then one day Kristin and I were playing canasta and she saw my nails. “Wow, they’re really getting long,” she said. “I’m surprised you haven’t broken one yet.”

Ninety minutes later as I was grilling some burgers for dinner I did just that. The nail on my right index finger bent and broke. The wife had cursed me.

The next day I reached over a student’s shoulder at school to point out something on his math worksheet and I scratched his arm. I wasn’t used to allowing space for my sword-like fingers.

The boy screeched and threatened legal action, and when I tried to apologize and showed my fingers as some sort of explanation, the class recoiled in disgust. I was now the creepy old guy with long fingernails. A la Howard Hughes, if that particular reference is not lost on all of you.

Now the question is “how long is too long?” And the other question is “file, clip, or cut?” And the third question is “should I get another manicure?” It has become a more cumbersome process to care for my fully grown nails than it ever was to explain my obsessive compulsivity to pick.

I think it would be easier if I just went back to the self-mutilation.

Pumpkin

2010-10-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to a couple of triangle eyes and a half moon grin with one snaggly tooth? Porches from sea to shining sea were festooned with piles of orange gourds with amateurish carvings and people were happy. With the exception of a little blood dripping from where Dad accidentally nicked his knuckles, and little Suzy running away as her younger brother attempted to throw a handful of seeds and other slimy bits at her, all was peace and joy.

The worst part of these Halloween pumpkins (wait, no, Jack-o’-lanterns; once there’s a face they are no longer pumpkins) was when the lid was cut poorly, with straight down slashes rather than at a slant. That’s when the stem would plummet through the hole and into the hollowed out gourd, and the neighbors would laugh.

Mom would try to prop it up with toothpicks, but it was still the most embarrassing Jack-o’-lantern on the block.

As things have become more complicated in this life (such as jeans that don’t stay up because foolish boys try to belt them below their hips and giant SUVs that don’t fit in small parking spots at the Dollar Tree), so has the Halloween fun of carving up a pumpkin. Instead of a simple little activity for the family, it has become expensive and competitive, not to mention beyond the average person’s capability.

All we used to use were a butcher knife and a large spoon. That’s why the eyes all had three sides. There was no fine work or close attention to detail, and certainly nothing round. Just slash and scoop.

This new world order is the result of the competitive nature of the average American citizen. And it doesn’t hurt that the Great American Marketing Machine has figured out how to turn it into a tidy profit. Victims of the marketing and distribution of silly things fall prey, and they find items in stores that they don’t need, but buy in bulk anyway.

There are carbon steel blades in a variety of sizes and levels of hazard, allowing the most intricate of designs while doubling or trebling the risk to life and limb (but mostly limb, there have been very few documented pumpkin carving fatalities). Patterns to trace are included in the overpriced packages (which mysteriously increase in price during the week before Halloween, only to be “drastically reduced” on November 1), to ensure that nothing is creative or unique. Everyone’s porch looks exactly the same and children arrive home from trick or treating, only to find that they are standing on someone else’s porch.

Hopefully not the neighborhood weird guy’s, or you just might never see Suzy or her little brother again.

Newfangled scraper tools are used to not actually punch holes in the gourd, but to scrap away the skin and some of the flesh to make thinned out areas that will radiate with a little of the light from within. Shadows and light, people, shadows and light. This is an art project that would earn an A+ if it didn’t have that store-bought look.

Speaking of light from within, we have moved away from the traditional candle and matchstick system. Whereas the carving has become a more dangerous procedure in the modern era, worried mothers have championed the new, and supposedly safer, ways to flicker the Jack-o’-lantern’s grin. Battery operated lights, LEDs, even strobes and flashing colors are all the rage.

No more singed eyebrows or blackened fingertips. Yet I still find nothing wrong with a candle that burns the inside of the hollowed out gourd. Makes the whole front porch smell like a pumpkin pie—a pumpkin pie your grandmother burned in the oven because she was watching her soap operas and never heard the timer go off.

The one thing that has stayed the same during all these years, from my parents’ youth through mine and down through my kids’, is the pumpkin seed project. Industrious moms and dads have the kids wash the seeds from the rest of the stringy guts and then roast them in the oven (the seeds, not the kids). If salted just right they make a tasty snack (again: seeds not kids) for the youngsters to take to school for many weeks to come.

Except it all gets thrown out when the parents aren’t looking. There has never been a kid in history to willingly eat homemade roasted pumpkin seeds. So, really, parents, knock it off.

Trick or treat indeed.

Bee

2010-10-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

The local middle school has embarked on a spelling adventure. I inadvertently inserted myself into the process when I recently subbed for a group of fifth graders who were urgently studying for a school-wide spelling bee. One of our tasks the day I was there was to complete a brief written spelling test, the results of which would be used to determine who would go on to the next level of persecution.

I mean, the second round. It was a mixed blessing, though, because the five best spellers from each classroom would be tested on the next group of new and more challenging words during their lunch break.

“Why do we have to do it during lunch?” one top speller asked.

“Because,” I said, opting for the disobliging response. “Quick: spell disobliging.” He began, “D – I – S.” And I ran swiftly from the room.

Later I saw two girls quizzing each other. “Scheherazadian,” one said to the other. The other girl rattled it right off, while I was stuck trying to decide between “Sh” and “Sch.”

And I always thought I was a good speller. I remember being involved in one spelling bee when I was a fifth grader. As I recall, I won, but of course I might be mistaken. I also remember always being polite to adults when I was younger and flossing my teeth in the school bathroom after lunch. And never doing anything wrong. Never, ever.

Maybe I didn’t win the spelling bee after all.

I used to equate being a good speller with smarts, but I have begun to take a second look at such a theory. I have met intelligent people (pupils and adults) who seem to lack basic spelling skills. Whether this is a function of nature vs. nurture, I don’t know. My own talent in this area is likely a result of my voracious reading—books, proctologists’ pamphlets, and Do Not Feed the Animals signs. If it is written, I wanna read it.

Poor spelling, therefore, might result from a lack of exposure to language. Of course, for some people it could also be indifference. I’ve met some of those people. Thay kare nuthing fer propar speling.

Regardless the cause, efforts are made to help people who are thusly challenged. There are plenty of rules designed to increase spelling skills, but I wonder if they really do much. Not for the ones who don’t care, because rules won’t make them care. For the ones who do care, the rules are a bit vague and sometimes untrustworthy.

For example: the time-honored rule of “i before e except after c.” Or the rest of the sing-song standard, “unless sounding like a as in neighbor or weigh.”

Works great, especially for neighbor and weigh and other words which fit. “I before e except after c,” unless that weird dude Keith has seized all the codeine.

Basically “i before e” is a rule, except when it is not. In which case you are on your own. This is unhelpful to the spelling-challenged among us. They need rules, and guides, and acronyms that work. Or at least a good spell checker.

Of course a good spell checker doesn’t know if you mean though or through or thought. Not only are they different by just one letter, but the vowel combination of “ou” sounds different in each word! And it gets worse, because enough, bough, and cough present three more ways to pronounce “ou.”

The English language is rife with ridiculous spellings, making it nearly impossible to apply any logic. Hence, you either spell well somewhat naturally, or you spend so much time memorizing lists of words that other facets of your life—like work and family—suffer. If you choose neither of those routes, you are simply doomed.

If you are one of the doomed ones, fear not. Poor spelling has generally not caused death or disfigurement. No one has lost their inheritance because of an inability to spell “inheritance,” and the reverse of poor spelling (otherwise known as the national spelling bee) looks like an even worse way to live.

The pressure-packed national spelling bee, nowadays shown annually on television, proves that a vast amount of studying is necessary to be a national champ. It also helps to be homeschooled, of foreign birth, and quite possibly to have an idiosyncratic way of keeping the spelling beat, like tapping the thigh or spinning the eyeballs. Also, familiarity with the phrase “can I have the language of origin, please?” can be beneficial.

For just about every contestant except the winner, the national spelling bee seems to end in tears. Can you spell “crushing defeat?” Of course you can, because you just suffered it. On national TV no less! Talk about pressure!

Hopefully the local middle schoolers are better able to deal with their ultimate humiliation. Except the kid who wins, of course.

That newly crowned nerd will just be shunned.

Said

2010-10-10T08:20:00.001-07:00

In my experience as a speaker, I have, uh, occasionally peppered my speech with, um, useless little words that would be better left, hmm, out. It is easier to edit in written form because you can go back over and delete anything you find superfluous. I don’t think I’ve ever put “um” in a written work unless I really meant it. Like earlier in this paragraph.

Not so when speaking. Um, uh, and other little timewasters slip out easily. When hearing the same from others it is painfully obvious how distracting it can be for the audience. Someone once told me just to pause when considering what to say next. There is no need to fill every space with some sound or another.

Y’know?

When I have been better prepared I think the verbal tics diminish, but they don’t ever go away entirely. Habit? Laziness? I dunno. It is, uh, what it is.

You know what else is what it is? The verbal tics of the younger generation that grate on all of our nerves. Sure, they often sound foolish when they talk, but hey, they’re kids. Very little that comes out of their mouths is interesting, even the fully formed sentences. Why worry about what might sound lazy or ignorant? Why constantly correct them? It’s not as though they make any sudden corrections. If they eventually speak like we want them to, it will be through maturity and experience, not due to a constant haranguing at home.

Perhaps we are not in the midst of language deconstruction, but rather are witnessing the further advancement of our language. What I like to mock in the speech of my children and their peers might be the very thing that eventually lifted American English out of the Elizabethan Age. Else I’d be yelling this at home: “Foul spoken coward, that thund'rest with thy tongue, and with thy weapon nothing dares perform.”

I don’t even know what that means.

Third grade teachers are always harping on their students to use other words than “said” when adding dialogue to their boring stories. (If you are a teacher please replace “harping on” with “providing quality education to,” and if you are a student please replace “boring” with “thrilling and clever.” No need to insult the easily insulted.)

He uttered, she exclaimed, he yelled, she whispered. Like that. Sure, students are supposed to use such words to make their writing more interesting, but in my years of raising my own children and teaching many others, I have never heard any kid say, “He yelled, ‘Clean your room!’”

Now certainly the same kid would say, “My dad yelled at me,” but that’s entirely different. That’s a verb, not an indication of speech. Maybe what kids are using for “said” isn’t the crime against humanity that old people like me make it out to be.

For example: “So he went, ‘I don’t think so.’ And I’m all, ‘Oh, yes you will!’ And he goes, ‘[expletive removed]!’”

Conjugations of the verb “to go” are the modern favorites to indicate what someone might have said. Wherever this came from, it doesn’t seem to be going away, and if youngsters carry the habit into adulthood it will eventually be entered into the Oxford English Dictionary (“the definitive record of the English language”) and Shakespeare will discontinue rolling over in his grave.

People were uncomfortable when I have said “uh” to distraction, and the younger citizens are saying “like” as though it were going out of style. You’ve heard it yourself, and I’ve made fun of it here.

“I’m, like, at the mall, and I can’t decide what color nail polish to buy. Can you, like, come down here right now? It’s, like, an emergency!”

So “like” is the new “uh” or “um.” To those of us who don’t use it, it sounds horrible. We think the barbarians are at the gate. And yet I hear it occasionally even from people who decry its use.

Is it really, like, so bad?

This all may be the evolution of language. We may bristle, but we don’t really know how this will all turn out in fifty or one hundred years. After all, Shakespeare wrote, “Thou didst drink the stale of horses and the guilded puddle which beasts would cough at.”

I don’t really know what that means, but I do know that the great master apparently ended at least one sentence with a preposition. And where I come from, that’s, like, a real no-no.

Awesome

2010-10-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

Some houses get egged by hooligans. Ours has suffered on occasion. Even more get toilet papered. Ours has met with that fate as well. A less destructive form of taunting is the forking, with plastic forks thrust into the ground tines down—sometimes by the hundreds. We’ve had that, too.

Even more enjoyable is the true vandalism. Like the fist-sized rock that was thrown through the back window of one of the cars spending the night on the driveway last year. That was fun. Nothing like trying to replace a pane of glass on a twenty-two year old car. They aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. And a few weeks ago someone was kind enough to take advantage of our open garage door and abscond with my bicycle.

Thank you sir or madam, I hope you are enjoying my fairly pricey bike. And I hope you crash and break your neck.

Despite the trials and tribulations we have faced in the matter of various house assaults, we Baxters keep a stiff upper lip. After all, who can tell from where these attacks originate? The three teenagers certainly have crossed paths with people who either love or hate them. And Kristin teaches at a middle school, so lots of young hooligans know her.

I am a paragon of virtue, as you no doubt are aware, but I live about two miles from where I grew up. I am in the midst of friends, neighbors, shopkeepers, and crossing guards who have known me since I was not a paragon of virtue, and some of them may be holding a grudge. Or many of them might be holding several grudges.

It just may be that I am the black hole of grudges.

The other morning we all exited the house to go to school or work (or in my case, wherever it is I go when I go somewhere) and once again found something in the front yard that wasn’t there when we went to bed. It appeared to be graffiti on the driveway, and we were momentarily horrified, until we got a little closer.

One message read: I♥KB.

The other: You’re an awesome family!

Some sort of cheerful, positive affirmation graffiti. We are, of course, an awesome family, led by the awesome wife/mother Kristin. Three awesome kids, and a reasonably awesome dog I like to make fun of. Which makes me a different kind of awesome: only a little bit of awe. Not quite as much as the others. My family members are full of awesomeness; you might even say they are awe-full. But that doesn’t sound right, does it?

The question, then, is not who is awesome. The question is, who is KB?

KB is, of course, Kelsey Baxter. She’s a senior in high school and on the field hockey team, and she and her friends appear to enjoy driving around and writing messages on each other’s cars. She’s a leading candidate for the target of the attack, but there is no way to tell for sure.

After all, KB is also Kyle Baxter. Perhaps someone loves my youngest child and only son. Well, of course someone does. Momma does. Grandmas and Grandpas do too. But this is a message scrawled on pavement. This takes a certain amount of passion, heretofore unknown in Kyle’s young life. I’m sure if he could track down who did it he might just find his date for the upcoming homecoming dance.

Let us not forget: KB could be for Kate. Sure she lives in Arizona now, but I’m certain there are still people in San Jose who pine for her. I know I do (but I also know I wasn’t the one who desecrated my driveway). Former classmates, babysitting clients, the possibilities are endless.

Last but not least, I♥KB might have been written for Kristin. I certainly could have written the note for her, except like I said—I didn’t do it. I am, however, willing to fight anyone who would write such a love note to my wife, though I would prefer some sort of amicable agreement. Maybe I could have her Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other weekend.

Let me know, Graffiti Artist, who you were writing to, and if I need to tell Kristin to pack.

There’s been no rain lately to confirm that these two notes weren’t written with some sort of permanent stain, but I think they will eventually dissolve, during an early fall storm. Or maybe a blast from the hose. I am reasonably certain that the notes, positive though they are, will not be around in perpetuity.

There’s only one thing I know with 100% certainty: no matter how full of awe I might be, the ♥ wasn’t meant for me.

Highway

2010-09-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

Back around 1981, my old pal James and I rode our motorcycles to Yosemite. I sat upon a Honda 360, his was a 400 of unremembered vintage. We were young and vigorous and arrived without incident.

That’s when we sat at the wooden table at the campsite and thought, “Hmm, perhaps we should have brought some food.”

We were cramped in the two-man tent, and hungry. Then we got cold. We were awakened early, while it was still dark, by the falling rain that had nearly collapsed our poorly tethered tent. By the time we found a place for coffee and breakfast we were dripping wet.

It was a grand adventure!

In 1986 Kristin and I took a two-week trip to Canada, on our 1983 Kawasaki 750. We had a windshield and a radio and we were comfortable beyond belief. The only campground incidents included a squirrel that had chewed through the side of our food bag and died—gorging on trail mix—with its hindquarters hanging half outside the bag, and the apparent theft of a buck knife and a flannel shirt.

I have wondered, lo, these many years, what kind of thief is in need of a weapon and lumberjack clothing. Regardless, it too was a grand adventure.

So now, after many years of not cycling far from home, busy with trying to work as little as possible and seeing just how long I can make one loaf of bread last for a family of four, I once again took to the highways and byways to see what sort of mischief I could get up to. I have recently returned, after nine days and 1,781 miles. There is some debate whether, in style and manner, I was more like Peter Fonda or Dennis Hopper. I’ll leave that up to you decide, as long as you don’t choose Jack Nicholson. He was just a passenger in that movie.

And if you don’t know what movie I’m talking about, get thee to a motorcycle rally.

My iron horse on this particular journey was a Kawasaki Vulcan 900 (903cc if you want to obsess over the details), and a smooth and powerful ride it was. There was no question it could get me safely to my destination. In question, though, was whether I should travel with any flannel shirts, and whether I would get blown off on the way.

I chose not to put a fairing on the bike, because it would ruin the look of this beautiful gray cruiser. But I’m almost fifty years old, and hanging on to the handlebars for hours on end tends to weaken my weary muscles. I felt some trepidation, but went anyway. You never know unless you go, right? Turns out the headwind wasn’t too bad. I just leaned back, kept my speed constant and steady, and tried not to relax so much that I fell asleep.

The grand culmination was visiting daughter Kate at her new digs in Prescott, Arizona. But I also saw Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, the Laughing Buddha Coffee House, and Barstow, California.

Not sure what to say about Barstow. I’ve probably already spent too much time talking about this dry, dusty, drive-through town. But I’m sure the residents are all fine individuals.

I also went to Sedona, Arizona, but it wasn’t as goofy as I thought it would be. It is known for being a haven for mystics, hippies, UFO hunters, and New Age weirdos. There was some of that, but it was mostly a thriving tourist trap. There were more cars with out of state license plates than there were mystical crystal-reading aura-diviners.

It had been many years since my last lengthy motorcycle road trip, and I found that the thrill of the open road still calls to me. Without Kate’s move, though, I’m not sure I would have been compelled to venture so far from home. I just might have to convince the other two children to relocate when the time comes to keep my blood flowing. Maybe Bozeman and Atlanta. Or Omaha and Pensacola.

And Kristin will have to remember how to pack all of her belongings in one small saddlebag. She was good at it 24 years ago, but judging by our bedroom closet she is clearly out of practice. Until that time comes:

Get your motor runnin’. Head out on the highway. Lookin’ for adventure. And whatever comes our way!

Beer

2010-09-19T11:30:00.000-07:00

For those readers under the age of 21—and if you don’t have proper ID I don’t care how gray your hair is—let it be known that nary a drop of liquor passed my lips before I was of legal age. I was too busy studying my lessons, and volunteering for several local charitable organizations, and tending to all of the chores around the house.

My sister and brother were no help at all.

If you are already old enough to drink, then you know most of what you just read is malarkey. Except the part about my evil siblings. I was Cinderella and they just stood there and laughed at me in my dusty frock. And I did study and volunteer and chore myself to death, wondering which day my prince would come.

Or princess. I wasn’t picky.

When it became legal for me to buy liquor, I did. If memory serves, the morning of May 15, 1983 I found the nearest liquor store with the earliest “Open” sign and bought myself a birthday present. I say “if memory serves” because I don’t really remember all that well. Probably because of the passage of time . . . or because I drank a case of beer on my own just because I could.

I have sampled many different drinks in my day, and I have a few favorites. Fortunately, friends keep introducing me to new concoctions and my favorites list grows. It gets to the point that I visit my local BevMo superstore and just stand in the center near the snack racks with my arms outspread, slowly spinning hypnotically. Until I am asked to leave, which I try to do quietly (as long as I can grab a bottle or two on my way out).

In my own defense, let me assure you that my life doesn’t revolve around alcohol. I’ve successfully held down a variety of jobs over the years (but yes, as a substitute teacher you might say that I am currently underemployed) and the family budget has never had a line item titled “booze” (but yes, that might be due to the difficulty in separating expenses including beer from the gas station and drinks with a nice dinner out and cash purchases at the liquor store and trading cigarettes for moonshine with neighborhood hillbillies).

Moderation and I have a passing acquaintance, an uneasy alliance you might say. I don’t nag it for being a party-pooper, and it generally leaves me alone unless it finds me lying in a gutter. Then it drags me home and drops me on the front porch, to be thwacked in the head when the morning newspaper is flung porchward.

Despite my apparent adult fascination with a wide variety of drink mixers and concoctions, I most often return to my first love: beer. It can be refreshing after late afternoon yard work, and it can be used to toast celebratory events as widely diverging as a Superbowl victory or the birth of a family heir. Even better, if you’ve had a few too many you might be forgiven for drawing a mascara mustache on the little heir.

My newest adventure in beer is the home brewing of it. I want to follow in the steps of a friend of mine who has successfully brewed two batches of beer and who has been kind enough to let me share in the joy. I didn’t have to share in the joy of the work, or the hours of boiling and mixing and storing and bottling and waiting. No, I didn’t even have to wait.

I drank store-bought beer until Kurtis called me up and said his was ready to taste. That’s exactly the moment I was able to share: the tasting.

His was so good I want to try it on my own, but I am scared. I am scared of the capital investment, because if I don’t take pleasure in the process of crafting my own ale I will be stuck with large piles of equipment. Bottles and caps and a capper; kettles and brushes and funnels and a carboy; thermometer and hydrometer and siphon and airlock. As a minimalist that would seriously irk me, to have it all sitting around and taunting me.

I am also scared of not being very good at it. I don’t want to make beer that people spit out. I am also scared that there are just too many brands left on the BevMo shelves that I have not tried.

So maybe I will join Kurtis in the actual work the next time he brews his five gallons—if he’ll let me—and I’ll see if I actually feel an urge to do so on my own. If the answer is yes, I’ll buy the equipment and jump right in to the process.

If not, I’ll drink Kurtis’s and find some other hobby. Hmm, maybe I would enjoy growing wine grapes.

Cover

2010-09-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

I am in the midst of a project. I am trying to figure out if the family dog (“Zen,” if you insist on personifying her with a name) is smarter than the rest of us, or dumber than a box of rocks.

This domesticated beast that lives among us is equal parts canny observer and oblivious hound. She has run into sliding glass doors thinking they are open, but at least one of my children has done the same so that may not be an appropriate indication of mental acuity. Zen has also smashed at least two screen doors off their tracks, thinking that her slender figure can fit through the opening once the screen has slid two or three inches to the side.

Either she lacked a certain spatial awareness, or she had a deep-seated drive to chase down a squirrel scampering across the backyard fence regardless what stood in her way. Neither is exactly a brilliant display of intelligence.

In her defense, however, Zen has learned a variety of ways to control the behavior of the humans in the house. She’s not much of a food beggar, but if one of us two-legged creatures is cooking breakfast or dinner she will sit nearby in the kitchen, quietly. For a while.

If it becomes apparent that her mealtime is in danger of passing, she will do her snapping thing that gets our attention. She snaps her jaw shut loudly to bring the focus back to her. We have thus far been lucky to avoid having any fingers in harm’s way.

Once we meet her eyes she opens her mouth. Kristin says she is smiling; I say the dog is simply breathing. Regardless, the psychic message is clear: “Food. Bowl. Now.”

With nary a please or thank-you we carefully measure the kibble and present it on her own eating mat. A little while later we will be asked to open the back door so that she can make business in the yard, and possibly chase wild neighborhood rodents. If done quickly, damage to the screen can be minimized.

While outside, Zen certainly behaves as if she were Empress of the World. She sniffs the grass and the agapanthas, passes by the lemon tree, and eventually squats for a bit. She makes a token attempt to cover her deposit, no doubt to appear civilized, but she doesn’t really look where she is scratching. Half the time the dirt and grass fly over her pile.

Then she looks up at whoever might be nearby as if to say, “There you go. Take care of it at your leisure.”

Same thing when we take her for a walk. She walks ahead and we hold the leash as if it were a gown that has to be held above the ground. At whatever moment she decides, and on whichever lawn she chooses, she makes business again. Some of the time we have to bow down and bag it. I know others had to do the same for me in the long distant past, but I eventually learned to take care of myself.

Not so the dog. She will be forever needing our assistance. Or our obsequiousness. Either she is too dumb to take care of herself, or too clever. Perhaps we are being manipulated by the cunning canine.

Lately Zen has taken to burrowing into the bathroom wastebaskets. She knocks them over as if she were looking for something in particular. If the smell is intriguing enough we might find a trail of her discoveries across the bathroom and even out into the hall. Usually, though, the various paper products and clumps of hair—from self-administered haircuts—litter the area around the sink.

I don’t know if Zen knows what day of the week it is and is saying, “Hey, empty the trash already, the garbageman comes tomorrow morning” or she is only responding to the basic reactions of her underdeveloped mammalian brain: “Mmm, me like dirty smells.” She never appears concerned that we might not clean up after her. After all, she has us well-trained.

There is currently not enough data to make a final determination on the whole brains vs. rocks discussion. Given the fact, however, that Zen has a platoon of humans ready to put food in her bowl twice a day, and at the right time, and these same humans follow behind her in the yard and on the leash with a plastic bag at the ready to pick up her unmentionables, I’m thinking Zen has the upper hand at this point.

The morning I wake up on her beanbag and find her under my covers, I will officially declare my surrender. Then she can start cleaning up after me.

Commitment

2010-09-05T12:52:00.001-07:00

Labor Day is upon us once again, and as its origination continues to pass further into the distant past we as a people do little more than thank our lucky stars we have another paid holiday. Except for those folks who still have to work because they are in some sort of service industry . . . and, I suppose, those people who have a job but don’t have decent holiday pay benefits. And a day off with pay certainly does no good for one of our many unemployed citizens.

Come to think of it, for a lot of people Labor Day may be just another rotten, stinking Monday.

Here’s to you, then, those of you left behind. I salute your disheartened and slippery grasp of the American Dream.

Since Labor Day began as some sort of political chicanery between a scheming President of the Democratic Party and the Labor movement, it would seem appropriate that Republicans not share in the bounty. After all, they oppose Democrats at every turn, and certainly the Right is no friend of Labor or the unions.

So, attention all Republicans, starting in 2011 you no longer get the first Monday in September as a paid holiday. But don’t worry, to even the score we will take away Thanksgiving from the Democrats. There’s no reason a bunch of turkeys should stay home from work and eat their own kind.

There. Now everyone should be happy. I am an equal opportunity offender.

As the 2010 version of Labor Day approaches, I am reminded to be thankful. Yes, I did indeed just mash together the two aforementioned holidays. To complete the image, I am wearing a Halloween mask and have a basket of brightly colored eggs by my side. But that’s not what I’m thankful for.

What pleases me is that I accomplished a goal this summer. Not the goal of riding 4,000 miles on my bicycle this year, which will be met (or not) toward the end of December. Which reminds me: in the spirit of the holiday mash up, I should set up the Christmas tree today.

And not the goal of home brewing my own beer, that keeps getting postponed because I am still finding delicious new varieties at BevMo. Someday, though, I vow I will be called Beer Maker.

What I achieved this summer took patience and planning and a whole of sitting around. From June 16 to July 27 I watched The X-Files. Yes, the show that went off the air in 2002. Yes, the show I only watched occasionally when it was originally broadcast. And yes, I still don’t have TV reception, ever since the government forced us onto the High Def Entertainment Rainbow. I’ve got an analog set and an antenna on the roof, and all I get to watch is static.

Unless I go to the public library. There I found all nine seasons of The X-Files on DVD, plus the two X-Files movies made in 1998 and 2008. By checking out one season with my cheerful librarian and placing the next one or two on hold, I could watch the entire nine years in order.

Back to back, hour by hour, 202 episodes. In 42 days.

Now sure, you could take issue with me. Perhaps this doesn’t really qualify as much of a goal. Not like running a marathon in each of the fifty states (six down, forty-four to go). Where’s the commitment in doing nothing more than sitting in front of the boob tube and watching bright images flicker past my face? Perhaps my time would have been better spent interacting with my wife and children, or tending the dog, or watering the lawns.

One of those three is definitely a lost cause, and it’s not the one about the family because during most of those 42 days they were out of state on a variety of vacations or hanging out with friends. I was the one at home, wondering where the dog had run off to and refusing to water the lawns, and so I watched some TV.

Once in a while the dog would join me, though usually she wouldn’t hang around for more than one episode while I dutifully plowed through three or four a day. Or seven. Okay, I didn’t just watch “some” TV, I watched a lot.

It was almost a relief when I finished this little project. I enjoyed each episode, but they started to overwhelm each other. Kind of like eating eight tacos but the ninth or tenth or eleventh is overkill (another lesson I had to learn the hard way). I have, quite frankly, had my fill of The X-Files, and will now turn my attention to some other activity.

After all, there are forty-four states I have not run a marathon in, and I’m not getting any younger. Maybe it is time to put down the tacos and the remote control and head out for a pleasant twenty-mile training run.

Or maybe I’ll eat just one more before I leave.

Stick

2010-08-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

The modern automobile is an extension of the people who buckle themselves therein. The old, bald guy in the red sports car is a cliché, but only because he exists in great number. The soccer mom in the ginormous SUV takes up two parking spots at the grocery store when she stops to pick up one bag of food.

Young men in their twenties hover under the hoods of their muscle cars for hours, other folks religiously wash and wax their vehicles and vigorously spray Windex and Armor All on whatever surfaces warrant it, and some people drive unsightly beaters simply as a way to get from Point A to Point Wherever-They-Are-Going (a.k.a. Point B).

We are all free to do as we wish with our cars. I saw a minivan the other day that had uncountable bumper stickers across the entire rear surface. Even the back window had a bunch, with two small spaces left clear, presumably so the driver could back up with at least a modicum amount of safety. I see cars like that every once in a while and strain to read at least a few of the important messages before the vehicle speeds off.

They are often funny—“Jesus Saves . . . at Raley’s” for example. Or politically incorrect: “Earth First! We’ll strip mine the other planets later.” Sometimes one contradicts another just inches away. Which is also funny.

I used to have a Darwin fish on the back of our old pickup truck. Other people prefer the IXOYE version or the one advertising Buddha, Gefilte, or Cthulhu. All can be ordered online, and many more, for a small delivery charge. Individuality is great, no matter whom you might offend.

I don’t mind Jack in the Box antenna balls, rusty bumpers, or extra wide bicycle racks that extend dangerously past the sides of the car. License plate frames are fun to read—unless the font is so small that I have to seriously tailgate to get the joke—and the myriad special license plates, with or without personalized tags, are a waste of money, but I say do it if you want to. It’s your car. And your dime.

Here’s my point:

I really don’t understand the little sticker families that are taking over the rear windows of our personal transportation vehicles. You know the ones: stick figures to represent dad, mom, each kid, and often even the family pets. For some reason the drivers want passersby to be able to verify that everyone in the family is indeed in the car so that the home can be safely burgled. It’s the perfect way to case the joint.

Obviously it is just another form of self-expression, but it is rife with dilemmas. The stickers representing little Johnny and Susie are smaller than the ones for the parents, but eventually Johnny is going to tower over Mom, as will Susie if her pituitary gland continues to misfire. Think of the expense in updating the stickers each year . . . it’ll likely wipe out the kids’ college funds.

Then somewhere down the road another baby will come along, and his or her sticker will be slapped on right in order, after the two cat stick figures. That ought to be the basis of several years of psychotherapy.

Stickers will have to be removed after death and divorce, and then replaced when the much younger stepmother enters the picture. Her kids will have to be included in the family display at some point, but maybe that should wait until after an appropriate mourning period. Like after Mom’s casket sticker is removed.

It’s a whole “my nuclear family is better than your nuclear family” thing. I don’t see any single folks putting on one sticker on their cars, and I have yet to see an arrangement that includes only one parent figure. Or, for that matter, two parental units of the same gender. This is an outrage! It is discrimination! People with one arm have no representative sticker! My brother with the ponytail can’t find a decal that shares his true nature with everyone who drives by.

Come to think of it, I think he prefers it that way. He likes to be anonymous, other than the fact that he’s an old guy with a ponytail. But maybe that’s just my bald head being jealous.

I am not jealous of these stickers, though. I think they are stupid, but I grant the rest of you the freedom to apply them to your cars if you want. Maybe it is the best way for you to make sure the entire family is in the car before you leave on vacation. Just match the stickers to the humans and away you go! The same counting system will also prevent accidentally leaving one of the kids in a gas station bathroom as you drive across the country to visit the Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, Texas.

Unless, of course, that is exactly what you intended to do. Maybe your son just wouldn’t stop counting telephone poles out loud. That could be really annoying.

Don’t worry, Dad can always scratch off Junior’s stick figure at the next rest stop to update the head count.

Whole

2010-08-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

Ah, love. That deep emotion we yearn for and fight over. Civilizations rise and fall for love. Great deeds are accomplished with such feeling, and horrific acts as well. Sometimes elusive, sometimes ever-present. It might seem to be furthest from your own grasp when you see nothing but clutching couples everywhere you look, yet it can surprise you around the very next corner.

What we love can spurn us. What we push away often loves us all the more. It is a tangled web we weave, yet most of us cannot stay away for long. Even after being dumped, we go back for more. Sometimes even to the same person!

My own personal love trail has had its share of twists and turns and dead ends. Early failure might very well have turned me into a hermit. But I persisted. Even after the darkest days, I persisted.

The first time I told someone “I love you,” she said, “If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.”

Guess what? It never was. At first all had been bliss and happiness. She was an older woman (only a year older, but when you are fifteen that is a big time score!). We went to movies and out for burgers and ice cream and other such stuff. After a few months, though, she met some redheaded dude at a roller skating rink who was more exciting than Mr. Sophomore With His First Girlfriend. So I got the “Let It Go” speech.

I have hated that speech ever since. But I love the bumper sticker I saw years later: “If you love something, let it go. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down and kill it.” It always made me think of our short, exciting fling and the burning ache as she drove away for the last time. Such cruel fate. I was not old enough to drive, so I had to be the one standing there sucking exhaust fumes.

The second time I told someone “I love you,” she said, “There are lots of different kinds of love. Love for a puppy, for example. Love for a book, love for a friend. You need to think about this a little more.” And she sent me packing. I did not go back and tell her a second time.

The real problem this time was she liked a friend of mine, a blonde, bronzed, and brawny fellow, while I was the skinny, non-athletic band geek. Perhaps I was also not quite the catch my mommy and grandma always told me.

The third time I told someone “I love you,” she said, “Oh.”

Ouch.

There is no way to recover from that. You’re holding a Valentine’s Day gift for your girlfriend, you say “I love you,” and then you pucker up.

And she says “Oh.” The thanks she offered for the present meant nothing and all I could do was think “stupid stupid stupid.” My puckered lips turned sour and I stumbled into the kitchen to check on dinner. A week later she had her brother tell me she was dumping me.

There we have it. Three strikes and you’re out! Twenty-two years old at that point and ready to enroll in the nearest monastery. Perhaps I was just not suited for this love thing. I put love out of my mind and buried myself in work, drink and Fritos.

Then I met Kristin. We worked together and became friends. I liked her smile, her laugh, the easy way she got along with people. She liked my motorcycle jacket. When I convinced her I wasn’t as old as she thought, she agreed to go out with me. And we married seven months later.

It’s been twenty-five years at this point, and Kristin has taught me what love really is. It is taking care of someone, tending to their needs, and being tended by them when necessary. It is taking the best of each of you and making a union that is more than the sum of its parts.

It is always wanting to see that person, and missing them terribly if you spend too much time apart. It is solving problems, creating joy, and working through the inevitable difficulties. Together. True love is wanting to spend the rest of your life with that person, through every eventuality.

But it is more than the wedding vows of sickness/health, richer/poorer and so on, because those are shared even at weddings that are bound for divorce court before the honeymoon is over. True love is the soothed ache in your soul because this person makes you whole.

The fourth time I told someone “I love you,” Kristin said, “I love you, too.”

Tour

2010-08-15T13:30:00.001-07:00

No one mocks the draggy pants of today’s young men more than I, but it becomes apparent that my comments say more about me than Mr. Draggy. After all, there have been a few occasions during my life when my behavior or sense of style was rightfully ridiculed.

Okay, a few thousand occasions.

But I find myself nowadays more often pitying the young folk than mocking them. They are woefully overscheduled by their parents, with extracurricular sports, theater, music, and equestrian activities. (If your parents never bought you a pony when you were a kid, replace equestrian with rodentia, which just means you were more likely to be found playing with a hamster named Squishy.)

I used to shake my head at the über-connectedness of youth, with their iGizmos and their regular twittery updates on social networking computery things and their cellular telephones that are so small they can get lost in a pocket between two coins. Now I marvel that these miniature adults can organize all that tech stuff and still manage their own lives.

It must be a difficult way to grow up. I’m glad I survived my younger years without draggy pants, ponies, and Facebook. I daresay, as the grumpy old man that I am, that life just might have been easier back then.

Going to college was easier as well. That pre-senior summer activity known as “figuring out where you want to go to college” has spiraled out of control as well. It used to be that the upcoming graduate would either matriculate at whatever university had a building named after his grandfather, or she’d apply to a couple of places she had heard of.

The application was completed by hand and it just wasn’t worth the effort to fill out too many. I did so for a university that was a few minutes from my front door, another where my sister was a student, and a third that my mom and I visited to see what it had to offer. That was it.

Our modern students, with the power of Google at their fingertips, can easily apply at dozens of institutions that will happily propagate their information so that it is a nearly painless process (simply click debit or credit and you will be ready to go). It doesn’t make sense to apply to a dozen colleges, unless you listen to the alumnae fundraising group of whichever school is currently under consideration. Then the more, the merrier! They encourage you to apply early and often.

Kristin and I now begin our second of three college application processes—for our children, that is. Our bank account will be zapped for fifty or sixty bucks every time Kelsey clicks [APPLY HERE!] just like when Kate did it two years ago.

We have gone on a couple of college tours with Kelsey, and she has been fortunate to visit other campuses with other family members. I go not to support the silly notion that you have to actually walk the streets to know if it is the right school to attend, but because I have time to kill and I always enjoy a road trip.

The tour guides are all well-meaning and cheerful, but I wouldn’t want to count on them for any accurate information. They are the university equivalent of the under-dressed ladies waving their arms over the latest vehicles at a car show. And since they are generally college seniors at the time they lead us around by the nose, it’s not as if they have actually finished school and can be any kind of good role model to the younger visitors. They’re floundering like everyone else!

The high school students along for the tour, anticipating possibly attending the esteemed institution where they find themselves, never have any questions for the tour guides. They stumble along silently, perhaps giggling with a friend who came along. It is the parents who pepper the guide with interrogatives.

“Is it a safe campus?” Sure. In relation to what?

“Does anyone really major in dance?” Yes. The tour guide, in fact.

“Does the school guarantee finishing within four years?” Hahahahahahahaha.

The last seemed like a really foolish question, given the rate of impacted programs and the length and breadth of four-year degree programs in general, and the likelihood that the student might just have other things to do than fill up the class load. Work, for example, and parties—and of course work parties.

I came to realize why the students were quiet during the tour. They had no interest in asking the questions that truly interested them, especially not with their parents standing nearby.

“Where do you rank on the list of party schools? And as a follow-up, I’d like to volunteer to help you improve in that ranking.”

“Where do the cutest boys (or girls) hang out?”

“Are my grades sent to my parents?”

We are just about done with Kelsey. She’ll go off in one direction or another. When it is Kyle’s turn, the last of the three, he’ll be lucky if we hand over the credit card number for the applications. And as for tours, we’ll just print out a map and wish him good speed.

Harmonica

2010-08-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

Every few years I get a hankering to be a harmonica player. It’s in the genes, I guess. My grandfather was a master of the instrument, and not just the little ten-hole plaything most of us have blown at one time or another. Grandpa played the Super Chromonica, a twelve-hole device that utilizes a button-activated sliding bar to essentially double the number of holes.

Then you’ve got the fact that each note can be changed by reversing direction of the breath, and Grandpa was blowing 48 different tones! No wonder he could reel off so many different tunes, sitting in his comfortable chair in the living room, the grandchildren huddled at his feet.

“Play another one, Grandpa, please!” we’d plead.

That’s what I notice about the difference between Grandpa’s harmonica playing and mine: no one ever begs me to play. I’ve walked down the sidewalks of Palo Alto, California with my brother-in-law as we attempted to warble the blues, and I have on occasion made an effort at a song with someone else in the house. But I rarely draw anyone to me; I don’t attract a crowd.

My most loyal following came when I used to teach kindergarten. It didn’t strike me as a thing to do in class right away, but one day we were singing “You Are My Sunshine” and I remembered that used to be one of my standby songs. (That, and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” were pretty much all I knew.)

The next day I took my harmonica to school and we sang the sunshine song, except this time I accompanied rather than sing along. The students were struck by the novelty of the situation, if not my skilled playing, and asked if I knew any other songs. When I played “Jolly Good Fellow” they shook their heads in disappointment.

“What’s that?” one asked.

When I tried to explain that it was a song traditionally sung at retirement and promotion parties at Fortune 500 companies, I was upstaged by a bright little girl.

“No, it’s ‘The Bear Went Over the Mountain.’”

We went back and forth with the “no it isn’t”/“yes it is” argument until she sang the first stanza. Lo and behold, she was right, the bear did indeed go over the mountain to see what he could see . . . but I wasn’t ready to give up. Some of the pupils were whining that they were bored, so I asked, “Well, then, what would you like to hear?”

I should have known I was setting myself up for failure.

They immediately clamored for “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” (Note: they weren’t clamoring for me, they were clamoring for the songs, an important distinction.) Simple enough I thought, so I gave it a try.

After a few moments, one asked, “What was that one?” as if he was tired of the entire event.

“‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was.”

Here we go again.

“It didn’t sound like anything.”

I tried to sound out the nursery rhymes as best I could, and if the kids actually sang along they drowned out my discordant tunes. We did Mary, and then Twinkle, and then Mary again, and then Twinkle again, and then someone asked if I could play anything else. And that was pretty much the last time anyone asked me to play.

It didn’t stop me, though.

I found one of Grandpa’s old Super Chromonicas and had it cleaned up at a music store. Its wooden case needed a little TLC and I took care of that with some glue and twelve-inch clamps. Then I tried to play it with the soul and emotion of its original owner.

Despite the newly refurbished slide button and the hours of practice (okay, a few minutes a couple of times a year), I couldn’t entertain even the most disinterested people. Perhaps disinterested people by their very nature would lose interest in amateurish harmonica playing. I prefer to think that disinterested people don’t have the inclination to seek out their own entertainment so they are happy to sit back and experience whatever comes their way.

Doesn’t quite work out that way. Interested people lose interest in the unenjoyable. Disinterested people look elsewhere for something to interest them. Either way, my audience diminishes to zero.

I am not exactly living up to Grandpa’s legacy, but I am still trying. I have found songs online to practice, and can play “Blowin’ in the Wind” well enough that adults can sometimes identify it, if they stick around long enough.

Usually my audience consists only of the dog, and if she doesn’t leave the room I figure it’s been a good show.

Telephone

2010-08-01T15:24:00.001-07:00

Perhaps you have heard of the scam when someone calls up and says, “Grandma? Hi, it’s your grandson. Hey, I’m in a bit of trouble and was hoping you could wire me some money.”

Grandma is not going to turn down such a heartfelt entreaty. Grandpa might, but that’s why the caller never asks for Grandpa. He’s a grouch, and barely says hello when the grandkids come for a visit, which they do with decreasing frequency because they are so busy with their friends and their jobs and their electronic doohickeys. Grandma, though, always has a smile and a welcome hug, and without question will hustle down to Western Union at the merest hint of trouble, ready and willing to empty her bank account.

Unless she asks a few questions. Where are you? What happened? Enough questions that the caller mysteriously hangs up. The grandma who survives this scam is one with the proper amount of skepticism.

Those who prey on the older generations used to do it door to door, convincing them to agree to unneeded roof repairs or signing for unsavory home equity loans or purchasing Fuller brushes even though the bathroom cabinet was clogged with plenty already. I used to think such victims ought to be a little wiser, and perhaps bore a bit of the blame.

Then I grew old and became wary of all the smooth-talking youngsters at car dealerships and blood donation centers and bank teller windows. Each one meaning to cheat me out of what was rightfully mine. The scams were no longer so unbelievable.

And then one of these scalawags called my mom.

I thought the Grandma Scam almost sounded too foolish to exist. Who would waste their time doing this as a job? Who would fall for it? My mom proved that it actually did exist.

At the time my son was traveling out of state. We don’t know how the caller knew my mom was a grandmother (hey, AARP . . . are you selling your membership lists to Canadian con artists?) but there was no chance that this particular teenaged boy was out of the country on his own and needed thousands of dollars sent immediately.

One or two questions and the rip-off fell apart. Simply asking, “What do you want?” prompted the guy to hang up, likely to call the next number on his list.

My mom is a scam ninja, ready to karate chop any swindler who tries to take advantage of her. She isn’t going to fall for such malarkey, and for that I am thankful. (I’m also thankful I was able to determine that it actually wasn’t my son calling and trying to pad his woefully thin bank account.) My mom will not suffer fools . . . well, none other than me. She has to put up with me, though, because I’m her little boy! And I’ve got a birth certificate to prove it.

I don’t know what kind of jackass considers such dishonest work a good career move. Mom reports that there was the telltale pause of the telemarketing call when she first said, “Hello,” when you know someone is just working their way down a list of phone numbers.

And they wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work. Like new salesmen are taught, you’ve got to be told “no” seven times before you walk away. The circulars in your mailbox are sent to tens of thousands of citizens in the hope that a tiny percentage will actually shop because of them.

As long as one grandma somewhere in this country will wire five thousand dollars to some phony grandkid, they’ll keep calling. Even the less offensive phone calls, the ones that aren’t out-and-out scams, are kept alive by a few people who won’t just hang up.

As long as a few people are willing to participate in opinion polls on politics, television, or the economic condition of the country, they’ll keep calling. As long as kind but misguided citizens purchase candy and magazine subscriptions from strangers on their front porch in an effort to supposedly help keep kids out of gangs, they’ll continue to knock.

As long as even a few folks contribute to police benevolent societies and Save the [enter favorite animal here], they’ll keep calling.

Some of you are taking the time to respond to those callers on the telephone even though their sole purpose is to separate you from your money. You try to say “no, thank you” but you eventually give in. I can only assume this because I keep getting the same damned calls. I’d like it to stop, but I can’t do it without your help.

Instead of saying “no, thanks” and not hanging up, please say, “get a real job.” And hang up.

I guarantee if it is actually your grandson, he will call back, and he will forgive you.

Specialist

2010-07-25T12:04:00.001-07:00

I’ve never been the kind of guy who can diagnosis automotive problems by looking at the engine or smelling the tailpipe. If the key turned and the car roared to life, I was fine. Otherwise, it was time to buy a new car.

Even in the old days when cars were basically mechanical beasts and young men loved nothing more than leaning under the hood for hours on end to tinker. Adjusting a belt, reconnecting a hose, monitoring fluid levels. None of it really makes sense to me. Sure, I can add a quart of oil when it sounds like the car is about to shake apart, but half of the oil runs down the outside of the intake and slops on the garage floor.

Better to just ignore the problem altogether.

When problems can’t be ignored and I am in no mood to deal with a car salesman, I will instead deal with the car mechanic. I’ve got a fellow I take the autos to, but it is a scary proposition because there is so much trust involved. I have to trust his skills and his equipment (and perhaps more importantly the grease monkeys he hires) and I have to trust the service will be top notch and properly priced.

Mind you, I have had no indication that I have ever been gypped at this particular establishment, but every time I go I enjoy a slight burning sensation in the pit of my stomach. That’s not the taco I had for lunch, either, it is the complete supplication I have for the automotive specialist. If he told me the ancillary cog on the secondary radiator needed replacing, I’d say, “Have at it!” even though that part doesn’t really exist.

If he told me it would take six days to get the part from the warehouse and three months to install it, I’d laugh and tell him how much I enjoy walking.

If he wrote the expected cost for the work and the number was too big to fit in the box marked “estimate,” I would shrug my shoulders and prove then and there how much I enjoy walking. Three months later I’d walk back to pick up my car.

When car repairs are required, I just have to go with the flow, since there is no chance I can take care of it myself. Being a control freak and being able to take care of most things in my life on my own, it is a feeling I don't particular enjoy.

I have the reverse problem with another kind of specialist. The medical professional, the general practitioner, the physician-slash-doctor, has knowledge of certain things that are far beyond my ken, but I have found them somewhat unhelpful in recent years.

I wanted a standard physical before I embarked on my marathon running and the doctor told me—before running any tests, mind you—that I would die and leave my children fatherless. I needed an ankle injury checked, and another doctor said it was sprained or broken. Evidence of either, proof of neither, or something like that. He sold me a pair of crutches and sent me on my way.

A third physician took one look at a part of my anatomy and recommended a lotion. I was looking for something more immediate as it was, well, rather painful, but all he could suggest I do was purchase a tube of such-and-such that I would find on the next aisle over from the dog food. I could have found the rash cream on my own, without the joy of the waiting room and the co-pay.

All three of these fellows did their job, I suppose, but provided nothing I couldn’t have done on my own. If my internal organs ever become external I’ll visit someone who graduated from medical school, but until then I think I will continue to self-diagnose.

The fine line of when the specialist is needed is ever changing. Sometimes we rely on so-called experts when a little common sense will do. Other times we try a little do-it-yourself and things go from bad to worse. I guess it pays to know your own strengths and weaknesses.

I have a pretty good handle on mine. I have never and will never attempt any sort of automotive repair. And my wife has a couple of medical dictionaries I can use to identify and resolve any ailment that might come my way.

I just hope the car is working when it comes time to rush me to the emergency room.

Never

2010-07-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been thrown to the ground and handcuffed behind my back. Thrown to the ground? Maybe. Handcuffed behind my back at the same time? My lawyer quietly requests I decline to answer the question on the grounds it may incriminate me.

Some things I’ve never done despite what you may have heard. And unless you are able to provide photographic proof to the contrary, you should just mind your own business. And read on.

I’ve never come in first place in a marathon. Never came in last either, in case you were wondering. When I used to teach kindergarten, I’d bring my new marathon medals to school to share with the pupils. They are shiny and heavy (the medals, not the pupils . . . well, not all the pupils) and the five-year-olds enjoyed oohing and aahing over my stories.

At least I think they did. They might have been groaning.

Every time I brought in a medal, I’m talking every single time without exception, some kid or another would ask, “Did you come in first place?”

“No!” I’d bark. “That wasn’t the point.” They were too disappointed to pay attention to my explanation of what makes an old man run a long way and be happy with not winning. They would have to grow up and survive long enough to learn how it is we adults suffer through life, properly and privately.

I never could figure out why that was always the question du jour, even if the same class had seen me earn five or six medals. I guess they always held out hope that I might win, despite what they knew of my stats.

“Did you come in second?”

“No.”

“Did you come in third?”

“No.”

“What place did you get?”

“2,563rd. Are you satisfied now?”

They were never satisfied. Or maybe it should be said that I never satisfied them. Perhaps I should have run faster. Perhaps I should have left the medals at home. Sometimes I am my own worst enemy.

Like at weddings.

I have gone to a fair number of weddings over the years, and four or five times I have been brazen enough to predict divorce for the currently-being-wedded couple. Not loudly, of course, but in quiet whispers to my wife, who found my behavior quite distasteful (a problem that has come up repeatedly, and not just on the subject of marriage implosions).

Here’s the point: I have never been wrong. Even as my unblemished track record grew in number, the next time I foresaw a future break up Kristin would deny such inevitably whilst simultaneously shoving her elbow in my side. So while I was never wrong, she was never amused. Everybody has a “never” story to tell, eh?

I go to fewer weddings nowadays (coincidence? you be the judge) so I must amuse myself in other ways. That’s why I never turn down an offer to conduct a wedding. And no, clever person, it’s not because it is easy to not turn down something that is not offered. I have been asked precisely once, and I followed through with it exactly that same number of times.

Also no, clever person; the wedding for which I had a one-day pass from the county to act as ringmaster was certainly not one where I caught the scent of dissolution on the breeze. That union is doing just fine, and their son calls me Uncle even though there is no blood relation. The boy just happens to like me, and has never been disappointed by me.

Yet.

In all honesty, the handful of failed marriages were easy to predict, probably half the people in the crowd were thinking the same thing. Sometimes you just know. But if you never want your own beloved to shove her arm between your ribs, you just might want to keep your thoughts to yourself.

Some things I’ve never done, but I fully expect to do them some day. I’ve never visited Antarctica, but I believe I will before being called to my final reward. I’ve never cared about separating the whites from the coloreds (laundry, folks, just the laundry), but one more pair of pink underwear might convince me to reconsider.

On the other hand, I’ve never killed a man, and I believe I will draw my dying breath saying the same. I’ve never painted my toenails purple or made a suit out of cardboard, and those will likely not come to pass either.

Sometimes a never is a good thing.

Solitude

2010-07-11T15:53:00.001-07:00

Many are the stories of individuals who seek knowledge, enlightenment, or plain old peace and quiet through aloneness. Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, Siddhartha Gautama under the Bodhi tree, even the old guy in the ramshackle house near you who only comes outside to yell at neighborhood kids who might be walking within reach of his dry and brown juniper bushes.

Peace and quiet and whatever it might lead to. It’s an honorable goal, although the method might sometimes be in question.

I socialize on occasion, but I am equally comfortable in my own skin, in my own room, on my own. I certainly don’t thrive on having company over. Peace and quiet is often my aim, and if enlightenment shows up at the same time, I certainly won’t turn it away.

For many years, summer in our house was controlled by the kids. Swim lessons, family trips, driving them places they needed or wanted to go. And of course the wife and I had to provide nutritious meals and a safe home where they could play and we needed to make sure they went to bed and woke up the next morning. Excruciatingly humdrum.

Now the children are older and some of the requirements of responsible parenting are still in play, but it is vastly easier. One has moved to Arizona, another has a valid driver’s license and keys to a working automobile, and the third has a bicycle and many friends’ homes where he is welcome to spend the afternoon, the night, or the weekend. Being alone isn’t always a planned event, but it can be welcomed with open arms if it happens to knock on the front door.

My opportunity for solitude during this summer of 2010 came courtesy of the great deserts of the American southwest. Kate came home for a visit but then returned to Prescott, Arizona. Kristin and Kelsey went to Las Vegas to visit Kristin’s parents. Kyle hopped on a plane to spend a month in west Texas, choosing a vacation with the family of one of Kristin’s cousins.

By June 30 they were all gone, and it would be eight days before the first would return. That might sound frightening to those of you who thrive on companionship, but it sounded like just what I needed. I looked at the dog and shrugged my shoulders. After all, in solitude there is no reason to speak. The dog looked back at me and smiled. Or maybe she was just breathing; it’s hard to tell with dogs. Regardless, she certainly didn’t break the code of silence with any unpleasant talking.

Ahhhhhh.

Eight days of peace and quiet. Eight days of being alone without being lonely. Not exactly the two years Thoreau had at Walden but about the same amount of time the Buddha stared at the Bodhi tree, and he achieved monumental spirituality when his week was up. What would I do with my eight days? It didn’t seem to be completely impossible that I might too achieve enlightenment and become a world renowned leader of a new religion.

Unlikely, yes, but not completely impossible.

Other plans were necessary, if theology wasn’t the point. So I rode my bicycle every day, racking up about 150 miles, and didn’t drive the car at all. I didn’t buy any groceries, surviving instead on whatever I could find in the house. With one caveat: liquor didn’t count as groceries. There’s nothing like a little ceremonial wine to help achieve a higher consciousness, or beer if the wine is all gone.

I hung my old dartboard in the family room, after it has languished unused in the garage or Kyle’s room for many years. I tested my aim with the calmness and surety of the most pious holy man, and could even hit the bull’s eye on occasion. I left a lot of holes in the wall, too.

By the end of my self-imposed confinement I had not unleashed a new religion. Perhaps that does not surprise you. But it could be said that I have a new appreciation for the ascetic, and I have learned how to spend vast amounts of time wisely on my own. It wasn’t all just bikes and darts and beers, people.

At this point Kelsey is the only one who has returned from her particular desert, and I am now a hermit with a teenaged daughter on the premises. Sometimes she is even home to share a meal with me, but of course her friends missed her so much that she has to make herself available. Her friends don’t do so well on the solitary way of beingness, but I have offered to provide counseling on the matter should they be interested.

Thus far, they are not. Isn’t that always the way for shunned mystics like me?

I will instead distract myself with the only thing on my To-Do List (a distasteful leftover of modern life that I successfully ignored for eight days): patching the thousands of tiny dart holes in the wall before Kristin comes home from Vegas. She is unlikely to accept enlightenment as a reasonable explanation for the damage to the house.

Maiden

2010-07-04T22:50:00.001-07:00

Father’s Day always seems to be a bit of a forgotten holiday. Sure, it has been celebrated for 100 years, but that’s not as many as Mother’s Day (which has precisely one more). One wonders if Father’s Day would have ever come to mind if Mother’s Day hadn’t been made up first. Just another example of fathers being second-class citizens.

Mother’s Day enjoys the mild spring weather of mid-May while Father’s Day sits smack dab in the middle of the vernal equinox, just as the heat of summer is beginning to permeate the atmosphere. Mother’s Day occurs during school months, allowing teachers to plan a multitude of art and gift-making activities for the students to take home to mom.

Father’s Day comes a few weeks after school is out and is overshadowed by graduation season. As an afterthought, an ugly tie or unneeded fishing lure is poorly wrapped and left at dad’s breakfast table, the gift giver having long since left the house to hang out with friends.

Children love to wake early on Mother’s Day to serve mom breakfast in bed. Then a few weeks later they call from inside the house, “C’mon, Dad, hurry up with that barbecue!” If Dad didn’t cook on his special day he’d probably go hungry.

Pity the poor father. Even if his years as male parent haven’t been as bleak as described, something is lacking in his special day. Father’s Day is more Groundhog Day and less Christmas; more Flag Day, less Halloween. So I decided to dress it up this year and make it the preeminent event that would be remembered for years to come.

My kids have done many nice things for me on Father’s Days past, I’m sure of it. After all, I’ve been celebrating Father’s Day since 1991. I just can’t remember any of them. The homemade cards, the clay sculptures from school, the undercooked sausage and egg served in bed with warm beer. They all fade in the annals of time. Father’s Day 2010, however, I will remember, for a long, long time.

Taking a cue from the Baxter Family Book of Important Things, I discovered a particular concert would be held in a nearby city on this year’s Father’s Day. Kristin and I had seen this act in the past, thrice in fact. In 1985 after dating for about two months, and then in 1986 and 1988 as a married couple. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you . . .

Iron Maiden.

I hope you are not thinking, “Who?” I’d be embarrassed for you. But for a one-paragraph history lesson, let me simply say that Iron Maiden is one of the most successful bands to come out of the Second British Invasion of Heavy Metal in the early 80s. They’ve been making music for thirty-five years, with the same core musicians for thirty of those years. I have all their albums and my children can sing along with many of their songs. Oh yeah, one more thing: Kristin is in love with the lead singer.

So we got tickets. The crowded parking lot that Sunday night took me back to the heady days of early-Reagan. The line to enter the gates snaked around the perimeter fence while fans drank their seventh beer, leaving the empties to rattle around the asphalt. There were a lot of gray-tops like me, but this was not simply a novelty act for oldsters to reclaim their lost youth. There were kids as young as ten, and plenty of teenagers (including two named Baxter who kept following me around).

The big difference I noticed that evening was my short-term memory. When I saw Iron Maiden in the 80s I could go home and remember the set list, even days later. Then I noticed at a Blue Öyster Cult show a few years ago that I was forgetting some of the songs they played . . . while the show was still going on! I didn’t want that to happen to my new Father’s Day memories.

“Hey, Kyle!” I shouted, even though he was four inches away. Iron Maiden was really blasting the tunes. I think their amplifiers went all the way to 11.

“What?” Kyle screamed.

I pointed to his iPod Touch and mimicked tapping its tiny on-screen keys to make a list of songs. “The Wicker Man,” I said, the first song that had just ended. I wiggled my fingers again and Kyle understood. He proceeded to enter the first song, and then typed “Ghost of the Navigator,” the second.

I nodded my thanks and returned my attention to the band. They were flailing around the stage, drums a-banging and guitars a-wailing and the object of Kristin’s affection (the lead singer, not the Father’s Day celebrant standing next to her) a-shrieking. I offered the appropriate response: rock ‘n roll devil horns. Fist raised in the air with pointer and pinkie extended, arm thrown forward in time to the music. Kyle dutifully recorded each song title as it began.

It was a magical evening, with one sad realization. I was back in my rock and roll element, sharing it with my wife and kids, and hearkening back over twenty-five years of heavy metal concerts.

But my brain had been replaced by an electronic toy.

Generation

2010-06-27T11:25:00.001-07:00

I was always under the impression that the typical generation ran twenty-five to thirty years. That was attributed to the basic breeding cycle of the human animal. A couple would have their first child around that age, and said child would do the same the same number of years later.

Grandparents, parents, children. Thirty years at a pop. The math worked well until teenage parenting became all the rage, and then it seemed that the generations sped up. Really, though, such early procreation has never been more than a small amount of the population. Most folks were able to restrain themselves until they had a high school diploma, or at least a job that paid more than minimum wage.

What I couldn't account for was the seeming onslaught of generations since I have become an adult. I was born at the tail end of the Baby Boomers, but no sooner did I reach the legal drinking age (while simultaneously commencing my third year of drinking) that a bunch of names were flying around. Names that sounded like people really weren’t trying very hard.

Generation X, Generation Y, and eventually the Millennial Generation just because the world didn’t come to a crashing end on December 31, 1999. Otherwise they might have been Generation Last. Regardless, children having children has not lowered the number of years in a generation. It turns out that there is a difference between familial generations and cultural generations.

Who knew!

Baby Boomers were so named because of a cultural event, that being a baby boom following World War II. It’s nice that our valiant warriors were willing to come home and set about immediately fomenting a population explosion. Baby Boomers have been a force for good, but first they were just a bunch of babies. It took until about 1980 for the term to be coined.

A little research shows this has been the case for as long as we the people have been preoccupied with labeling everything within reach. The Lost Generation, known as the Generation of 1914 in Europe, included those who fought in World War I. They became known as such sometime in the 1920s or 30s. In other words, when time and perspective gave credence to the moniker.

The G.I. Generation is better known as the Greatest Generation. They might as well be known as the Patient Generation. They waited nearly seventy years for Tom Brokaw to dub them the greatest.

Every twenty years or so we westerners group all babies born in a certain time period and identify them by something they have in common. Or at least most of them. Certainly there have to be some members of the Greatest Generation who are real losers. But most of them are great! And the name sticks. The losers just have to deal with the shame that they aren’t really living up to expectations.

The lazy naming I have identified seems to begin with Generation X. It might mean the unknown generation, because no one knew how disco, Iran-Contra, and videogames would affect them. But at least the name wasn’t coined until 1991, a full ten years after their ’61-’81 run. I can deal with that.

Now it is all going just nuts. Following Generation X is the cleverly named Generation Y, because apparently the officials in charge of nomenclature could do nothing but go along the alphabet. How ridiculous! If Generation Y doesn’t sound familiar, don’t worry, because they are also called the Millennial Generation, Generation Next and the Net Generation. Depends who you ask. Actually, it depends who you ask if you ask someone who has too much free time on his hands.

The fact is that the birth years for Generation Y are approximately from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. We are just now getting to the point that wise folks can look back and do a little analysis to come up with a name that makes sense. We didn’t have to start calling them Generation Y while they were still in kindergarten. We could have waited a bit, at least until they had formed personalities.

Even worse, the group that would supposedly follow Generation Y. In other words, the group of people born beginning in the early 2000s. Hello? We are still in the early 2000s! The end of this generation hasn’t even arrived and it has been named already: Generation Z. Again with the alphabet. Wonderful.

A little online research finds this claim about Generation Z: “Relatively little is firmly established about its composition, character, and even name.”

Oh really, relatively little is firmly established? Perhaps it is because THEY ARE STILL BEING BORN! Why are we so concerned about the cultural generation in the midst of which we currently find ourselves? They are babies, for goodness sake. They drool and they wear diapers and they do what they’re told (at least for a few more years). What’s with the preoccupation with who and what they are?

Ahh, unless it is strictly for the purposes of marketing. That bastion of twentieth century American capitalism. We need the label to properly create false consumer need in products and services. To make money, especially for those members of previous generations still alive and running the marketing machine. The more labels the better, which is why they are also known as Generation I, the Internet Generation, and the New Silent Generation.

This is who we are and how we do things, I suppose, but the names being set in stone are stupidly vague because no one wants to wait five minutes and discern one that makes sense. The rush for market share doesn’t allow for perspective or judicious consideration.

If the Greatest Generation could wait a handful of decades to be identified as such, perhaps we can slow this all down a bit and be patient for our youngest citizens. I’m sure a better name than Generation Z or its alternatives will come up if we just wait.

Can we wait?

Dirge

2010-06-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

I have worn my share of pointy hats, a few of the “dunce cap” variety. I acted the dunce in elementary school on occasion, but I was usually out-dunced by some goof named Mingo. By the sixth grade Mingo was getting involved in recess fisticuffs and I was all but forgotten as a behavior issue.

The only other pointy hats that have decorated my head were worn as the cake was cut or the presents were opened or the song was sung: “Happy birthday to you, happy bir . . .”

I’ve got to stop there or pay some ridiculous royalty. When you sing it at home to your least favorite aunt (visiting from Wichita and with a hairy mole on her chin) there is no fee, but use it in a commercial enterprise—such as a stunningly brilliant and financially successful humor blog—and you’ve got to pony up the cash. That silly song rakes in about two million bucks a year. For someone other than me.

Happy birthday, indeed.

Anyway, I no longer wear pointy hats. I do continue to sing the happy birthday song, at family gatherings and around whatever few friends and colleagues remain in my inner circle. At times my voice is light and bright and enjoyable, but in a few rare instances it slows. Beat by beat, word by word, it is like watching a slow motion video of an out of control car bearing down on an abandoned baby carriage. Baby included free of charge.

These requiems started as a competition between my brother and me. At some unfortunate soul’s birthday party—with Scott and Matt, the Baxter Buffoons in attendance—we finished the song some few seconds after the rest of the assembled guests and with a dissonant tone. We probably were given a few warning glances and looks of disdain, but that just made it funnier to us.

So the next time we had the opportunity, we sang it even slower. Each time thereafter we stretched out the words a little longer, and sang them a little lower on the register. Eventually we might only be at the end of the second “to you” as everyone else finished the entire song. We’d still be singing as the cake was parceled out to the plates, and in the most extreme cases the last syllable might be drawn out until the guests began to leave.

It became known as the Baxter Birthday Dirge: the same words but different music. Horrible, plodding music, full of lament. It sounded like we were mourning the passing of another year, and yet we really were just trying to celebrate the special day for that special someone . . . sitting there in the birthday chair and staring at us with loathing.

It was the best part of birthday parties for many years, at least for Scott and me, but lately we have had to alter our songfest a bit. You see, my wife has become a member of a professional choral group. They sing the birthday song to each other on a regular basis, sans the pointy hats. Kristin recently heard her own birthday song, once at home as a dirge and once with her singing friends. She is in a perfect position to offer a cogent analysis on what is wrong with the way my brother and I sing birthday praises.

“When our group sings,” Kristin says, “it is full of sunshine and joy. It is the sound of butterfly wings tickling your lips and an overwhelming sense of love.”

“Makes sense,” I respond. “Go on . . .”

“Your little song, well, that might not be the right word, but let’s go with it. Your ‘song’ is more like a broken sewer line. It is decay, and mistrust, and an overwhelming sense of loss.”

“Makes sense,” I respond again. “Go on . . .”

She has made her point; I am just too daft to get it. Once again she leaves the room and allows me to ponder my future. I pull down the family calendar from the kitchen wall to see whose birthday is on the horizon.

There will be a few opportunities to try to sing nicely, for some nice people. Mother, sister, niece, and others. I will do my best to inspire, rather than to suffocate, because they probably deserve it. They have put up with my shenanigans for a long time.

But I will save my most grief-riddled dirge for September 26, because that is Scott’s special day. And I am determined to make it the best ever. Or the worst ever.

Depends on your perspective.

Way

2010-06-13T20:54:00.001-07:00

I got run over on my motorcycle back in the summer of 1982. Actually, she didn't run me over, she lurched out from behind a stop sign and then slammed on her brakes when she was right in front of me. A panicked reaction, I suppose, to seeing me bearing down on her.

There was no stop sign in my direction, hence I hadn't stopped. I stopped pretty quickly, though, when I ran into her right front fender, followed by a graceless landing on the hood of her car. My only injury was a sprained ankle caught on the handlebars as I flew over. Pretty lucky, all things considered.

Her insurance company was happy that I settled for a new helmet and a new motorcycle. I never gave much thought of trying to bleed someone dry just so I could become an instant millionaire. My mama didn’t raise me that way. A lawsuit is fine when warranted, but too many people want to turn it into some sort of lottery.

Take, for example, the lady pedestrian from Southern California who got hit by a car in Utah earlier this year. Drivers must always be diligent and avoid running over humans, of course. It doesn’t matter who has the right of way, it is just a matter of flesh vs. steel. Flesh will always lose.

Hence, our victim has a legitimate complaint against the fellow who was driving the car that ran into her. Her medical bills ought to be fully paid for, and even perhaps a little for pain and suffering. Not enough to finance her for the rest of her life (being in her mid-20s after all), but something to make sure she gets back on her feet and back to work after being medically cleared to do so.

Oh. Wait. She was unemployed. Maybe we should say “on her feet and back to her couch,” where she could play video games all day and eat leftover pizza.

I wonder if that's why she might be trying to turn this unfortunate incident into a windfall. She claims she was advised by Google Maps to take this particular path between two points in Park City, and it turned out to be a dangerous street, and she was hit, and so she is owed something. She is suing the guy who hit her, which makes sense. That should cover the basics.

But she is also suing Google, probably because they have the deep pockets. No doubt her lawyer encouraged her to do so, what with the astronomical legal fees that will be generated during the case. Photographing sidewalks that don’t exist, interviewing potential wildlife witnesses, and coming up with new and clever ways to blame the blameless. It’s a big job for the lawyer!

Usually when you get walking routes on Google Maps it says something like “use caution – this route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.” Our hapless victim claims it didn't do so on the particular technological toy she was using. Even so, how stupid do you have to be?

When the street looks dangerous, you don't walk down it. If you do, you do what you can to avoid a problem. If there is a problem, the right people have to be held accountable.

In this case, that isn't Google.

Makes me think of the “never again” claim. Every time something bad happens, the ones with the ridiculous lawsuit cry “never again!” They’re not doing it for the money (they say); it is the only way to get the attention of the evil and corrupt corporations and other evil and corrupt entities. It is the only way to protect the little citizen-people.

In this case, our pummeled pedestrian and her attorney are trying to prevent anyone else from ever getting run over after following Google Maps’ walking directions, and they claim that the punitive damages will help. They don’t know how much that will be at this point, because the poor woman continues to suffer physically and emotionally from the trauma of being run over while walking on a highway.

As soon as they have a price, I’m sure we’ll hear of it. And it will be obscenely large and, if won in court, will certainly help the plaintiff’s lawyer buy a new vacation home (maybe in Park City, Utah!). To a limited extent it would help the plaintiff as well (maybe she could buy a car and stop being such a foolish walker). Hopefully, though, the case will be laughed out of court by a laughing judge.

But even if she wins and Google has to write her a check, you can be sure that some time, somewhere, it is going to happen again. You just can’t prevent the stupid people from doing something stupid.

Peace

2010-06-06T20:24:00.001-07:00

For some it is a simple V for Victory. Famous person Winston Churchill helped popularize the V-sign with his first and second fingers during the World War II years, and later that clever man-about-town Richard Nixon would wave it with both hands, even though he was disgraced and humiliated.

Apparently there can be a bit of irony in such a victory.

Others of a later generation would brandish the bi-digit greeting to signal hippie feelings and good vibrations. “Hey, man,” this two-fingered salute would say if it could talk, “turn on, tune in, and drop out. Right on, man.”

To this day, counter-culture absurdists continue to acknowledge each other with the peace sign. It permits instant membership into their little clubs, where they sit around and complain. “Well, at least I’m not going to work for the man, man,” says the goof who is too turned on to get a job. “Hey, man, pass the medicinal herb.”

The only use that our youngest citizens had for this particular gesture was when they were supposed to be posing nicely in a group setting for a family or school picture. At the very moment of the flash, the ne’er-do-well in question would make bunny ears behind the head of the kid in front of them. The photographer would shout, and adults within reach would cuff the culprit on the side of the head.

The photography would commence again, this time without the mockery.

There appears to be a new use of the V-sign, particularly around elementary school campuses, and it is really annoying. At least to me. But then again, so much annoys me it might be hard to determine exactly how annoyed I am. Let me explain:

In classrooms and school auditoriums the peace sign is being used as a tool for quieting an assembled group. Or at least it is being used in an attempt to quiet an assembled group, because I can tell you from personal experience it is not terribly effective. It is supposed to be a quiet way to get the attention of the masses and prepare them for the exciting lesson or lecture or assembly to come.

There are two things very wrong with this theory.

First, when the brown-nosed goody two shoes is flying the salute to her chatty classmates, the clueless one talking to his neighbor or shouting at a friend sitting two groups over has no idea the V is meant for him. He doesn’t even see it happening. He is too busy to notice.

The other dilemma is that on certain occasions the talkative individual is the very one waving the peace sign. “I’m holding up my fingers,” she says, “why are they still talking? Stop talking!” Despite her loud voice and wild gesticulations, the room doesn’t quiet. Certainly she doesn’t.

The irony is palpable. Kind of like Nixon grinning maniacally from the steps of his helicopter. But I digress.

I don’t know when this tradition took hold in modern public education. I know forty years ago we were quiet just because we should be. There was a blurt out every once in a while, and I was known in elementary school for not knowing how to whisper particularly well, but it was a kid or two at a time, not half the class.

And a look from the teacher quickly quelled it.

Now elementary school educators need bells to ring and rain sticks to shake and two fingers to raise to get the attention of their students . . . and loud voices to be heard over the droning of the class when nothing else works. And when things are really going nuts, you can rely on a bunch of oddball students to wave two fingers in the air as if that is going to silence their more rambunctious classmates.

By rambunctious I mean, of course, rude. Impolite. Discourteous. Uncouth. Offensive. And whatever else my thesaurus can throw at them.

They haven’t learned manners, like listening when someone is speaking, so we will wave a peace sign and hope everything works out. Just like it did for the hippies.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

And be careful, boys and girls, that you don’t let that pointer finger wilt, or you’ll be offering a salute of an entirely different order.

World

2010-05-30T15:24:00.000-07:00

I used to visit my grandma when I was a kid. I might stay a night or two, or, in the summer, up to a week. There was yard work to help out with and other basic household chores, but most of the stay was very relaxing.

The pay was ridiculously high, but that’s what grandparents do. I might do nothing more than pull a few weedy mint plants in the side yard and rake the driveway (no, I wasn’t a fool, it was a dirt driveway) and I’d pocket enough coin for a couple of comic books from the corner store down the street with plenty left over to taunt my friends once I got home.

My friends were never too fond of me when I returned from Grandma’s house.

But while there I ate whatever I wanted; breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I would have chosen waffles, BLTs, and stuffed meatballs every single day, but Grandma had me expand my gastronomic curiosity a bit. She didn’t want me to grow up an embarrassment to the family—though I’m not sure if she succeeded.

There was lots of time to relax as well. I’d read books, do puzzles and play games, and watch TV. Grandma and I would careen around town occasionally in her Plymouth Fury III to run errands. The schedule was very flexible, except for one brief period every afternoon.

During this time I was wise to stay out from under foot and to keep my trap shut. It was time to choose a chair or sofa cushion and sit for the only thing that had to happen every weekday, Monday through Friday, at one-thirty. As The World Turns was on the telly, and interruptions were frowned upon.

As soon as the show was over, Grandma would call her friend on the telephone and they would discuss what just happened as if the characters were their friends. I would wander away and wonder what was so interesting about it, but the seeds were planted.

When I moved into my own place at the age of 20 I fell into a slightly different routine than Grandma. I had to work every day, so I couldn’t watch TV in the afternoon. Fortunately, we had these crazy machines call VCRs, which allowed us to tape programs to watch later. It was a technological revolution!

I would get home from work around 5:30. I’d curl up in the recliner I had in the corner of my bedroom, grab a bag of corn chips and a pitcher of Long Island Iced Tea, and watch . . . yep . . . you guessed it . . . As The World Turns. I was hooked.

The soap opera is a funny thing. The plot takes months to go anywhere. One day the character of Bob is played by a tall fellow with dark hair, and then magically the next day he has dropped several inches in height and dyed his hair blond. Oddly enough, his face also looks entirely different.

Days go by and the characters are suffering the same problems they were last week, or last year. Nothing ever gets resolved. Sometimes the evil folks turn good, but that’s usually for ratings and not because they are suddenly good. Viewers have become accustomed to them and their evil ways and they seem almost charming.

Until they kill someone.

But don’t worry, because dead people always come back to life in soap operas, and there is always a mysterious twin confusing who is really doing what to who.

I never really discussed the show with Grandma once I became a watcher on my own. I wish I had. I don’t know what the attraction was for her. It seemed somewhat compulsive and addictive for me, at least until I stopped. Eventually it just seemed like a silly way to spend an hour every day (or 48 minutes by zipping through the commercials).

At some point my passion faded.

I turned it on the other day to see what was going on. Many of the same actors were still on the show, although they had definitely aged in the past twenty years (unlike me). There were lots of young actors scampering around being sexy. Some had familiar character names but new faces.

Which is to say that everything had stayed relatively the same. The only thing different is that in a few months it all ends. As the World Turns has been canceled, like every television show that loses viewers and no longer makes as much money as it used to. It will air its last episode on September 17, 2010.

I’m almost glad that Grandma doesn’t have to witness the show’s demise. Otherwise she might have come to realize that soap operas are just escapist pabulum and not worthy of her time and interest. It makes me wonder if perhaps she had just the tiniest shred of an addictive personality, and once she started watching she couldn’t stop.

I wonder, though, if she would have fallen prey as easily for our new national television shame: the reality TV program.

I shudder to think so.

Forbidden

2010-05-23T21:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes words matter. What you say has to really be what you mean. Otherwise great confusion can ensue and people can get mad.

That’s why Kristin got mad at me. Because I didn’t say what I really meant. I would have worded it much better if I had thought about it a little more. In that case I wouldn't have just blurted it out.

She was telling me about her idea for the backyard. We have a bit of a lawn, though we let it mostly die during the summer. Something about not wanting to pour water out of the sprinklers, trying to keep the grass in a semi-arid plain alive during the warm summer months.

I don’t mind the lowered water bill either.

Besides, the grass always comes back lush and green, as it did this year after our heavy rains. And being that it is now late May, it seems to be lasting longer than usual. Which is disconcerting. I’m not paying for it from a utility standpoint, but it does require regular mowing.

I used to be responsible for that, but now that falls on my son’s capable shoulders. Thanks, Kyle! But don’t worry, it will die again at some point. Then you can go back to your little technological toys.

Kristin and I are in agreement on the point of letting the lawn die each year, by the way, so we really haven’t gotten to the crux of the problem. The words I shouldn’t have said. Or the words I might have said more judiciously.

No, I think I was right the first time. I shouldn’t have said them.

When the grass is long and green, it is also often damp, especially in the morning. I believe that is called “dew.” When Kristin wants to walk out to her free-standing hammock she does not particularly care for the mushy feeling. In a few weeks she’ll begin to have a different problem: the dead grass will be brittle and harsh. She won’t want to walk on it then, either.

What she said she wanted to do was put some stepping stones from the small circular patio outside the sliding glass door all the way to the hammock. Possibly to where the faucet and hose are as well, but mostly for the hammock.

The hammock that, being free-standing, gets dragged around a bit in order to get into or out of the sun on any given day. Depending on the needs of the user at the time. Hence, how can you put stepping stones to it? It might not be there next time!

So I said what any thoughtful, loving husband would say.

“I forbid it.”

You would have thought I’d strangled a hummingbird.

“You what?” Kristin asked.

I knew instinctively that I shouldn’t repeat the f-word. The look on her face told me so. And the tone of her voice. And the fact that I am not a complete imbecile.

“Well, you know, the hammock moves all the time. What’s the point of stepping stones to nowhere?”

Her pause frightened me. She allowed me to continue digging. The hole I was standing in wasn’t quite deep enough yet.

“It’ll be a pain to mow around them all the time.” Now Kyle was staring at me, too.

“We don’t need them,” I said with a smile. None of it was working. Apparently sometimes my charm has its limitations. “I’ll carry you out to the hammock whenever you want!” I finally screamed. I was sweating bullets.

“That’s. Not. The. Point.”

Of course it wasn’t the point. The question at hand wasn’t how Kristin would get out to the hammock. It was how one spouse could “forbid” anything to the other. I tried to convince her that I didn’t mean “forbid” in its classic sense, but more in a loving and doting husbandly way. A recommendation, maybe. Or just some sage advice from the guy who does most of the yard work (be quiet, Kyle).

Of course words matter, though. And “forbid” means what “forbid” means. I briefly tried to impugn her character by pointing out that in our twenty-five years together she has certainly forbidden me certain things, but she denied it and I couldn’t come up with any concrete details.

So I no longer forbid her to put in stepping stones to the wandering hammock. But if they are installed, I absolutely refuse to relocate them every time the hammock changes location.

And meanwhile she has forbidden me to use a certain word.

That seems unfair.

Spandex

2010-05-16T18:01:00.001-07:00

When I was in high school I participated in a talent show. We were a costumed jazz band, made up of fairly decent musicians. I wore a cleric’s collar, and, since I had a saxophone solo mid-song, we were called Pastor Baxter and the Holy Rollers. We came in second place to a couple of morons who hopped around on crutches.

That’s why I think my two friends were less interested in participating the next year. I wanted the three of us to dress up in spandex and lip sync to a new Bee Gees song. No doubt my pals just didn’t want to suffer the ignominy of coming in second place again.

That, or they didn’t like the whole idea of a spandex and falsetto gig. Our plans fell apart, and I never got the chance to wear form fitting stretch fabric again . . . until this year.

This year my exercise regime has morphed from primarily running to primarily bicycling, and it turns out that when one has a nice bicycle and one rides a lot of miles, one is better served with proper equipment. Water bottles, flat repair equipment, a helmet, stuff like that. Oh, and padded spandex shorts.

My first thousand miles passed in late April, exclusively in my regular shorts. Not bad for thirty minute rides, and passable for sixty, but once I hit three or four hours in a day, and fifty or sixty miles in a row, the seat was molded into my shorts and, through them, to my flesh. I had to practically peel myself off the saddle.

It came time for me to buy some real bicycle shorts, and I could only do that at a real bicycle shop. A guy in a foreign accent said the padded crotch was normal and, no, I wouldn’t need to wear underwear. I assume he was a salesman. I hope he was a salesman.

Whoever he was, he eyeballed me in a not too uncomfortable way and estimated my size. Then I was directed toward the expensive racks. When he turned his back to fawn over someone else, I did what I could to save some money. I found mid-priced tighties and slipped into the dressing room.

It took a surprising amount of upper body strength to drag the shorts up my thighs. They were very clingy, and suddenly I knew what Peter was complaining about when he had to dress up for the Brady Bunch Variety Hour. There’s nothing wrong with glitter and rhinestones and yards and yards of day-glo Lycra, but at some point having a layer of clothing that is closer than your own skin is unnatural.

With this fashion atrocity surgically attached, I eventually headed out on my favorite bicycle trail. It felt weird at first, but eventually the padded butt certainly started paying dividends. It didn’t feel like I was sitting in my favorite Barcalounger, but I was no longer astride the rock that is the modern professional bicycle seat. Fifteen or twenty miles with a little extra tush was breathtaking.

The one thing that didn’t change on my bike rides was my indifference to my fellow citizens. I am as oblivious on the trail on a bike as I am when running. I don’t run into or over people, but other than making sure I give them a wide berth I don’t really pay attention to them. Thus I don’t recognize people when they call my name. Or wave. Or smile.

Why, for goodness sake, would someone smile at me just because I am passing them on a creek trail? Just because of my form fitting shorts? Seems like a nice waste of facial muscles.

Oh, maybe they recognized me. Parents and kids from the schools where I teach, neighbors and coworkers, or people I see on a regular basis on the trail. All of them are just trying to be nice. Maybe that’s not what I easily recognize, the phenomena of being nice. It doesn’t come naturally to me. Hmm.

Or being tightly packed into shorts. Not used to that, yet, either.

So I have decided to take my newly adopted clothing style and be a newly friendly person out on the open roads. I will look more people in the eye and nod at their acquaintance. When they smile, I will smile in return.

It is what my wife and others have been talking about. The sociability of Matt. A work in progress—tight shorts notwithstanding.

Prom

2010-05-09T19:28:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever ate escargot was under duress. I was wearing a white tux with tails, and on a date with a girl who would have rather been dating the fellow sitting opposite me at the table. Meanwhile, the girl to his right would have had none of that! He was hers for the evening.

Thirty years later, neither couple had survived. I’m pretty sure my relationship ended about three hours after I choked down the snails. My friend might have gone out with his date for a while, but eventually he ended up with another.

On the night in question, the foursome was at a fancy restaurant prior to going to our senior prom. Despite the tight collar and tails and ruffles on my white suit (seriously, what was I thinking?) I was having fun. I felt very grown up, and the girl on my arm was pretty and smart, and it seemed like everything was going to work out for me. The future was so bright I had to wear shades, which also helped hide my identity in case anyone I knew saw me in my white tux.

Okay, enough about the tux. That’s really not the point of the story. And besides, “anyone I knew”? I wasn’t the most popular kid in high school, but I wasn’t exactly invisible.

But really, a white tux with tails? It was her idea, of course, and I went along with it because it seemed like it was a deal breaker. She obviously had a lifelong dream of going to her prom with a guy in a white tux with tails, and the dream was going to come true, through hell or high water. My only dream was going to the prom, and actually my only dream was going out on a date with her, and actually my only dream was going on a date with anyone, and actually my only dream was . . .

So I ate the escargot at my date’s urging, and though the thought of it sickened me, the reality wasn’t too terrible. It was a nice restaurant, and they knew how to serve it properly. In the ensuing years I have had escargot another time or two, and I have certainly learned that it can be prepared poorly. Yuck! Nothing like a drippy gastropod mollusk with excessive garlic to completely throw you off your meal.

Certain accommodations had to be made in order for me to attend the prom. I could have stood my ground and been less of a door mat, but that would likely have just led me to being home alone on that night. I wasn’t willing to go that route.

I have now been the parent of a prom attendee three times; my kids are high enough on the social ladder that they attend the junior and the senior prom! So far they seem to be making good choices and not falling under the spell of having to go or else. Of course, it probably helps that so far it is the daughters who have gone—perhaps they are the ones making unreasonable demands on their dates.

My son is a sophomore and has thus far not attracted the attention of the upper classmen (upper classwomen?), so he has not yet gone to a prom. When his sister and her friends gathered at our house this past Friday in preparation for the big event, he made sure he was nowhere in sight. He wanted to avoid the entire “scene.” In the next two years, though, I expect the subject will eventually come up—even for him.

I don’t want any of my kids to regret going to such a seminal high school event. I don’t regret going to mine, despite the snails, the goofy picture, the tuxedo, and the ultimate rejection at the end of the night. I don’t regret driving away from her house after being summarily dismissed without so much as a kiss, and then passing another friend’s house where all the non-prom-goers had gathered.

I don’t regret being the loneliest boy in the city that night. Really, I don’t.

My offspring appear to be taking the bull by the horns and directing the entire proceedings. Their dates have been polite and well coiffed, and despite several times going as “just friends” the young men have handled it well. There has been no blowback or animosity. I hope that continues: the lack of emotional commitment and the absence of hard feelings. It seems to be the best way to survive prom season.

Besides my exceedingly useful humor column, I will attempt to help my children continue to make wise decisions prior to going to their own proms by dragging out the photo of me standing in a white tux (with tails) and telling them about the escargot.

I’m pretty sure that either the story of the ultimate turn down or the eating of snails will convince them to be true to themselves.

Fashion

2010-05-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

My sister did try to help me out when we were younger. She told me that my elephant bell bottoms were hopelessly out of style, but I wore them for another year or two past their expiration date anyway. She tried to point out that my shaggy hairdo needed a trim, but I refused to do anything about it. I was diametrically opposed to being stylish.

Obstinate is a good word, because it really had nothing to do with style. I wasn’t rebelling against the status quo, I was rebelling pointlessly. Anything anyone offered to me as advice or suggestion I immediately turned against. Lisa was trying to help me present a better Matt to the world, but I was uninterested.

And obstinate.

She might very well have also said that I should perhaps be changing my clothes a little more often. There was no reason a high school boy should wear the same jeans every single day for months on end—certainly not if washings were few and far between. And to let an entire week go by with only a single change of shirt might have been an olfactory offense to sicken the entire school.

Like just about any teenager, I had my ways, and I was going to stick with them through thick and thicker. I had no use for advice.

My son sometimes has no use for advice, either. Especially mine. I realize this is somewhat natural, and as long as he doesn’t paint his room black or pierce himself or burn me in effigy on the back lawn I can live with most of it. There are times when Kyle does accept advice, however, and most notably that’s when it comes to fashion advice from his sisters.

Maybe my indifference originated because I had only one older sister. It was like a tennis match: she’d serve, I’d volley, she’d try again, and then I’d walk away because I was sometimes stupid. Okay, often. Kyle isn’t so lucky. He has two older sisters, and they can tag team him (in my solitary wrestling metaphor for this week) or team up two-on-one (for my third and final sports metaphor).

Kyle has come to accept that if Kate and Kelsey are telling him the same thing, he might be wise to consider it. That shows a certain maturity, but it makes it difficult for me to relate. I simply don’t understand his passion for clothes and hair.

He currently has something like four pairs of jeans. Based on their color and their fit, they are to be worn only in certain situations. Recently he asked me to take him shopping for a new pair. I naturally refused because, like I said, he’s already got four. I have one, a habit that has worked for me since I was his age. Four is just ridiculous.

When it comes to his hairstyle, Kyle also takes recommendations. He has been known to take a picture from a magazine and, escorted by a sister, proceed to identify exactly what he’d like the hairdresser to do. Sometimes he gets a little shaggy, but when it comes time for a coiffure he is all about sideburn length and whether or not he will be able to comb it up into one of those faux hawks that are all the rage with the young boys.

He also uses a variety of products in his hair and on his body, and smells positively scrumptious when he exits the bathroom. This is my son? The last time I smelled scrumptious was, well, let’s see, probably never. If something smells scrumptious and I’m in the room, I think we can all agree: it ain’t me.

When I was Kyle’s age the barber did whatever he thought was right, and I lived with it. Probably why I didn’t go back until I couldn’t see through the mass. The last product I put in my hair was some greasy junk called Valvoline or something like that. Maybe it was Vitalis. Regardless, I’m pretty sure I stopped when I was eight years old.

It was greasy and took too much time to apply and I just didn’t care. Hair and clothes weren’t that important to me when I was a kid. I think it is pretty clear that they still aren’t. Which makes me curious about Kyle’s desire to look fashionable and smell like soap.

Come to think of it, I’m probably just jealous.

Gee

2010-04-25T16:56:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I wonder how long I will be able to hold out against the cellular telephone onslaught. It is likely the vast majority of you have one, maybe even two. They provide you with peace of mind possibly, or just a convenient way to communicate with others. Whatever your reason for having one, I don't begrudge you your possession. Nor your monthly bill.

I don’t have a cellular telephone now, but I did get one a long time ago. Long, long, long ago. Eighteen years or so, by my best calculation. It was the size of a shoe box and incurred roaming charges and all sorts of other mysterious fees. It didn’t take pictures or have ring tones or play games. It didn’t even have a calculator.

It was—and this may be hard for you to understand—a “phone.” Friends were envious, because most didn’t have one. Because it was such a new toy I sometimes used it foolishly. Once I called my mom from her front porch rather than ringing the doorbell. I was a phone phool.

There was no discussion when I had it that it operated on the 1G or the 2G network. Perhaps if there had been, I would understand the current television commercials and freeway billboards that boast of the 4G network. Of course, other companies still call theirs 3G. None of which makes any sense to me, so I did a little research.

Apparently the “G” stands for generation. The first generation (hence “1G”) utilized analogue transmission. That’s like having a wind-up watch or an Atari 2600 or a push mower. In other words, it dates you.

The switch to 2G began around 1991, when I had such a device, but I don’t know if mine was analogue or digital. Probably I was fooled into using a 1G phone even when 2G was available. Perhaps the salesman was unscrupulous and was just trying to get rid of old merchandise. Being the size of a shoe box wasn’t repellant as it would be to you smart phone owners. It might have even been a selling point.

“Look how big it is! You’ll never drop it between the sofa cushions!”

“I’ll take it!”

Sometime in the last decade the transmission network for cellular telephones began to include multi-media support and operated at a minimum of 200 kbit/s (whatever those are). This was decreed the third generation; that’s right, 3G. These phones were two generations removed from mine, basically turning me into the old guy in the recliner who does nothing other than complain about how fast the world is changing.

Even so, I don’t remember hearing much about 3G. Maybe I forgot to put my hearing aids in. For the last year or so, however, I have seen commercials that tout 3G as the thing to be. Someone offers the fastest 3G network, or has the greatest number of whatzits or flibbitygibbers. This must have been because they saw the future, and the future was their competitor: 4G.

Another entity began to proclaim that it had the first 4G network, and also the fastest (but if they are the first and only aren’t they currently the slowest 4G network also?). I don’t know who to believe, so I don’t believe anyone.

It doesn’t really matter to me, of course. I’ve been cellular telephone-free since 1996, and I have no plans to join the pack anytime soon. Sure, lots of people make fun of me. Many elementary school kids carry one and laugh at me when I tell them I don’t have one. Then they get angry when I say they don’t need one, either.

They have been indoctrinated by their parents who fear the next calamity, and want their children on an invisible leash. Of course, there’s no real way to know in what direction that leash stretches because the kid could be anywhere.

“Where are you?” Mommy asks her son.

“At Jimmy’s. We’re making birthday cards for his grandma.”

“How nice. Have fun!”

“Did she believe you?” the friend asks after the cellular telephone is flipped closed.

“Of course, she always believes me!” Thirty miles from where he is supposed to be, the boy takes the pack of cigarettes from his friend and lights up.

That little fantasy does not mean all cellular telephones are unnecessary or only used to lie, cheat, and steal. As I said, I don’t begrudge anyone who wants one. But I will stay happily on the sidelines waiting to see what happens. When the victor of the 3G/4G battle is decided (and it seems pretty obvious it will be 4G unless the Earth starts spinning backwards and the Atari 2600 begins selling more units than the Nintendo Wii) it will have to take on the inevitable 5G.

And then every new G after that. The networks will become more powerful, the phones will become smaller and do more, and eventually one will be embedded in your skull and you will be able to call your friends with just a thought. Your physical body will no longer be of use and you will become just another cog in the Matrix.

“Welcome to the new 10G network. Please park your soul at the door.”

Gee whiz. And good luck to those of you already ensnared.

Half

2010-04-18T21:35:00.001-07:00

We must always protect and nurture the precious youth, because they are the future. Have you ever heard that before? “Children are the future.” As far as I’m concerned, I am the future, and the children can be so once I become worm food. You know what else is the future? Everything. Well, everything minus dodo birds. And anything else that might have reached extinction or obsolescence by the time this illusive “future” has arrived.

Everything is the future, even the past if you want to be cosmically mystical, so let’s stop talking about the children as if they are all we have to look forward to. Tomorrow is the future, and yes, the children will be around and we must do what we can to ensure their survival. But I am still more concerned about whether I will get a bacon sandwich for breakfast tomorrow than I am about such issues as child labor in foreign sweatshops or playground politics or quality public education.

The latter, for example: public education is going to work out one way or another whether I worry about it or not. The bacon sandwich is not so inevitable. Which is why I’m not so worried about the kids. Yours, mine, and ours. They’ll all be okay.

They have it easy, nowadays. They have online homework help and teachers are always worried about the pupils’ self-esteem and never again will the students have to walk a mile through the snow to get to school because their parents will drive them and drop them off at the gate, even if they live a quarter mile away.

Of course, I never did either. Snow, that is. Not a mile or any other distance in the snow, and not barefoot, poorly shod, or in any other unfavorable footwear condition in good weather, and I have never complained to my children about having done so. Some things in my time were more difficult than what the modern youngsters face, and likewise they deal with things that I am glad I never had to.

When I was a kid there was minimal acknowledgement of birthdays at school. A song, a card from the teacher, and then on to the math lesson. More recently parents have become lunatic, wanting to bring treats, drinks, gifts, and interrupting class for thirty minutes or more. They start in kindergarten and continue every year until the teachers finally yell, “Enough!”

This can happen as late as middle school, and can be completely embarrassing for the child (which is all right with me, I think the world might be a bit better off if the youth could not only spell and define “chagrin” but also feel it on occasion).

Of course when I was a kid, those with summer birthdays wouldn’t even get the brief song and short note. It was as if their birthday never happened, they just magically aged one year before returning to school for the next grade . . . or possibly to revisit the same grade. How sad it was to have a summer birthday.

Except it might actually be a warm day to have a party. You would have to track down your chums to invite them to the soiree, but it would be better than having a mid-February celebration in three feet of new snow. Let’s face it, there are always downfalls to any possibility. You have to make the most of it, even if your guests all suffer from frostbite before they go home.

To remedy this dreadful summer birthday situation, the modern era has invented the half birthday. Enthusiastic parents who had the temerity to give birth in late July can bring tomfoolery into the classroom in late January instead.

It is almost more exotic, this half birthday. There are fewer such celebrations based strictly on the statistical odds of non-school months versus calendar months. Soon the other students want to celebrate their half birthday as well. The odd little boy born on October 13 who brought in a tray of cupcakes on his special day wants a do-over on April 13 (unless that is during spring break, in which case he would be glad to postpone it until school is back in session).

In the younger grades there are now enough “special days” that interruptive treats arrive practically every week. Parents think they are doing a nice thing for their child, but if they don’t stop there will be a rude awakening when the kid hits middle school and the only thing that is likely to happen on his or her birthday is some enjoyable bullying.

Unless the persecutor can be appeased with a cupcake.

Waste

2010-04-11T18:41:00.000-07:00

When I see a pile of leaves, I want to take a running leap and fall into it like a giddy schoolboy. Probably because that’s what I used to see in the movies when I was a schoolboy—giddy or otherwise. Kids were always running across expansive lawns and jumping into enormous piles. If their older brother had been doing the work he would chase the hooligans around the yard with the rake. If Dad were the workhouse, he would just lean against a tree and chuckle, no doubt fondly recounting his own youthful leaf jumping.

The problem I had was the leaves I raked and swept from my childhood front yard were left in the street to be picked up weekly by large bulldozers. It only took me a few times to realize that an under layer of asphalt and concrete is not the same as spongy earth. I could do little more than stare at my well organized piles and dream.

My brother had it worse. He was responsible for the back yard, which required numerous trips back and forth with a wheelbarrow, and by the time he was done with his yard he was too exhausted to contemplate diving into the heap. Probably why he never hurt his back.

I still gather yard waste and put it at the curb for the weekly pickup, though my piles aren’t particularly large. Certainly not big enough to support my falling body. Some of my neighbors have leafier trees and collect larger amounts, but it would still be dangerous, at least for a man of my age. Other neighbors put all of their trimmings in green plastic containers, so colored to separate them from the trash and the recycling cans.

In this environmentally friendly age when you can always find someone trying to reuse what would formerly be called trash (old tires into playground surfaces, wire hangers into child motivators—thank you Joan Crawford), everything has to get separated so it gets to the right place. I didn’t want to use the third container even though it was free, because I already had the other two stinking up the side of the house.

The black one is for trash, and trash smells no matter what I do. The gray one is for recycling paper, plastic, and glass, and it could smell better if the various bottles and cans were rinsed thoroughly, but I’m too lazy to do that. When I was offered the green one by the garbage company, all I could imagine was the slow breakdown of biodegradable material that would stink to high heaven as it baked in the sun for a week. No thanks. I’ll just throw it at the curb and try not to jump in it.

There’s one truck the city folk use for the lawn waste in the bins. It hoists them up with a mechanical arm and dumps them in seconds. Later, a mobile tractor comes scooting along with its large horizontal pinchers and picks up the stuff in the street to drop it into the back of a different truck. Three vehicles for the compostable stuff, which seems like overkill, but hey, we’re saving the rainforests and not burying disposable diapers under biodegradable mass. Al Gore would be proud.

I only have to make two trips to the curb each Tuesday afternoon, to retrieve my newly emptied garbage and recycling containers. My green-binned neighbors must make three, and I laugh silently at their misery because I believe I have found a better way. At least, that is, until I stand at the empty curb and see just what has happened. While my neighbors are putting away their third bin, I see what the jaws have dropped from between their pinchers in front of my house.

Leaves, small branches, spiky balls from the cursed Liquidambar trees, and other escapees from different yards up and down the street. Sure, the machine is ninety-nine percent effective, but that one percent is a doozy. I can’t even tell what it all is, but I know for sure it isn’t all mine. Bits and pieces from the yards of people I don’t even know.

I think in earlier years I didn’t worry about it much. I didn’t even really notice it, as I drove in and out of the garage twice a day. I didn’t spend a lot of time in the yard. Any abandoned detritus would get scraped up by the tractor the next week, or dragged along the street underneath whichever neighbor’s car was parked in front of my house because they have too many vehicles, or washed down the gutter in the next rain. Something would always take care of it.

Now I have more free time on my hands, and on occasion I stand in the front yard. I see what is strewn from side fence to side fence, and I grab my broom and dustpan to finish the job. I have become the crazy old man who sweeps the street after the trash has been hauled away. Every neighborhood has at least one such oddity.

Of course, I wouldn’t have to do it if I used the third green bin, because everything would be contained and the tractor wouldn’t have to stop in front of my house. Or if I ignored local laws and burned my yard waste like in the good old days.

The good old days when kids could safely jump into a pile of leaves.

Chocolate

2010-04-04T20:47:00.001-07:00

Easter egg hunts are a part of my past. I eagerly participated when I was young, possibly even into my late teens. I distinctly remember the event becoming more physical between my brother and me, combining tackle football and wrestling with the keen-eyed observation required to find yellow-dyed eggs in the backyard lemon bush.

At that point it was more about the competition than the wide-eyed wonder of finding edible treasures behind every rock, plant, and spigot. We had grown up, and it was time to celebrate Easter in a different way. Like eating too much ham and deviled eggs. And let me tell you folks, turkey ain’t the only meat high in tryptophan.

Next on the memory hit parade was setting up Easter egg hunts for my own children. Sometimes we dyed eggs and sometimes we filled plastic eggs with small chocolates, jelly beans, or coins. Kate and Kelsey and Kyle searched in Palo Alto and Campbell and San Jose and once in South Lake Tahoe after a blizzard. That was the quickest hunt on record, what with none of the eggs having been left their natural white. There is nothing so obvious as a pink egg on a field of snow.

I ended my Easter egg hunt experiences with five years of teaching kindergarten. With copious contributions from generous parents, we scattered hundreds of eggs around the schoolyard before releasing several classrooms’ worth of five-year-olds. It was dangerous to stand in their way, lest you be trampled.

Now, with free time on my hands, and having finally learned the difference between “showers” and “rain” in the weather forecast, I embarked on solving another mystery. Because I am tired of being invited to Easter dinner and never knowing when to show up.

Most holidays have a fairly easy way to remember when they occur: a certain date! Halloween, Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, and that most important of all, my birthday, all happen on the same day, year after year, without complication. (May 15 for those of you wondering; plenty of time to get a gift.) You can just take down your kitchen calendar every December and copy those special events to the new version, easy as pumpkin pie. For those of you who have more successfully made the transition to the new millennium than I, your so-called smart phone will take care of it for you.

Easter, though, is totally wacky. I never really cared when I was a kid, because as long as the solid milk chocolate bunny was sitting at my breakfast table, I didn’t care what the date was. I didn’t even care what month it was, which is important, because Easter is so totally wacky that it actually migrates between months.

The earliest it will arrive is March 22, but if that doesn’t work for you, no worries! It might just come along the next day, or the day after that, or by March 31. And if you’d like to put it off as long as possible, just stay alive until 2038 because that year Easter will finally land on April 25. The reason it fluctuates so much is because some geniuses gathered in what is now present-day Turkey (hmm . . . maybe they picked the Thanksgiving meal as well) in A.D. 325 to attain consensus on various items relating to Christendom. Settling the issue of the relationship of Jesus to God the Father, constructing the first part of the Nicene Creed (the profession of faith widely used in Christian liturgy), and promulgating early canon law. Makes my head spin just thinking about it.

Which is probably the same reason some doofus at the table wasn’t thinking straight when he blurted out, “What about Easter? We still haven’t picked a date yet!”

The bishop leading the proceedings might well have been trying to break for lunch, but our hapless hero—I’ll blame Secundus of Ptolemais until someone tells me otherwise, mostly because he has a funny name—brings everyone back from the buffet room with his simple question. And in their rush to fill their bellies, the assembled clerics put together a hasty mishmash of a plan involving the vernal equinox, the next full moon to follow, and the first Sunday after that.

Might as well just have picked a day and made it easy for the rest of us. For goodness sake, in 2018 Easter falls on April 1. Who are you gonna believe, your grandma or your teenager?

Grandma: “Happy Easter!”

Teenager: “April Fools!”

Good luck not opening a plastic egg that year and finding a rat turd in it.

Picture

2010-03-28T21:26:00.001-07:00

Like many of you, I spent a number of years climbing on rickety metal risers with my classmates for the annual class picture. We’d push and shove each other, make rabbit ears behind the head of the kid that nobody liked, and end up with our own awful rictus grin that looked pasted on. It seemed as though our goal was to torture the teacher and the photographer.

Most of you have grown up and long ago left that world behind. I, meanwhile, chose to become a teacher in my late 30s, and there I was again, grinning into the camera, muttering between my still lips to any pupil who dared try to ruin the experience for everyone else.

“Do you really want your mom to see you like that?” I would hiss.

Of course he would. He didn’t care. And yes, it was inevitably a boy.

Spring 2001 was my first kindergarten class picture since 1968. I was much taller, but still looked uncomfortable in my “best” clothes. The twenty little faces surrounding me were also decked out in outfits they otherwise never would have worn to school. Several of the moms hovered around Room 13 that morning, ready and willing to apply spit and forty comb strokes to smooth out the most unruly locks of hair.

I was in a dress shirt that day—short-sleeved—but at least it had a collar and a full set of buttons. Since seventy-five percent of my wardrobe was T-shirts and twenty-four percent was faded polo shirts, it was no small feat for me to be in such a photogenic outfit. This particular shirt spent most of its time in the back of the closet, always waiting to be pulled out but usually forgotten. Until some sort of event came up that required I dress like an adult.

A grownup dinner party. Some sort of church service. Or a kindergarten class picture.

The next year my wardrobe had not increased in size or variety. I didn’t give much thought to what I would wear, because there was still limited choice. When the 2002 class picture arrived I hung it up in the classroom for all of the students to see.

“Mr. Baxter, why are you wearing the same shirt as last year?”

“What?” Sure enough, there I sat in the new picture, in the middle of a different group of students. Same shirt, same jeans, same silly grin. “Well, it’s my only good shirt. Now, how about some math!”

They booed the math and forgot about the picture. I did neither.

It became a tradition for me to keep wearing the same shirt every year. At first no one really cared except me, and I had to bring the unusual situation to others’ attention. As the years passed and the picture collection grew, I continued to sit in the same position, surrounded by new faces. Former students would come by to see the latest addition, dragging along their friends who had never even been in my class. It became the stuff of legend.

Generally the parents thought I was a little odd. They would look askance at me if I dared try to explain my little Dorian Gray experiment. They pitied my wardrobe selection and my lack of fashion creativity. They wondered if they could perhaps pull their child from my classroom, but by that time it was usually too late. Spring had sprung and the end of the school year loomed.

Besides, they had known I was a little odd since the first day of school. This picture business was just one more oddity on the list of oddities.

When I started teaching fifth grade I no longer sat in the front middle. The photographer seemed to think it would look better if I stood to the side, level with the other heads. Which was fine with me, as long as I was in my famous shirt.

Which I was. Every year. Stood right next to the ten- and eleven-year-olds and grinned at the camera, knowing full well that the shirt and I were achieving some sort of lasting fame that would eventually be known only to those who had ample time to waste poring through their old yearbooks and noticing such things as the goofball who showed up on picture day with the same shirt, year after year.

Eventually even a periodic laundering will stress the finest garment. Perhaps it was the fading of the class picture shirt that prompted my exit from full time teaching. One of the buttons slowly loosened, the collar no longer would lie flat, and in the summer of 2008 I tossed the shirt in the trash. That fall, I was no longer a teacher.

Coincidence?

You be the judge.

Bravado

2010-03-21T10:46:00.001-07:00

There is something about men I don’t get. The posturing, the clenching of muscles, the grim stares, the heightening by slightly lifting their heels from the floor . . . all in attempt to best their opponent. And their opponent can be anyone at any time, they are that eager for a battle. This is more common in younger men, but I’ve seen it as well in older guys who should know better.

My antipathy likely stems from my underweight youth. I was skinny and passive when I was younger, and only got in one real fight. Which I lost by unanimous decision (mostly because I didn’t realize it was going to be a real fight until it was over; by then it was too late). I didn’t participate in contact sports, and I didn’t drag my testosterone to bars when I reached drinking age.

Whether it is true manliness or not, I have been left out of the bravado loop. All snickering aside (and seriously, stop snickering), using a Star Wars metaphor I am more Luke Skywalker than Han Solo. More Wimpy than Popeye, more Jim Rockford than Thomas Magnum, more Sonny than Cher. [Insert your own funny comparison here.]

The other day I sat in my car doing very unmanly things. I was sipping a white chocolate mocha from Starbucks with whipped cream (likely one of their least macho offerings) and attempting to gift wrap a just-purchased birthday present for my young niece. I was in full-estrogen mode, having remembered to bring the gift wrap, the transparent tape, AND the scissors. If not for the beard I might have been mistaken for a woman.

As I sat contemplating my gentleness I heard loud voices coming from nearby, and looked up to see a couple of males going at it. They might have been itching for a fight, if they weren’t working so hard at avoiding any real contact. Typical guy posturing. Like a couple of roosters scratching in the dirt.

The little guy (well, he looked little because he was sitting in a small car and was generally looking up at his fellow combatant) was defending his driving skills. The other guy, a swarthy and stockier dude, stood near the front corner of his large pickup truck. The kind of truck that says, “A real man drives me!”

If trucks could talk.

The trailer behind the truck was stacked with a variety of yard care equipment. The trailer said, “A real gardener drives me!”

Mr. Truck was yelling about the other guy cutting him off, apparently as they had been driving around the parking lot. He accused, and the accused denied doing anything wrong. In fact, he turned the argument on its head and complained about the large truck with the trailer taking up too much space.

Eventually the ultimate swear word was tossed around, alternately as verb or adjective, its use increasing as the sentences got shorter and less erudite. Mr. Car never made a move to exit his vehicle, choosing instead to flail around his arms and swear some more. Mr. Truck made one brief feint toward Mr. Car but never truly stepped out of the shadow of his truck. It seemed like they both wanted to fight, but were holding themselves back.

Then I realized: it’s Thursday, about eleven o’clock in the morning. They are both probably heading for whatever counts as work for them, plus the light of day is shining brightly on their idiotic behavior and they are likely stone cold sober (though possibly, like me, highly caffeinated). As typical male brawlers, they were itching for a fight, this just wasn’t the right time.

If the same altercation happened in a different parking lot, say at a bar, about thirty-six hours later, say late Friday night, no doubt fisticuffs would have flown. They would have been surrounded by their respective friends and beaten each other senseless, or at least until the authorities showed up. Then they would have smiled through their swollen eyes and bloody lips, their friends lauding them for a fight well fought, and no matter how badly one of them lost he would think he won.

Because they are stupid. Brawling hooligans who mistake machismo for confidence. The kind of guy I am glad I did not grow up to be.

One more white chocolate mocha to go, please.

Goats

2010-03-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

People pursue exercise in many different ways. Some like to throw cash at it, purchasing gym memberships or home equipment that they might even use on a regular basis (if they buck the trend of using it as a clothes hanger). Others go a more natural route and choose to run or bike on trails either natural or asphalt.

For me that is highly preferable to running in place on a treadmill or cycling in place on some sort of recumbent ugliness complete with TV screen. I’m sure it works for some people, in fact it works for a lot of them. I see them in long rows whenever I am unfortunate enough to be near a gym. They pant and drip sweat on their hamster wheels to nowhere.

I shudder and walk away.

But even going au natural can be improved upon. If the neighborhood community center has a track, folks drive there and then run around in circles rather than just running in their neighborhood. Or they hop in the car with the bicycle strapped to the roof or disassembled into the trunk to find a nice place to ride, instead of just opening the garage door and pedaling away.

As a charter member of the Cheap and Lazy Club, I will almost always begin my run or ride from my own driveway. Working out in a club just requires me to work more to afford the monthly dues. Gas to drive to the nearby track or other trail is cheaper than the club, but still requires money. Too cheap to spend the funds, and too lazy to have to go somewhere to exercise.

If I can reduce my work hours by running and biking more simply, and utilizing push-ups and sit-ups at home to exercise other muscle groups (and turning yard work into yet another fitness regimen), I can use those freed up hours for that very exercise. More time for me, which is always my ultimate pursuit.

About two miles from home I can access a fairly lengthy trail that runs along Los Gatos Creek. Those two miles to get there are on surface streets so I have to maintain constant vigilance for vehicles under the control of distracted drivers. Whether they are late to their yoga class or just trying to find the volume control on their GPS unit, they will certainly win any physical confrontation between us. So I always defer to their right of way . . . even if they don’t have the right of way.

Easier when I am on the sidewalk going by foot, but let us not pretend that no pedestrian has ever been run down by an out of control car. I’ve seen it happen in a lot of movies, and since movies are simply a reflection of reality, I know it could happen to me. So I stay to the right and keep an eagle eye out until I reach the safety of the trail.

Ha! What an illusion. “The safety of the trail.” What a crock. If I get out during the week it isn’t too bad, but weekends it is a madhouse. Too many people are following my example of exercising by actually moving their bodies forward under their own power (although I suspect many of them drove to the parks that are scattered along the trail . . . infidels!)

The simple rules of the road are too often ignored by these health conscious individuals. They’d never veer across a line without looking behind them if they were driving (well, that is not entirely true, but let’s go with it for a moment and see where it takes us . . . watch out!) yet walkers regularly swerve across to stop at a drinking fountain or just to look at something on the opposite side of the trail from four feet closer than where they were.

Dog walkers use extendable leashes that allow Rover plenty of room to make his own decisions, and let me tell you as the runner or cyclist that is about to pass you, Rover would rather cross the path in search of the scent left by the last dog to walk by. And he won’t check over his shoulder first. He’s a dog.

Toddlers are left to exit their plastic tricycles and stumble about, and slightly older children are working on their balance in the early days of their bicycle riding experience. When they see someone coming in the opposite direction it is a scientific certainty that they will be propelled into the way of the other person, in direct proportion to their efforts to stay out of the way. Like I said, scientific certainty.

Which is why when I was out riding the other day I was glad to see more pedestrians using the dirt edge rather than taking over the path where we cyclists want to ride by at dangerous speeds. That way, when they paused to let their dog lift a leg or to allow their goat to nibble on some long grass, there was no chance that we would smash into each other.

You read that correctly. There was an older couple walking along, each with a goat at the end of a leash. They were smaller than expected—the animals—perhaps some sort of diminutive household version of the tin-can eating animal in many of my childhood storybooks. I could almost hear a gentle “maaaa maaaa” as I rode past. On my speedy return trip I saw them again, still munching on the weeds.

The goats knew the rules of the road and were good role models for all the people stopping to smile and point. Stay to the right. Don’t cross the center line.

When the desire to eat overpowers the desire to move forward, move into the weeds. More small children should do the same.

Space

2010-03-07T10:37:00.001-08:00

The other day I was subbing in a second grade classroom. I’d worked at that particular school a handful of times, and in that very classroom once. Many of the students remembered me and greeted me with a smile when they walked in the door.

“Hi, Mr. Baldy!”

Let me explain . . .

I am not bald. If anything, I might be described as “balding,” but that is a decades long process that has only recently begun. As far as I am concerned, I have a fine head of hair and will be “balding” for the next three decades or so.

But perhaps I protest too much. Theories abound of hair loss through the generations, and presumably I can blame my maternal grandfather for grooming a fine ring of hair around his generally bald pate. If that is any indication, then I am either a bald man, or bald man to be. Either way, I embrace it. Cuts down on shampoo. Also barbers, though I haven’t been to one of those since 1999.

I was cultivating a really embarrassing ponytail back at the end of the last century, and it needed regular maintenance to keep it stylish. For that I would pay a paltry sum at a well-known hair-cuttery chain store that did nothing more than spritz a little water on the hair before hacking away. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had pulled out a bowl to cut nice even bangs.

Since then I trim it myself, every six weeks or so. At the point I might be called shaggy I stand in the bathroom and reduce it to about two millimeters. Nearly to the point of baldness, I suppose.

The students (from the early part of our story) called me Mr. Baldy not solely because of my threadbare hair threads, but because there was a fellow who was also a regular substitute teacher who went by the name. It wasn’t his real name. He was legitimately bald, and I guess his real name was too hard to pronounce. So he told them to call him Mr. Baldy.

And I deal with it to this very day. I don’t know if it is because we are both guys, or both have beards . . . we certainly aren’t the same height, since I have at least a few inches on him, but maybe from the diminutive perspective of the pupils we look the same. So we share the name.

During my lunch break on my most recent “Mr. Baldy” day I hacked onto the teacher’s computer. Technically, it wasn’t a hack attack, because I remember the default passwords the school district uses from when I used to work there full time. (Hmm . . . perhaps I am outing myself here.) If I had nefarious goals perhaps folks should be worried about the safety and security of their network, but all I wanted to do was use the computer.

It was either that, or go to the staff room and hang out with other teachers. I generally don’t like to do that. Teachers often ostracize unknown subs, and even when they don’t, all they talk about is teaching. It makes me shudder.

I had a devil of a time going online and searching for celebrity news and home brewery recipes. The computer was acting very oddly and I kept getting access errors. It turned out that every time I hit the space bar the keyboard ignored me, and every time I pressed the “m” I got “mn.” That last sentence would have looked something like this:

ItturnedoutthateverytimneIhitthespacebarthekeyboardignoredmne,andevery
timneIpressedthe“mn”Igot“mnn.”

How was I going to spend my free time without a proper functioning keyboard? Just about every Web site I might have visited was a dot-com, or, in my new world view, a dot-comn. I couldn't exactly go shopping on amnazon.comn. So I tried to compose email messages to my friends and loved ones that didn’t require the “m” key. Or the space bar.

I wrote to Kristin, who thankfully has a dot-org email address.

“Help!” I wrote. She didn’t understand.

“911!” I replied. She thought I was joking. This is a natural result of my many years of acting ridiculous. I joke, I taunt, I rib, I exaggerate tales to the point that their veracity might be questioned and then I post such tales online. Except the following two things are frighteningly true.

One: I am balding.

Two: the space bar did not work.

Whichmnakeseffectivecomnmnunicationthatmnuchmnoredifficultinyo
uraveragehumnorcolumnn.

Summons

2010-02-28T11:09:00.001-08:00

In the living room we have three small picture frames, each holding a photo of one of the kids when they were young. One is grinning into a camera from her kindergarten classroom, another is sitting on Grandma’s brick hearth, and the final kid is sitting well clad in a snowdrift.

Each is precious. The children have all grown beyond their initial innocence and the pictures are not a sappy remembrance of how things used to be. They are simply a way to recall what it was like having kids who didn’t drag us into court.

What?!

Yes.

When Kristin answered the knock on the front door she had no way of knowing that the nameless gentleman on the porch would be dragging us into legal proceedings. Until he handed her an envelope stamped “Summons.” Then she knew it was serious.

The individual named therein was a certain Kyle Baxter, a minor, our son; a good boy with a not exactly spotless record. Nothing to concern yourself with, but let us not say that he was a choir boy. Because he wasn’t. Except for that time he was in the school choir. That was completely different.

Once Kristin got past the heart attack factor, it turned out that Kyle was being summoned to appear as a witness against a burglar who had traipsed through our neighborhood the previous summer. The criminal in question had scampered over a neighbor’s fence and into our backyard as Kyle watched from a second story window.

The perp dropped a few salient items in our yard and Kyle, ever the trustworthy and responsible citizen, picked them up and delivered them to the investigating officers. After the future felon was cuffed and sitting on a neighbor’s lawn. That’s when the boy learned that it would have been better to have just alerted the authorities, rather than actually moving the items. That made him a material witness.

“Cool!” Kyle said. He told all of his friends as soon as possible. “I’m going to court!”

Kristin and I tried to impart the seriousness of the event. Without success.

“No, really! I have to sit on the stand right next to the judge. It’ll be like an episode of Lawn Order!” I didn’t have the heart to correct him.

I was, however, a little concerned about the entire event. It didn’t seem likely that the accused would have a posse of hooligans ready to knife my son once he left the courtroom, but what do you do when faced with such a possibility? I asked the Assistant District Attorney over the phone. He assured me that there shouldn’t be any such problem, and that he would be happy to talk to Kyle before he actually took the stand. There was even the possibility that the guy would plead guilty and the trial would be averted.

We would be kept abreast of all developments. Or so we were told.

The trial date approached and Kyle was still stoked. He would be able to skip a day at school, and this would no doubt be a positive item to be listed on his application for the police academy. He has considered law enforcement a possible career ever since his eighth grade exhibition project on the academy. He has treated the idea seriously ever since, and I have no reason to hold him back.

If it turns out that’s what he wants to do, I am not going to tremble in fear every day that he has a dangerous job. After all, fat and lethargic in a cubicle is no less dangerous. At least from a health standpoint.

The trial date arrived and was postponed for a few weeks. Unfortunately, as the new one drew near, we received no further updates. Instead of being told what day Kyle should be in court, we sat in a quiet and dark house wondering what had happened to the criminal justice system. I called and left a message for the formerly responsive Assistant District Attorney, but never heard back. The week came to an end, and I don’t know if the trial commenced, or if the perp pled to some equal or lesser charge.

I don’t know if Kyle’s participation will still be required, and I don’t know if the ADA is still alive. Could the accused somehow have coerced an associate to commit some heinous such as causing the ADA to “disappear”? Has the entire event turned into something unsavory and dangerous?

And what’s that strange car that’s been parked across the street from the house for the last three days? And who are the fellows in it that are watching our house through binoculars?

Uh oh.

Speed

2010-02-21T13:07:00.001-08:00

I hope I am alive in one hundred years. Not just because I want to sit in my rocking chair and yell at my great-great-grandchildren about how hard it was in my day (although that will be a cherished moment, I assure you). No, what I want to be able to see is whether I am correct on the whole high speed rail issue.

For those of you who have first hand knowledge of the Pony Express, perhaps you ought to return your attention to the gruel your nurse is trying to feed you right now. Everyone else knows that over the course of time there are technological improvements made that bring us collectively to a higher consciousness. The computer chip did so, as did Oprah, and pretty soon we will able to communicate purely with our thoughts and someone will finally figure out the perfect hangover cure.

I live for that day. The cure, that is; I can live long and well without knowing your thoughts.

In the meantime, before this perfect future arrives, we adapt or eschew so-called improvements to our way of life. Whether it concerns organic food or Google or transportation, each has rabid believers who wish to indoctrinate the world. The world just isn’t sure if it wants such indoctrination.

For example, there are people who want to build a high speed rail system between Northern and Southern California, very few of whom have any real vested interest in the project, other than wanting to be known as a proponent when it works out. Which it won’t.

There just aren’t that many people wanting to travel by train from Hollywood to San Francisco. Or vice versa. If the only proof that it would work is that it does in Japan and China and France and Germany and even, to a limited degree, on the East Coast of the U.S., then I am sorry to disappoint everyone. But I have one simple word for you.

Ford.

Here’s another one: Toyota.

We are a car culture in this country, for right or wrong, and, notwithstanding trillions of recall notices being sent out by Toyota recently (and, in smaller numbers, from every other manufacturer of two- and four-wheeled motorized transportation units on a regular basis), a car culture we will remain. A few people might hop on board the newfangled train for the ride up or down the state, but not enough to justify the expense.

And, oh, what an expense!

We’re talking billions of dollars, and still we are not sure where it will be built. The middle part is easy, right through some cauliflower fields in the Central Valley. But then how do you get in and out of the major metropolitan areas at two hundred miles per hour?

You can’t. That’s the simple fact. It will have to slow down and deal with cities, and while the folks inside the train think to themselves, “Gee, that was fun, we should do it again, after all, there are so many seats available!” everyone on the outside will say out loud, “That’s why I don’t ride that damned train!”

Just because it works in Europe isn’t necessarily proof that it can work in the good ol’ U. S. of A. California is a large enough state—in square miles and population—that train proponents think it will help the citizens, but most of those citizens are happy to just tootle around in their gasoline-powered global warmers.

What might make sense is a high speed rail system that connects the west coast with the east. After all, it is a wide country with a lot of desolation between the ends (sorry Wichita, Kansas, but it’s true). A nice fast train track between, say, San Francisco and Raleigh, North Carolina, might be interesting. In truth, though, how many Americans would such a ride benefit? The answer: too few to matter. It just doesn’t seem to make sense here.

If you want to prove your case by listing all of the first world countries with high speed rail, let me ask two questions. How many citizens does it actually serve? And which so-called developed countries are able to survive without this transportation option? Oh, and here is my third of the two questions I promised: seriously, why do you have this bug up your rear?

Some people love the idea of high speed rail in California and will shout it from the highest rooftops. Some hate it, and have lots of stats as to why it won’t work. I don’t presume to know enough to say it will never work, but I highly doubt it. Since I don’t have a crystal ball I guess I’ll just have to stay alive for another fifty years or so and see how it all progresses.

My first thought is that it will still be under discussion, but the price tag will have grown into the quadrillions of dollars. If it turns out that I was wrong, and thousands of passengers are happily saving time and money hurtling across the ground in high speed railcars, I urge you to let me know. Really, send me a thought-mail or whatever passes for communication in this practically inconceivable future.

I promise to give your message as much attention as I would today.

Tee

2010-02-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

When my brother visits, he often pulls a football out of the trunk of his car and plays catch with my son. He used to ask me, but I would usually say no. I only play catch with a Frisbee.

Now that Kyle is big enough, he can actually catch the football with his hands. At first it usually just bounced off his head. With his newfound skills, he has fewer headaches, and he can lob it just about as far as his uncle. Kyle has not yet passed me in height or waist measurement, but I believe he he has in arm strength.

Last year, as a high school freshman, Kyle was on the swim team, another skill I was unable to help him with. He has become a better swimmer than I, and has continued to build his shoulder and arm muscles as mine continue to atrophy. I might be able to run marathons but my upper body has the scrabbly little appendages of a T-Rex.

This year Kyle has joined the golf team at school, and I am happy to report that I have been able to help him with his golfing goals. No, I haven’t taken him out on the links to share my copious skills. Mostly I just identified the person who could properly answer his questions.

A golfing champion I am not.

I sent Kyle around the corner to my friend’s house, a friend with a ridiculously low handicap like 5 or 6. For those of you who don’t know much about golf, that’s like being able to balance a lawn chair on your nose while using chopsticks to eat lunch with one foot and kicking the dog with the other. In other words, it takes skill.

Kyle had a list of questions his coach wanted answered, and my friend helped admirably. Do not take practice shots. Remove your tee. Step back to allow the next golfer a chance to hit. Shout “fore!” in advance of the head injury to reduce the likelihood of a lawsuit. Do not carry more than one six-pack of beer for your personal consumption during the round.

There was the matter of proper grip, body posture, and positive mental attitude, this last one to prevent any bending of clubs after an errant shot. Kyle returned home, eager to hit the course for the first time. He had the enthusiasm of a real golfer, from a real golfer.

Kind of like how he enjoys throwing a football, because he practiced with my enthusiastic brother. Such excitement can rub off on a kid, and undo any harm caused by an amateurish and lazy father.

Of course, now Kyle has to take whatever he has gained in skill and knowledge and put it to work on the golf course. This is where I failed as a golfer. It short-circuited my business management career, and ended my hopes of having an active social life. I was a terrible golfer, and my clubs were eventually given away. (The clubs breathed a sigh of relief.)

And he is showing promise on the golf course. Of the boys with little to no experience, Kyle seems to be a rising star. There is even a chance that he will make the varsity squad when the real games against other schools start in a couple of weeks. He tops a ball every once in a while, and isn’t immune from a dangerous slice now and again, but his swing is forming and he is getting under the ball more consistently.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to caddy for him, and I’m not sure if high school golf is much of a spectator sport. If I have to live vicariously through his stories once he returns home, I can live with that. If he wins any sort of trophy or award at the end of the season, it will be easy enough to get a small bit of tape to cover over “Kyle” and write “Matt.” I’m sure he won’t mind sharing.

When Kyle runs cross country each fall I get into it and we even run together sometimes. Then he confuses me by trying a sport I have either ignored or failed in. If Kyle gets excited about the current winter Olympics and decides to form a high school curling team, I think I will have to rein in his enthusiasm with a little bowling. I can handle bowling; it is not a cold sport. I can even break one hundred in the first or second game.

After that my dinosaur arms weaken appreciably.

Hose

2010-02-07T13:33:00.001-08:00

Last Christmas Day we hosted a few family members for dinner. The menu was fairly simple: porcupine balls, mashed potatoes, and green beans. I know what you’re thinking. Nothing says “season’s greetings” like porcupine balls.

And no, the main dish had nothing to do with roadkill. It’s actually meatballs with rice mixed in, like quills. Get it?

We often make mashed potatoes at home without peeling the tubers. Something about many of the nutrients being stored in the skin, and the texture it provides in the final product, and . . . oh, yeah . . . I am a really lazy man. Not having to spend time peeling the potatoes is a step in the right direction, at least in my cookbook.

“Sure, I’ll help with dinner,” I say. I grab a bunch of potatoes, and rinse, rinse, rinse. “Here ya go!” Mashed potatoes ready to make. They just need boiling, mashing, and whatever else is required to get them on my plate. I’ll leave all that hard work to others.

Kristin wanted to make the mashed potatoes for our visitors in the more traditional style, and so I volunteered to help peel. It was the least I could do, seeing as how I hadn’t helped with the shopping, gift wrapping, decorating, or holiday cheer in any other way. I pulled the peeler from the kitchen drawer that stores all rarely used implements and began hacking away.

It felt like I was on KP duty in an old war movie. Standing over the sink, trying to finish each spud in just a few seconds so that I could go on to the rest of the pile. Five hundred pounds of potatoes in the movie in my mind; more like four pounds for our assembled guests.

When it came time to clean out the sink, I knew my newly installed disposer could handle the mess, so I turned on the water and flipped the switch. Hungry chewing sounds emanated from the hole as I shoved down the potato peels. It was over almost before it began, no muss, no fuss.

Two minutes later the sink backed up.

We made it through the holiday without our guests knowing of the problem, and the next morning the sink was draining better. I figured the peel pile had moved on down the pipes.

It had. About two feet, from my best estimate. The next time we washed a load of laundry the garage sink backed up.

We hung an “out of order” sign on the washing machine and told the kids they would just have to wait to wash their favorite outfits. Every day I would take the plunger out to the garage and see if I could fix the situation externally. Of course, as any respectable plumber will tell you, plungers are mostly just a joke tool that can’t accomplish any sort of significant repair. Yet two days later the garage sink was draining again!

Score one for the amateur handyman and his plunger.

“Dad!” Kelsey screamed from the house. I ran inside and found her gagging in the hall bathroom. She was covering her mouth and plugging her nose with one hand and pointing at the bathtub with the other. Water was coming up from the drain, in what can only be described as the wrong direction. And the wrong color as well. It was, more or less, black.

Clearly the potato peels were still wreaking havoc on my pipes. I crawled under the house and did some quick analysis. The sludge was slowly making its way through the system, and I could figure out where it currently sat based on where the pipes joined from the kitchen sink, the garage sink, and the bathroom tub. There was a short connecting joint in the vicinity, the result of an old repair job, so I removed that and brought down some muscle.

The plunger wasn’t going to cut it. I needed power, force, an unwillingness to ever, ever give up. I needed the garden hose.

Kristin wasn’t home so she couldn’t complain about the hose being brought in through the front door and down into the narrow crawl space. I shoved it in the opening in the pipe, as bits of dark, gooey matter plopped onto my hands and arms. The water on the ground, having exited the pipe as soon as I opened it and splashed into a nice little puddle, was slowly reaching for my shirt.

Back outside—with a lot of crawl space dirt dropped on the tile in the foyer—I cranked open the spigot as fast as I could. I heard the water rushing through the hose and crossed my fingers. Either the blast of water would clear the blockage, or I would have just added about five gallons to my under-house puddle.

I let it run for a minute and then shut it off. Back inside, I peered down into the crawl space, afraid I had added an underground swimming pool to our home’s amenities. The puddle was no larger, though. As I extracted the hose I got even more sludge on me, but with the pipes back together I was able to run water down all the problem sinks without a backup.

The cheap-o plumber had achieved victory, and celebrated by taking a long, hot shower in the grime leftover in Kelsey’s tub. Cleaning the body only took a few minutes.

Scouring the sludge marks off the porcelain took considerably longer.

Mind

2010-01-31T14:48:00.001-08:00

The last time I traveled via airline was early 2007, when the family visited Austin, Texas, and Boston, Massachusetts, so I could run a couple of marathons. The wife and kids were happy to go on some big trips and, to a lesser degree, to cheer me on near the finish line. Except in Boston where it was near-hurricane conditions, and they would have preferred to stay in the hotel with the cable TV.

Each time we passed into an airport terminal, heading east or west, we had to take off our shoes. Ten separate feet, some more stinky than others; then we huddled together, leaning on each other so as not to fall over while trying to put on shoes in a standing position. I hadn’t the forethought to put everyone in slip-ons.

The reason we were subjected to this terrible treatment, of course, was the infamous shoe bomber from December 2001. He tried to blow up an airplane by secreting explosives in his shoe, so we must now all present our footwear to screening agents who scrupulously check for the same. I don’t believe there has ever been evidence of a second shoe bomber, yet this “security measure” continues. Certainly the Baxter five passed easily through the screening process.

Eight years after the shoe idiot we met the underwear bomber, who—using the same basic chemicals, and also buying his airline ticket with a large amount of cash and checking no luggage—tried to blow up his own airplane. Just like his predecessor, he failed.

If we haven’t learned anything throughout this process, all airline travelers will soon be presenting their underwear for analysis. This will no doubt slow the access points even further, although it might be fun just to hang out at the airport and watch our fellow citizens being debased and degraded.

Instead of once again chasing tactics after they have been attempted, I suggest we simply begin profiling passengers. There have been no terrorist incidents involving grumpy men traveling with their wives and teenage children, so I wouldn't experience any difficulty personally—other than putting up with the teenagers. Conversely, anyone buying a full price ticket over the counter with cash and checking no luggage despite a lengthy—and possibly international—flight should immediately be pulled aside and interviewed.

I don’t care if his name is Abdul or Bob. Something weird is going on, and either he is a terrorist or he is a terrifically bad planner. Either way he could use some solid advice from the authorities.

The protection of civil rights in these United States is important, but it should not preclude rational thought and reasonable safety measures. A few questions by a trained professional should be enough.

“Are you carrying any explosives?” “Do you promise you are not carrying any explosives?” “Would you mind if I waved this lit match near your crotch?”

If we don’t put some simple profiling steps in place, not only are we at risk of further attacks by lunatics, but we will also face more invasive techniques that are currently being developed. One of those is the full body scan, which apparently might show some private parts. Other than the screener snickering from behind his little station, I don’t know why I would worry about that. Is it an invasion of my privacy to make sure that I don’t have explosives taped down there? Perhaps those ACLU nuts would prefer the open flame routine.

Another idea being thrown around is the mind scan. Have each traveler look at a flurry of images and monitor their pulse, blood pressure, and eyeballs, all the while analyzing their autonomic responses.

Baby chick. Check.

Birthday party balloons. Check.

AK-47. Pulse rate quickens.

Dewy forest glen. Check.

“Wait a minute, go back one.”

I think this possibility actually makes some sense. Lie detectors work the same way, and Mr. Subliminal made a similar point on Saturday Night Live many years ago. You can’t check every two-ounce bottle and every body crevice for every kind of possible weapon. As soon as you focus on what the last guy did they come up with something new.

Let’s learn from what already works. Where is the safest large airport in the world? Israel, where they unashamedly profile airline passengers. Security personnel talk to every single flyer even if just to ask how they are doing, and if there is a hint of suspicion the person in question is taken aside for a more in-depth conversation. Guess what? They have very few problems (other than the tiny packages of Israeli peanuts given to passengers). And even though there are plenty of lawyers in Israel, they are not lining up to sue the airlines for invasion of privacy.

The safety and well being of the average Israeli is increased; we just don’t want to do the same because we don’t want our feelings hurt.

Sometimes it seems as if ACLU lawyers are more of a threat to our way of life than terrorists.

Linoleum

2010-01-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

I am immersed in yet another home improvement project gone out of control. It is the kind when the simplicity of “insert tab A into slot B” is absent, and so I have to bring in the experts. I can paint unevenly over the most even of walls, and I can install grounded electrical outlets without being properly grounded. I even installed a new garbage disposer a few weeks back that only rarely drips. But some jobs exceed my capabilities.

This new debacle is centered smack dab in the middle of the kitchen, and from wall to wall. It is the floor on which I walk on a daily basis. Where the dog sheds while I cook dinner and the kids leave scuff marks as they race out the door.

“Bye!”

“Did you finish your homework?”

Slam!

Oh well.

I rolled out some linoleum many years ago in two small rooms in a different house, and despite having the aid of a much more handy person than I, it was a borderline fiasco. I ignored the time-honored handyman’s credo of “measure twice, cut once” and cut one of the rooms one foot short.

Instead of resolving that problem appropriately, I tried to cut corners (what a pun!) and everything got worse. I tried to lay a one-foot strip along one wall and lacked the proper equipment to flatten it effectively. Then it, too, was short, and I was left with a small square in the final corner.

Generally the entire mess was hidden under a sofa and end table, but every time someone had to move the furniture it would inevitably get caught on the curling edges of the linoleum. “Oh yeah,” the furniture mover would say out loud (especially if I was in the room), “this is where Matt tried to lay the linoleum.” Hilarity would ensue.

I swore I’d never attempt such a job again.

Nearly eighteen years ago we had linoleum installed in the kitchen. The house was new (to us) and I was too busy to consider such back-breaking labor. I would rather spend my time getting fat and lethargic behind a gray desk in a gray cubicle. Instead of being clever and industrious, I would use the vast sums I was earning behind the desk to pay others to be clever and industrious.

They were, indeed, clever. In the bathroom they erred making the cut around the base of the vanity in this relatively small area, and instead of just starting with a new piece they cleverly cut a small shape from some scrap and nicely matched the rest. Very clever, indeed. I wasn’t aware of their chicanery until many years later when the seam started to slowly pull apart.

They were clever in the kitchen as well. It looked nice for at least fifteen years, but eventually those seams started to show. Three seams, that is. In a room approximately 11x21 they used four different sections. I was convinced that I had been duped by merciless handymen, trying to improve their profit margins by using small bits rather than one long piece of linoleum.

“No,” the salesman said at the floor covering store last week, “it was probably the high-end Armstrong product from back then. The rolls were only six feet wide. Otherwise they were too heavy.”

“Oh, so they didn’t take advantage of me,” I said sheepishly.

He turned his attention to Kristin. He didn’t like me disparaging linoleum workers.

When it came time to choose the pattern, a familiar song-and-dance routine commenced. Kristin wanted to look at each and every possibility and complete a variety of compare-and-contrast charts and slowly pare down the original 500 possibilities to somewhere near 100 and then have me rank my top 30.

I can’t do it that way. First of all, I have very few requirements when it comes to linoleum patterns. I don’t necessarily want some diagonal scheme of cherries and lizards, but other than that I am likely to be pleased by whatever Kristin would choose (if she would just do that . . . choose!).

My other dilemma is that I just can’t get worked up about the minor changes in shading. Even when Kristin had chosen her favorite pattern, we had to go back and forth on several shades ranging from blinding white to black as night.

“Can’t we choose the one in the middle?” I asked, but both she and the salesman ignored me.

When he showed up at the house the next day to measure the kitchen, the first thing he said upon walking in was, “Oh, hmm, they should have had this in a twelve foot roll back then.” He shrugged his shoulders because he didn’t really care. I thrust my arms out to my sides and looked at Kristin, mouth agape. She ignored me and said to him, “What about the coving?”

But I guarantee I will be lurking during installation, ensuring that no corners are cut. By me, or by those we have hired.

Gone

2010-01-17T10:57:00.001-08:00

The first time a young child is left by its parents so they can go out clubbing or scuba diving (or whatever new parents are doing these days), it can be traumatic. After all, baby has grown accustomed to those faces, and this other face, the face that is now in charge, while possibly familiar, is still different. “Waaahhhhhhh!” says baby.

Babysitter feels bad, but what are you going to do? What are new parents to do? Not go clubbing? I don't think so.

What baby learns is that mommy and daddy come back, they don’t walk out that door and leave forever. This is some sort of developmental step missed out by those unfortunate babies whose parents are too clingy and could never ever leave their precious offspring with someone else. This child goes on to become homeschooled and quite possibly the national champion of the Spelling or Geography Bee.

The trophy looks very nice sitting in the closet, where the antisocial and friendless child sits as well.

I distinctly remember the first time Kristin and I left our first child with her first non-family babysitter. Kate was screaming holy murder as we walked out the front door. Kristin was a little worried, I waved and walked on (because I am, after all, a heartless knave). Babysitter announced upon our return several hours later that Kate stopped crying mere moments after we left.

And thus, the baby learned. Parents come back. And the knave is exonerated of his callousness, although he likely does something else unkind within a very short period of time. He is, after all, a knave, with a long history of knavishness.

It is different, however, when it is the kids that go. As our three children have grown they have disappeared for days or weeks at a time on school trips or with various family members or friends, and I have never been sad about that because they always come back. Plus, during their absence I can satisfy my lust for tacos and doughnuts without having to share.

Kate, Kelsey, and Kyle are reaching the age when their disappearances become lengthier and more often self-generated. When they are gone it seems like they are really gone, and any hours spent in their presence are the exception rather than the rule. Two of them drive now, and the third is aching to, and so sometimes a car is missing and a note is on the counter. They have earned the right to come and go as they please—to a certain extent.

When Kate went off to college last fall her departures naturally lasted for weeks at a time. A phone call once in a while, an email here or there, but her face had never been gone for so long.

Now she has taken her work and school goals to Arizona! I imagine the reunions will be even more infrequent, unless I get a job as a long-haul truck driver. Since that is unlikely to happen, I’ll just have to settle for the voice on the landline and the notes over the Interweb, and whatever joyous face-to-face encounters await in the future.

I can count on my fingers and toes the months until Kelsey performs her own collegiate disappearing act, so that is going to pass extremely quickly. Then another college will be sending me a monthly bill, or maybe she’ll be building schools and digging wells in poorer nations. Or enjoying the high seas trying to save the whales. One thing I know for sure is I shouldn’t waste time trying to predict what my children will do!

Even Kyle is going to have to fly the coop at some point. He threatens to stay with us until he’s thirty, and while that might sound cute, trust me, it isn’t. I have always said that I don’t want grown children living with me, because I think that stunts them. It prevents them from living their own life.

Plus, it begins to feel as if they are just waiting for me to die so they can get the house.

Children need to grow up. Children, eventually, need to go out on their own as well. But I have come to find that such departures create strange and unexpected feelings, at least for me. Now that I am in the process of being left by the children, I think that I just might cry at first, but I’ll get over it.

After all, they handled it with aplomb when I did it to them.

Palaver

2010-01-10T08:59:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of words in the English language that are underused. There are also too many that are overused, such as when my children say “like.” Ugh. It almost makes me, like, throw up in my mouth, like, just thinking about it.

Of course, “like” isn’t bad in and of itself. It serves a purpose at times, especially when it comes to similes, but unfortunately it has become one of those automatic utterances that are unbearable. The same thing happens every year when dictionary publishers peruse a list of possible additions for their grand books. Are they truly words of importance, or are they just popular buzz words that will soon wither and die?

I think any word to be considered for inclusion in the vaunted dictionaries of our time should be ignored if our grandparents never said it. The fact that the Oxford English Dictionary has recently added “staycation” to its list of worthwhile words is proof that we as a species can’t properly judge the merit of new words. At least fifty years must pass before a word is added to our approved lexicon. Otherwise we are faced with a cheapening of the language that I, as wordsmith, cannot stomach.

I am reasonably certain that no one will be saying “bromance” in 2020, and I likewise hope that “teachable moment” also eventually fades away. Both are trite and gimmicky, too clichéd to survive. Their overuse condemns them to obscurity.

Underused words, however, have staying power. Even if they are, well, underused. Every once in a while one slips out from a book or in a conversation with a friend and you can think, “Hmm, nice word.” Here’s a word that’s been around since the early 1700s (if my inadequate research can be trusted) but no one really uses it anymore: palaver.

That’s a good word! Palaver. It just sounds cool. It smacks of some wild west hombres sitting around a campfire, striking matches off their boot heels to light their hand rolled cigarettes, horses loosely tied to some nearby mesquite. I would sign up for just such a life, as long as there was somewhere I could plug in my iPod.

Palaver generally means “prolonged and idle conversation.” I wonder why no one really uses it anymore. Probably due to the lack of availability of hours-long campfire chats. Perhaps it is underused due to lack of familiarity, or just garden variety laziness. Regardless, I am here to return it to the public venue. Say it with me: palaver. Ahh, doesn’t that feel good?

The funny thing is I am generally not very good at palavering (the gerund form of the noun, or it might be a present participle, but remember: I rely exclusively on inadequate research). Prolonged conversation is scary for me because I am an impatient person. In my experience, most people use twenty-seven words when three will do, and very soon I just wander away.

Idle conversation is also problematic. Besides being impatient, I am also a control freak, and I want to have a plan and I want that plan to be implemented. An idle dialogue sounds too willy-nilly, and that can mean only one thing: everybody begins repeating their stories. The same things are being said by the same people who said them the last time. And there I go again, disappearing into the distance.

I realize I don’t often bring much new to the table either. My stories repeat, my observations are mere echoes of earlier ones, my opinions are tired and jaded. Sometimes I just stop talking mid-sentence because I am boring myself to death, and I pity the face(s) looking back at me. I can just imagine what they are thinking, so I walk away before they can tell me.

However, I’ve got a pal I’ve known for nearly forty years. We get together every once in a while, and the hours can just spin by if we don't pay attention. A couple of years ago our wives were both separately out of town, and I bicycled over to his house (I had mistakenly left my horse tied to the mesquite).

We sat and chewed the fat for a long time. A little reminiscing, but a lot of nothing more than “prolonged and idle conversation.” Eight hours went by before we looked at the clock. I can’t pull that off with too many people.

What I have to figure out is how to take what I have with this one guy and modify it for use with others. Unfortunately I have driven off most of my companions. Family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, have tired of my taciturn nature and my constant walking away.

Maybe I’ll start a little campfire in the backyard and invite over some hombres, ditch the tiki torches for some cactus and a fake mesquite plant if I can find one at Cost Plus. Then it’ll be time to chat.

C’mon, folks, let’s palaver. I promise I’ll try harder this time.

Cyst

2010-01-03T10:25:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time there was a cat. It followed me from Campbell, California, to Palo Alto, and on to San Jose. Through the shadows, across time, from zip code to zip code, it was a haunted feline that lived to torment me. For years, it went wherever I did go.

Okay, you animal lovers, yes, it was the family pet, but it sounds creepier my way, doesn’t it? Almost like a Stephen King novel. Brrrrrrrrr.

Back when this cat spent five years with Kristin and me in Palo Alto, it got into a couple of scrapes. We never knew if it was with another housecat, or perhaps a wild animal—possums were always a possibility—but Naugles (that’s the cat) required two surgeries within a matter of twelve months or so. Each cost about five hundred bucks, to remedy an abscess, back when five hundred bucks was . . . well . . . five hundred bucks.

I swore the second would be the last, and that we’d not shell out such serious money again for the cat. Lucky for Naugles, it never happened again, and she lived a good ‘nother twelve years or so. Some people think I’m coldhearted enough to have actually denied a third surgery if it had become necessary, and I’m not going to attempt to dissuade anyone of that belief.

Now in the new millennium I wish that such a procedure would only cost me five hundred bucks. It turns out that prices have gone up since 1990. Who knew?

Daughter Kelsey, a creature doubly as active as Naugles the cat, had experienced some pain in her right wrist for at least two field hockey seasons. I, of course, wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a passing ache, so I waited a couple of years before we took her to the doctor.

If only she had been the family pet rather than a human being. A scalpel and a quick, impersonal procedure would have done the trick. Instead, Kelsey was subjected to x-rays and an MRI before a ganglion cyst was diagnosed. Surgery was suggested, although I was aware of a cheaper and quicker method using a bible, dictionary, or other large book. Just smack the thing! It is supposed to work well, although the smacked ones have been known to return.

Being a human being and not one of the lower species, and with a mother who has a mothering instinct, Kelsey earned the privilege of proper medical attention. Damn the cost and full speed ahead! The bills are just beginning to arrive from the surgical center, and the doctor, and the anesthesiologist, and it appears they’ll amount to more than $500, even with an insurance policy in place. Something to do with deductibles, and patient co-pays, and fees for not reading the fine print.

But, hey, it is Kelsey. It’s okay to spend that kind of money to improve the quality of her life, right? Sure, as long as it doesn’t keep happening. I’ll have to make sure that Kelsey reads “The Story of Naugles.” Another ganglion cyst might just be her ticket to the great beyond.

While Kelsey was resting at home two days post-op—with some highly enjoyable Vicodin tablets—Kristin took the latest incarnation of the family beast to the veterinarian. Zen the dog had a small lump on her chest that had appeared a couple of months earlier. Like the humans in the house, Zen doesn’t rush to the doctor with every possible infirmity. She takes the “wait and see” approach. Or we do for her.

Do me a favor, though, and don’t point out to Kelsey that we waited two years for her wrist, because Zen only waited about four months. This is simply because we figured the vet bill would certainly be less than Kelsey’s, and the dog’s might even turn out to be elective surgery. In which case I would elect “no.”

Still, the canine lump could be cancerous or something more unpleasant and so we figured we needed to know. Kristin took the dog to the vet, where she got a ton of compliments. That is, Zen got a lot of compliments. She was eager, friendly, curious, smart, and puppyish, despite her advancing years. (Really? Almost seven years old? Does that make surgery even more optional?)

The lump also was complimented. It was small, not intrusive, and simply a fatty deposit. Nothing malignant. Liposuction was an expensive possibility, but there was no way we were going to sign up for that. Zen got a couple of shots to keep her up-to-date on her vaccinations and to make sure she doesn’t spread rabies around the neighborhood again this year.

Just kidding. She didn't spread rabies around the neighborhood last year.

It was two years ago. (Kristin asks that I point out that I am still joking; ha ha, you be the judge.)

Anyway, Zen and Kelsey are both on the mend, and under strict orders from me: no more doctor visits! Or they will quickly learn just what the American icon Sarah Palin means by “death panels.”

Mirror

2009-12-27T11:07:00.001-08:00

There are jokes that circulate through a society that most people don’t want to hear. They are cruel, or mindlessly unpleasant, or concern themselves with dead babies or Helen Keller or chickens that may or may not have crossed the road.

For example: How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her when she was bad?

They rearranged the furniture.

This is either proof of a sick society—that such a thing could even be thought of in the first place, let alone shared (in any number of joke books and Internet sites)—or, if you’d care to be less negative for just a fraction of a second, perhaps Helen’s parents were believers in feng shui and were just trying to figure out how to bring good luck to their home.

Moving the couch away from the wall, or certain potted plants to particular compass points, might improve the flow of energy, or ch’i. Sure, Helen might stumble about for a few days, but that would be a small price to pay for the universe to smile upon the Kellers and bring forth a beneficial life force. A small price, indeed, unless your name was Helen.

For thousands of years the art of placement has been followed by many people. None of those people lived in this country, because it was a superstition unique to a foreign land. It didn’t arrive in the good ol’ U. S. of A. until someone figured out how it could be marketed and sold to a group of New Agers who had tired of shamanic chants, aura photography, pyramid hats, and ear candling.

Folks jumped at the opportunity, because rearranging the furniture seemed a lot less dangerous than holding a burning candle to their ear. This feng shui business would improve their dwelling or workspace and create maximum harmony with the spiritual forces believed to influence all places.

That’s great, I suppose, if you believe in ghosts. Or making wishes on falling stars. Or planning for the great hereafter. As Artie Johnson used to say to Ruth Buzzi on TV’s Laugh-In, “Do you believe in the hereafter?”

“Of course I do,” she’d respond, quiveringly.

“Then you know what I’m here after!” He’d lunge toward her, and she’d smack him with her purse. Feminism in action. I think Ruth Buzzi has excellent ch’i. And she probably never trips over her own furniture.

It makes perfect sense to arrange the items of your home and office in a harmonious manner. If your feng shui consultant (yes, they exist) advises you to set up your living room so that you can see someone entering the room from any seated position, go ahead and do it. At the very least it will allow you to greet your visitors. Likewise, sitting with your back to your office door is silly from a practical standpoint. Who are you avoiding, besides your ch’i?

After that, you should fire your feng shui consultant, even if she is fully certified (yes, that exists as well, and is available through a Distance Learning program for only $1000, though I shudder to give you any further information for fear of advertising their silly business). If one feng shui consultant will tell you that you shouldn’t hang a mirror at the end of your foyer for fear of reflecting positive energy out of your house, and another will tell you that you definitely should hang a mirror at the end of your foyer to reflect out bad vibes, then who is right?

This is the ch’i version of determining if your glass is half full or half empty. It’s all attitude, baby. If I live in fear of my beer mug being half empty, then I no doubt think that negative energy is always following me into the house. Mirror up. If, on the other hand, I know the mug is half full (and not only that, there are still six or seven beers still in the fridge), everything is right with the world. Mirror down.

Like all superstitious beliefs, feng shui suffers from its own vagaries. Beyond where the ottoman goes, practitioners want to insure your fertility with the proper color scheme in your bedroom and to build your wealth by placing a blue rug at your front door and to help you achieve business success by fixing that broken desk drawer. Because everyone knows that no one ever got pregnant sleeping in a dirt brown room.

When the rules can’t be nailed down, you know it is most likely dishonest puffery. Despite the number of times you might hang a melting candle over your ear, bad things will still happen to you. It is called the human condition. If I trip over the furniture in the middle of the night, maybe it was placed in such a manner that evil forces are seeking to harm me. Or maybe it is the wrong color.

Or maybe, just maybe, I had too many half full mugs of beer before calling it a night.

Santa

2009-12-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

For weeks now, men of every size and hue (and some women) have been sitting in ornate chairs in the middle of shopping malls and greeting thousands of strangers as if they were glad to see them. In reality, they were not. But they had to act the part: it went along with the black boots, red suit, and snow-white beard.

Santa is always happy to see you, even if you are a tear-stained, arm-flailing, screaming toddler.

Many of the lap-sitters smile for the camera and quietly tell St. Nick of their fondest hope for the Christmas season. Perhaps it is world peace, or maybe that Daddy won’t be dipping into his secret sauce as much as he did last year. Some probably even ask for a gift, and the most astute of these new millennium greedy kids will whip out their cellular telephone to show a picture they took of that particular gift.

“I can give you the UPC if you need it,” the child says, “and the URL for the best online sites. You can probably even get free delivery if you order by the twenty-first!”

“Ho, ho, ho,” the Santa says, although it sounds rather like, “Ho, ho . . . no.”

It must be a tough job. Hours of sitting, dirty fingers clutching at your beard, children grumpy from standing in the long line. Smart mall owners (or those fearful of a lawsuit) will provide a variety of translators so that Santa doesn’t promise a cheese grater or tire chains just because he didn’t understand what the kid said.

The translators hover around the throne waiting to hear a language they understand. Then they run off to the food court during their federally mandated lunch break to scarf down deep-fried Christmas snacks. Meanwhile, Santa sits undefended, fighting the porcine scourge of the 2009 holiday season.

Yes, the swine flu.

At the same time that our fellow citizens were outraged by reports that Fortune 500 CEOs were lobbying for front-of-the-line status when it came to flu shots, conservative talk show hosts were complaining that Guantanamo Bay detainees were also in the queue before good old regular Americans. Then Kris Kringle got in on the act, in the form of the AORBS: the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas.

This very real group is proud of their membership, because these are fellows who truly could pass as St. Nick. Their beards don’t pull off, and they aren’t skinny old-timers with a couple of extra pillows stuffed under their shirts. These fellows are not just play acting; they are Santa.

As such, they have sat for years, trying to avoid the tears and the snot and the hacking coughs spewing from their littlest visitors. They have to duck and lean and dodge all manner of airborne death. As I said, they’ve been doing it for years.

Suddenly, though, swine flu threatened their very existence. If they couldn’t get the shot, the AORBS said, these jolly men wouldn’t sit at your local ShopTown Mall and let your little brats rub their sticky fingers all over them. It wasn’t just a matter of not getting sick, they also didn’t want to help spread the germs. The Christmas carols piped in through tinny speakers underneath the Santa throne might have to be rewritten. “Deck the Halls (With Purell),” or something like that.

Unfortunately the Santas have fallen prey to the scare tactics of modern medicine. The common flu kills tens of thousands of people every year, and this latest strain has killed far fewer. Yet it is hyped as a bigger threat. Instead, the AORBS should be embracing this potential epidemic with other new songs, like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Swine Flu.” Laugh in the face of danger, or something like that.

I never have had a flu shot, and I won’t this year either. I come into contact with a goodly number of students in my travels as a substitute teacher, but they don’t sit in my lap and they rarely have their fingers anywhere near my face. I don’t live in fear of the Little Contagious Drummer Boy, but apparently I might if I was a mall Santa. That, however, will have to wait until my beard is longer and whiter, and my beer gut is more prodigious.

In the meantime, if swine flu was originally transmitted from pigs to humans and now travels from mall brats to Father Christmas, maybe other species aren’t impervious. Perhaps reindeer are at risk. Maybe Rudolph’s nose isn’t red just so he can guide that sleigh that night; maybe he is infected.

Oh Cough, All Ye Faithful.

Jerk

2009-12-13T09:57:00.000-08:00

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Wait a minute, something sounds wrong there . . .

“Twas”? Really? Nobody talks that way anymore. If old movies can be colorized, and old jokes can be decreed verboten because people are becoming overly sensitive to their diminutive height, hair loss, national heritage, or skin hue, then can’t we update a Christmas classic that kids sing in classroom all over the country?

“It was the night before Christmas . . .” That works just as well, and it sounds better grammatically, which is important in these times of rapidly declining student achievement. The problems with the poem, however, don’t end there.

It gave the luster of midday to objects below. Hmm.

As far as I know, there is a Web page designed for people to find out if there are lusters living in their neighborhood. Is Santa really on the prowl for sex offenders when he is out on his appointed rounds? I don’t think so.

Assuming luster means gleam or patina and not “one who lusts,” can’t we just say shine? Luster, gleam, patina, they all the same thing, except they are not as clear as “shine.” What could be more clear than “shiny as a bald man’s forehead”? Except we can’t say “bald” anymore (see above).

“Midday” is not exactly clear either. I think it means noon, but some wiseacre over in the next humor column cubicle says that midday is between dawn and dusk, and that can range all over the clock depending on the time of year. Assuming we are speaking of December 24 (remember, ‘twas the night before Christmas), midday on the west coast of the United States would be 12:08.

That might be close to noon, but it is not noon. In other words, it twasn’t. So we ought to lose the midday and just say what time it was. It gave the shine of 12:08 p.m. to objects below. I can live with that.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot.

Really? Fur pants? I can see the hat and the coat, especially if the Great One had recently departed the chilly North Pole (where his closest neighbor is reputed to be Superman and his Fortress of Solitude), but fur pants in the lower forty-eight are just silly. Especially if the fellow wearing them is excessively jolly. That will just invite taunting.

Assuming the fabulous sled being pulled by eight flying reindeer has been upgraded in recent years, I’m sure there is a heater on board. Let’s lose the crazy pants and put on something reasonable. Dockers, for example.

And where is PETA in this whole conundrum? They should definitely be boycotting fur pants, whether it is fake fur or not. Fake fur pants are simply a gateway drug to real fur pants, especially during this time when everyone wants to feel Christmasy. PETA likes to say, “Be comfortable in your own skin; and let animals keep theirs.” They should include Santa in their recriminations.

And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.

How joyful an image! How healthful! A cloud of smoke, pumped voluminously from a stinky pipe clenched between his rosy cheeks. I can just assume that as soon as the song is over, St. Nick is coughing his lungs out through his brown teeth. As little Suzie or Jimmy wander down stairs to check on the “clatter,” they get a good five years’ worth of secondhand smoke in a matter of seconds.

Happy holidays, kids! We hope you enjoy the Christmas stench! Now, see if you can find that can of peppermint chewing tobacco that Santa left in your stocking! Speaking of stockings . . .

And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk.

Sure, in this case “jerk” means yank, or jolt, or twitch. All of you old people get it, but try reading the poem to a classroom full of prepubescent pupils. I did recently. As soon as I said, “then turned with a jerk” half the class started yelling at me.

“You said a bad word!”

“You mean ‘jerk’? Give me a break, kids, it’s just a stupid poem.”

“Ooh, I’m telling Miss Perkins. You said the s-word.”

I was certain I had done no such thing, until they informed me that “stupid” is the new s-word. The other s-word is too common in the movies and videogames that even the youngest children see that it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow anymore. But say “stupid” and you are suddenly the Anti-Santa.

Or “jerk.” You can’t say that at school anymore either. Unless you are talking about a substitute teacher. I have been called Grinch, and I have been called Scrooge.

But I believe this was the first time I was called a Christmas Jerk.

Rear

2009-12-12T14:16:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of parking lots in the world. Environmentalist wackos like to decry the number of cars polluting the planet, and goodness knows the house next door to me has about eight vehicles and only three licensed drivers, but just imagine how this extrapolates to parking lots.

All of the cars on the planet aren’t being used at any given moment, but spots have to be available in front of every convenience store, exercise center, or proctologist’s office for anybody who might drive up. That’s a lot of asphalt. Wide open and ready for use. If only someone would drive in.

For some reason, I find myself in a lot of parking lots. I might be taking a short cut on one of my runs, or I might just be looking for dropped coins, but as I stand there I think, “Hmm, what a waste of land” and I think, “Hmm, what’s with those folks who don’t know how to park properly?”

Whether the lot is full or not, I can always find some vehicles that aren’t parked nose in. You know, the way the rest of us park. There is an unwritten social contract that says we all park the same way: headlights facing front, blinding the old geezer reaching for the gearshift in his own car.

In some cases the social contract isn’t unwritten. To stem the tide of these ne’er-do-wells, some small and private lots post un-unwritten rules. “Please park forward.” That’s the nice one. “Do not back in.” That’s the one for when nice just doesn’t cut it. There is a reason such a request, whether it is cute and informal or brisk and direct, is made. That reason is “a friend of mine.”

I had a friend a while back who always used to park his van backwards in parking lots, and even on his own driveway. It took him slightly longer to park, what with the three-point turn and having to carefully navigate in reverse between other vehicles, but his departures were much quicker than those of us who had to back out.

He could just floor the gas pedal and turn the wheel. It made escapes much easier, which is possibly why he did it. He had a lifestyle, which, shall we say, obligated him to be able to flee at a moment’s notice.

Those who might have been after him are the same who also park rear-in when they take a short break to buy doughnuts and coffee. Every police car I see in front of a convenience store or pastry shop is always parked nose-out. That’s when it hit me: it was either to aid in fleeing, or in pursuing. The fugitive needs an easy out, and the hunter needs to be able to quickly follow. The rest of us ease into our slot and then carefully back up later after the proctologist declares us fit and healthy.

Backing out of a parking space certainly takes care, but it seems harder to back in. You have to crank your head around until it is ready to spin off your shoulders, and the tires that are leading the vehicle aren’t the ones that turn. That makes it more problematic.

Because it is more difficult, it takes more time, and every time someone is trying to back into a spot in a crowded parking lot, traffic begins to back up. That’s why we have the social contract. If the traffic flow is messed up, it leads to flaring tempers, and the world ends in a fiery rain of anger.

I can’t see going to all that trouble. We all should do whatever we can to prevent the world from ending in an angry rain of fire.

Better everyone just stops parking backwards. Granted that police officers should be allowed to back in whenever they are on duty—lest they arrive late to the scene of the crime—they shouldn’t do it out of habit in their private vehicles. Likewise, criminals shouldn't park that way because now, with no one else doing it, their getaway car will stick out like a sore thumb.

The obvious nature of their criminal enterprise will be further exacerbated by them running around, guns drawn, with alarms blaring behind them. They need a better getaway plan than simply the rear-parked car.

If you, or someone you know, need to discuss options for fleeing, you should talk to my old friend. Just call ahead to make sure the facility isn’t in lockdown.

And only use his ideas that were successful.

Fake

2009-12-06T09:34:00.000-08:00

If the name Ron Popeil sounds familiar to you, it is probably because at some point in the past you have purchased one or more of his products. Chop-o-matic. Inside-the-Egg Scrambler. Showtime Rotisserie. And don’t tell me you’ve seen him on TV but never called the 800 number. I know there is a Pocket Fisherman somewhere in one of your closets, you just don’t want to admit it.

Another of his infomercials offered GLH-9, otherwise known as Great Looking Hair Formula #9. This was, in essence, spray paint for your head. It may have been nutty, it may have been ludicrous, but it made the man some serious money. I don’t know if the stories of gunk running down from hairlines during strong winter storms are true, but if mascara runs when the ladies cry, why wouldn’t hair thickener?

The garden equivalent of GLH-9 has now been unleashed on the world. There are companies offering to come and paint your yard, either to improve the home’s curb appeal while it is for sale, or to cut down on your watering bill. Or just because you like to be the first person on your block to do something stupid.

It seems to me most lawns that would qualify for a nice coat of paint probably front a home in a similar state of neglect. If the porch is piled with faded newspapers, and the front door handle has one of those jumbo realtor lock safes and several pizza ads attached, and a curtain is blowing out of an upstairs bedroom window accidentally left open when the family secretly vacated the premises in the middle of the night several months earlier, then I’m thinking a new coat of Behr’s Lustrous Emerald is going to look rather ridiculous.

The theory of making your home look as presentable as possible when trying to sell it makes sense. Picking up the toys, doing the dishes, making sure the men and boys in the house haven’t completely fouled the area in and around the toilet—these are easy, cheap, and logical. The fact that this practice has morphed into an entire home staging industry is surprising.

That it has now reached the point that we are considering painting lawns is madness.

I know people who dye their hair (dye—not spray paint). I have heard some of them say “this is the last time,” generally when they are trying to bridge the gap between years of dye jobs and a coming out of their glorious elder gray. Every time the roots start to show, though, they rush back for auburn highlights, unwilling to suffer through the inevitable transformation.

Here’s the thing: you’re not fooling anyone. Same with a bad toupee, too tight clothes, or teeth so white and straight that they look they were chiseled off a marble statue. Real life ain’t so perfect. It has rough edges, imperfections . . . and brown lawns when no one is watering.

The same thing would happen outside your front door. If the grass needs to be painted twice a year at a cost of up to $500, are you really saving any money? And if you have only “cut back” on your watering, aren’t you still encouraging its growth, and, therefore, its roots to show?

I thought the fake lawn had hit its low point years ago with Astroturf. For sport fields I can understand it, but it makes no sense at home. Despite the protestations of synthetic lawn proponents, I know it is ridiculous, because the vast majority of people won’t do it. And by “vast” I mean so many people that I might as well say “everyone.” Doesn’t matter how brown their lawns are or how high their water bill goes, plastic grass just doesn’t cut it at home.

This newest debacle will surely fade, no matter how they try to pitch it. First it was to help improve the fading beauty of foreclosed properties, but it wasn’t a huge hit, plus foreclosures inevitably decreased. So now it is marketed to citizens in the midst of a drought.

It still won’t sell.

Would a homebuyer prefer to see an abandoned and foreclosed property with a perfectly manicured and beautiful lawn? Or would that give them something to worry about? Who’s been taking care of it? Squatters? Maybe the green paint running across the sidewalk after a light rain is the clue.

“They painted their lawn?” the potential buyer says. “What, they think we’re idiots?” And off they go to look at another house.

Pretty soon some knucklehead so-called entrepreneur will suggest painting backyard patios blue and calling them swimming pools.

And bigger knuckleheads will actually do it.

Tree

2009-12-06T09:33:00.000-08:00

Last year we had a Christmas tree in the house, after several years of not. Actually, some of those several years we had alternatrees that did not suit the needs of three children. Sure, they want to be all grown up and have driver licenses and are practically ready to move out on their own if you asked them, but send around the holidays and they clam up their cries for independence and want instead presents and trees and stockings-full.

One year our untree was made from backyard scraps. I had some extra PVC pipe from a sprinkler project and I decided to build our own Christmas tree. It was more or less a pipe pyramid, with holes drilled along the tubes to hang ornaments. Lights were strung across and around, and it lit up just like any other Christmas trees. The kids demanded that it never come back.

Then there was the year we inherited a twelve-inch potted tree. We placed it on one of the stereo speakers and hung all the ornaments it could hold: about three. It was a legitimate Christmas tree, but would be better served in the land of midgets. The kids said they should be able to gather around our Christmas tree and look up in wonder. Not down.

I think it ended up in the trash.

There have even been a couple of years with no tree at all, real or alternate. Blame my frugality, or the misguided notion that it is cruel and unusual punishment to the tree. When you stop having a tree, the pattern ingrains. Last year’s tree almost broke the trend, but it was a fake tree we inherited from a friend. It had built in lights, went together fairly easily, and looked great. But the damned thing weighed a ton! Where was I going to keep it the other forty-eight weeks of the year?

So I found a great place to store it: the Salvation Army. Now it is in the way at someone else’s house.

This year there was again a debate about getting a tree. I was told that Kate was going away to college next year, that the house would smell great, that darn it the kids just wanted one! The kids, the kids, it’s all about the kids! It also ended up being all about the fact that it was four to one in favor of getting a tree. I was the lone dissenting opinion.

What a surprise. I lost.

We were thinking of going up in the hills to cut one down as we had in earlier years when the kids were much smaller (and when a Christmas tree made more sense, but I have to whisper this or I’ll get in trouble all over again with the family). I had done the same with my family when I was a kid. Christmas tree farms are plentiful in the mountains surrounding the Bay Area: all you have to do is drive along their pitted, alignment-jarring roads, grab a long-handled saw, and murder the tree of your choice. It is a lovely holiday tradition.

For those clamoring for a tree, all I asked was that it be a family trip, so that we could spend time together crammed into the car, whining about whose foot was in who’s space and can’t you just scoot over a little bit? You all want a tree? FINE! Get in the car and be quiet!

I don’t know what I was thinking. Why would I torture myself that way?

Instead we opted for a lovely specimen retrieved from the jolly holiday Home Depot parking lot. It worked out perfectly because Kelsey was practicing her driving skills in anticipation of her upcoming test and Kristin was in the car with her. Kristin was the real ringleader in the coup to get a tree, so I said, “Go, get a tree, have fun!”

They were driving down the road and saw the sign for cheap trees, and without causing an accident Kelsey made a legal left turn and parked mostly straight. Now the tree is in the house, and even I can admit it looks splendid. I had to do very little, nothing more than hold it straight while the kids screwed the clamps directly into its soft pulp.

Say, was that the sound of a tree screaming? Oh well, who cares, there’s is a nice pine aroma in the living room, glittering lights and shiny ornaments are festive and pretty, who cares if the decorated thing is dying. We can mask its pain with another decorative strand of tinsel. We can drown out its cries for help by singing the Christmas carols a little louder.

“O CHRISTMAS TREE, O CHRISTMAS TREE . . .” they yelled.

“Hey, maybe we should pick a different song,” I said.

Pine needles are strewn from one end of the house to the other, compliments of the dog, and we are on constant fire alert. “Did you water the tree?” “Who watered the tree?” “Does the tree have water?” I figure if the tree goes up in flames we can just borrow some chestnuts from whichever nutty neighbor would have some, and we can roast, roast, roast away!

Open fire, indeed.

Tissue

2009-12-03T22:10:00.001-08:00

There are some awfully confusing signs during the teenaged years of the common American. Are you getting the sign to give a kiss at the end of the date, or are you getting the brush off? Do your friends like you because you are strong, or funny, or because you have the keys to your dad’s liquor cabinet?

In my house we debate whether having your house toilet papered is a sign of respect or the very opposite of respect. Otherwise known as disrespect. When I was a kid it was a sign of popularity. No one would spend the time and money festooning someone else’s front yard with strands of toilet tissue unless they liked the victim.

Kristin recalls that it was more of an insult, as in “normally I’d use this to wipe my backside, but tonight I’d rather scatter it willy-nilly amongst your foliage.” Though I doubt such hooligans actually used the word “foliage.” And since Kristin hearkens from very near the hill country of North Carolina, the youth there could be forgiven their ignorance of whether respect is good or the opposite of respect is good. They were probably too busy hunting for ingredients for that evening’s road-kill chili to attend school.

Our house was egged a year ago (yes, I am pretty sure an egg bombardment is not meant as a compliment) but we had thus far been able to escape the toilet papering. Until this summer.

I was going to bed one evening when one daughter or the other received an alarming call on her cellular telephone. A friend of hers had noted something odd going on around our property as he drove by, so he called to report it. (Why didn’t he just stop and intercede? I dunno. I asked the same question, and got no answer.)

There is, of course, no logical reason that he should be driving right there, right then, but such is the logic of teenagers. It was all just a big cowinky-dink, they both said, and they swear so to this very day.

I was much more interested in going to bed, but I decided to check the perimeter of the house, just to make sure we were all safe and sound. The friend had no details other than “shadowy figures.” The dog hadn’t gone crazy, as she does when she smells or hears or psychically intuits ne’er-do-wells on the premises, so I expected to find nothing before heading quickly to my slumber.

On the front porch I immediately identified strands of flowing white tissue draped across the yard and could tell that we had been papered. No worries, I thought, it’s a compliment. It only happens to popular people. I thought about which one of my friends might have done it.

Then I realized I wasn’t seventeen anymore. It had nothing to do with me. Someone who knows one or more of my children had pilfered the rolls from their own house and proceeded to decorate mine. In honor of one of the three youngest Baxters. For a moment I was proud.

Then I went to clean it up, and I saw what a terrible job they had done. It was really embarrassing, how poor their efforts were.

It’s true that we didn’t really give much for the offending morons to work with. The front tree was replaced a few years ago with a lovely maple Autumn Blaze that still doesn’t stand tall enough to serve such a thrashing. The only other front yard tree, at the end of the driveway, was chainsawed to a height of three feet just last year.

That doesn’t leave much, does it? The large oleander took the brunt of the damage, but it was cleaned up in about thirty seconds. Some was scattered over small bushes but it was really a pathetic effort. There were two benches they could have covered, and the basketball hoop was completely ignored. Bad, really bad, boys and girls. Next time, try a little harder, eh?

When the neighbors woke the next morning there was really nothing different about the Baxter property. The yard was still yellow and weedy like it had been one day earlier. I missed one two-foot strip at the top of the oleander but that was gone as soon as I saw it in the light of day.

As the so-called victim of this crime, let me simply say that it was much easier to clean up than the egging of twelve months or so ago. Thank you, boys and girls, for using a paper product rather than a protein-based food. I really appreciate it. But it doesn’t make up for the poor quality of your work.

In the final analysis, because I was outside shortly after the aerial assault ended, I gained four rolls of only partially used toilet paper that the youthful hooligans were nice enough to leave on my front lawn. They couldn’t even be bothered to use up their supplies. No one else in the house had any interest in using the free toilet paper, but I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Seriously, the unrolled parts weren’t wet at all! Or dirty!

Everything worked out in the end, except I wonder if the lackadaisical manner in which the hoodlums approached this “job” is indicative of their future performance for the employer foolish enough to hire them.

Host

2009-12-02T06:45:00.000-08:00

Let me preface this wordy bit of self-denigration by insisting that I am not utterly devoid of basic social skills—I just keep them well hidden. I don’t engage in friendly banter, I ignore the proper utensil order when setting the table (but hey, I am setting the table for goodness sake!), and I couldn't care less if I’m caught wearing pink after Labor Day. Or whichever color is verboten.

Kristin doesn’t have these problems. She is not obsessed with the formality of proper behavior, but she can toe the line and behave in an appropriately grown-up manner when necessary. This might stem from the fact that she was nearly a debutante during her upbringing in North Carolina. She escaped, however, to California and saved herself that ignominy.

Whenever visitors descend on our house, therefore, Kristin is the designated host. She can greet with a smile (I do not) and effortlessly relieve the intruders, I mean guests, of their burdensome purses and jackets (I will not). Kristin can also provide a refreshing beverage without even asking what they’d like—she’s that good.

I’ll point out the kitchen faucet and assume the guests can find the nearby drinking glasses. That is, if I have even bothered to look up from whatever I am reading on the couch. It’s not so much disinterest as it is a lack of interest.

The most recent social event at our house was comprised of thirty teenaged girls, blowing in from the nearby high school for a pre-game pasta dinner and taking over my house in a loud and teenaged fashion.

It was “pre-game” by about twenty-four hours. The field hockey game was the next day, but the girls often gather one day prior for a team-building meal. This started out several years ago as pasta dinners—probably because it was cost effective—but have morphed into whatever the host-daughter can convince her parents to provide.

Kelsey (defender and occasional goalie) wanted me to barbecue burgers this time. It had everything: the party atmosphere of grilled meat; not the regular boring food; and me cooking in the backyard (in other words, out of the house). The latter was important to help make the evening more enjoyable for everyone.

This was no assembly line, “you’ll get it like I like it,” meal. I have served those to my own children for the better part of two decades. Doing that in this instance would have resulted in thirty-plus burgers with mustard and onion and nothing else, and plenty of disgruntled girls with strong arms and long sticks ready to do me damage if I didn’t become a little more flexible.

Kelsey made sure I had a couple of vegetarian patties available, and even a few hot dogs. There were condiments galore, cheese if you please, and various vegetables (lettuce, tomato, onion) that I knew would go mostly unused.

Never fear: they would be Kelsey’s dinner salad the next night.

The grilling started off reasonably well before the players arrived, and while it never really went out of control, it most definitely toyed with the idea for a while. I cooked more meat than this at any given dinner service back when I worked at Burger Pit, but I was dealing with a much smaller work area in the backyard, and possibly more flammable food.

Apparently thirty individual hamburger patties, each comprised of roughly 83% real meat, drop a tremendous amount of melting fat on the flames beneath. This only angered the flames, which rose high to melt even more fat and perhaps even remove my eyebrows if I was standing too close. At one point I was disoriented by the smoke, and the flames reached out to grab my best spatula. I rescued it in the nick of time.

Despite the fact that I had been banished to the backyard to be away from the crowd, the party slowly moved toward me. The girls were sitting on the ground and chatting over snacks, though I know some were watching me trying to beat back the inferno. They were probably worried about their meal, and quite possibly I had become the evening’s entertainment.

In the final analysis, the only charred meat was served on my own dinner plate, and the guests were all satisfied. When the gas was finally shut off, I was left on my own. Kristin took care of whatever else came up, with assistance from Kelsey. Like a flock of birds, the team departed in a mad rush, just as they had arrived.

They were all appreciative and called out “Thanks!” on the way through the front door. I waved and left them alone, because I didn’t belong at the center of the evening’s festivities. I belonged behind the scenes, especially as this was rather a rather large party. Quick, but large. My hosting skills have atrophied, although I can imagine this possibility:

“Baxter, party of one?” Now that’s a party I could host.

Friday

2009-11-29T19:23:00.001-08:00

A horde descended on places of commerce recently, and though it wasn’t a plague of locusts or an invasion of zombies, it was no less destructive. Those who survived congratulated themselves on surviving, and also for finding seventy percent off deals that would be the envy of their friends (unless those friends got seventy-five percent off elsewhere).

In the wake of the event were store shelves torn from their moorings, disheveled stacks of slacks and sweaters, minor flesh wounds such as dislocated digits caused by tug-‘o-wars for electronic gizmos, and an abundance of lessons for the younger citizens on how not to behave. Watch the news tonight, kids, maybe you’ll see mama fighting for your Christmas gifts. I loooooove this time of year!

Welcome to the world of competitive shopping.

The term Black Friday has multiple origins, but nowadays it refers primarily to the kickoff to the Christmas shopping season. Stores used to mail print ads to bring shoppers out the day after Thanksgiving, and everything was going along normally, even in the midst of the capitalist machine.

Then, it went nuts. Stores started offering bigger discounts and nuttier hours. It wasn’t only a competition for those spending money they didn’t have, it became a rivalry between Toys R Dust and Best Byze. If one opened their doors at six a.m., another tried five. Four o’clock in the morning wasn’t unheard of, and was only surpassed by those willing to welcome customers at midnight before the turkey dinner was even digested.

Experts say this doesn’t increase sales, but it certainly makes for excitement. It shouldn’t be newsworthy, and yet there are the reporters and the cameras and, sadly, the coroners. On Black Friday ‘08, one unfortunate fellow was trampled in New York by a mob trying to enter a store where he was working, and two idiots shot themselves to death in California outside a store after fighting inside.

Okay, argue with me that the California lunacy wasn’t directly related to Black Friday, but hey, they were out in the crowded store, where stress was on sale right next to Disney Monopoly and cable knit sweaters. It could not have helped their mood. And you know, they might have been fighting over Transformer action figures. So there you go.

I deplore the mass hysteria and blame everyone involved, from the stores ill-equipped to deal with large crowds to the individuals who, together, become the large crowds, but I realize that the mass of people out shopping last Friday did so without calamity. Parking was difficult, lines were long, and frustration was likely simmering, but most shoppers probably expected it and dealt with it in an appropriate manner.

My son was out at midnight, with a friend who had money to spend. Kyle was low on funds, so he was just along for the ride. When he got home in the morning, he went to bed. Everything worked out. I stayed at home all day, didn’t spend a dime on anything, and everything worked out for me as well.

So next year, let the eager beavers rush out and spend their time and money as they see fit. Let the stores open early if they can find employees willing to work. And let us all keep our heads. Black Friday will always come to an end, and the TV economists will debate if it was a strong indicator for the retail sector, and I will still stay at home.

I have found a different event to celebrate for Turkey Day Friday, and that is called Buy Nothing Day. Proponents don’t advocate the end of the consumption-based economy, but they do say, “Hey, give yourself a break, don’t spend anything today and see how you feel!” To some degree it makes sense, because you do get to avoid a certain amount of the madness.

But my brother has a point when he says that folks on either side of the spectrum—to buy nothing or to buy everything in sight—are bombastic when they complain about their opposites. It is possible to be unpleasantly dogmatic about your position, and to skip over that whole “live and let live” philosophy. Which is odd in this supposed festive time of year.

To mock the housebound when standing in the checkout line, or to rant at the TV images of Black Friday shoppers from the comfort of your own home, is the same unpleasantness.

Either way, you destroy your soul in the process.

Line

2009-11-27T13:04:00.001-08:00

I used to be one of those people who jockeys for the “best” checkout line at the grocery store. I would approach stealthily, counting the heads I could see above the candy racks, but checking for short customers as well. It’s often the short ones that get you to commit to an aisle before you see them.

If the conveyor belt had a lot of little items on it, that would be a bad aisle. Loaded with larger items (24-pack toilet tissue, large bags of dog food, or, my personal favorite, cases of beer) I knew that the clerk would be able to move it along quickly. It was amazing how much time I would spend analyzing such a small part of my daily existence.

Now I’m a little more relaxed. I don’t purposely aim for the aisle with the doddering or chatty clerk who will slow everything down, or the customer who doesn't begin rummaging through his or her purse or pocket for the debit card until after the grand total is announced . . . I’m not a masochist.

But I pick an aisle and go with the flow. No switching to what appears to be greener pastures once I’ve committed. If things slow down I’ll just read the covers of the silly newspapers and magazines in the racks. Or I’ll wonder how they can charge a buck ninety-nine for my beloved Reese’s peanut butter cup two-pack.

I was subbing in a kindergarten class recently that reminded me of the grocery line competition that we all go through. Really. Bear with me for a moment. As we approached the cafeteria at lunchtime we found a conundrum worthy of the most impacted register at the local Safeway (or Raley’s, or Whole Foods, or the regional food store of your choice). The line was long and it wasn’t moving. There were no options in this, the only, hot lunch line. Trying to move around a slower moving class would have just been rude.

It was the first day of a new ID card system, where the students were expected to walk up to a large display and promptly find their card amongst hundreds. Fact 1: the cards were not grouped logically by class. Fact 2: the font used for the students’ names was tiny. Fact 3: these were five-year-olds I was trying to help. Fact 4: I was the last of four kindergarten classes to get in the line.

Final outcome, half our lunch period was spent waiting in line. Just like when I show up at the store at 5 p.m. to buy a carton of milk and some apples (okay, a six-pack of beer and a box of Bagel Bites) and everyone else has a cart full of a week’s worth of groceries.

On the positive side, by the time we got to the board many of the cards were already taken, so it was a little quicker for us. Still, the pupils were quite antsy. I wondered briefly if these small citizens would be the ones to grow up and bollix up the lines at my neighborhood grocery. We may have been teaching math and reading in class that day, but we certainly weren’t educating them on effective line management skills.

That sub assignment was exasperating, at least during lunch. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I did a four-day stint in 7th and 8th grade P.E. Those kids don’t even know the meaning of the word line. We tried to line up to take attendance but they hovered around like drunken bees. Every time I got eight or ten to stand still, eight or ten others would flit about with their friends.

“Line up!” I’d yell again. Some smart aleck would point out that they are each supposed to stand on one of forty numbers that were laid out in a five by eight grid on the black top. “Fine,” I’d say. “Number up!”

“Number up?” several muttered. Others were tiring and began sitting on their numbers.

“Stand up!” Complaints came from every corner, except for those pupils who had already wandered off. I’d lost control. Line up, number up, stand up, none of it was working, so I went with my standard response. The one that indicates I have lost all control.

“Shut up!”

They hadn’t lined, numbered, or stood, so of course they didn’t shut either. Finally, I did what any self-respecting substitute teacher would do: I handed the roster to a future Employee of the Month grocery store clerk and asked her to mark down anyone she couldn’t see.

She would learn some valuable inventory skills, and the knuckleheads would get some practice lining up for detention.