Where the wild things are

The family had a big day of animal watching Tuesday. We went to the Atlanta Zoo, and the Georgia Aquarium, and we went to the Atlantic Station shopping area, where there were a lot of LSU football fans walking around.

The big attraction at the zoo continues to be the pandas. We could hardly get into the viewing area because it was packed with people who wanted to catch a glimpse of the new baby panda. It was panda-monium!

(I apologize for that.)

Ling Ling or Ying Yang or whatever her name is didn’t bring the baby out, but they have a camera set up so you could see her dragging the little furball around backstage. At one point she had the baby in her mouth and I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if she ate it? They do that, you know.”

That earned me a couple of dirty looks from the moms who were nearby. Well, I thought it was funny.

I don’t really get the big whoop about the pandas. I guess they’re cute enough, but so is Lucky, and nobody comes to my backyard to see her. All they do is lie around, eat, and scratch themselves regularly. That’s exactly what Lucky does most of the time. Matter of fact, it’s exactly what I do most weekends.

In truth, most of the zoo animals seem kind of lazy. This is what happens when they have humans supplying all their food. I think it would really spice up the lion exhibit, for example, if they’d throw a wildebeest or gazelle in there once in a while.

Otherwise, there’s just not a lot of animal activity going on in the zoo. I saw a monkey pick something out of another’s butt and eat it. One of the kangaroos actually stood up and I thought maybe he was going to jump or shadowbox or something, but instead he looked right at me and dropped a load. Then he lay back down.

One exception to the lazy animal rule is the tigers. They stalk back and forth in their little enclosure, and every now and then one of them would catch my eye, and I just know he was thinking, “Dude, if I could get out of this cage for five minutes, there’d be nothing left of you but a greasy spot.” I don’t taunt the tigers.

Then it was off to the aquarium. They were having some sort of event for the Chick-fil-A Bowl, so there were a lot of Georgia Tech and LSU fans walking around. The Tech fans are easy to notice, cause their yellow sweaters and sweatshirts smell like mothballs.

The aquarium was about what I thought it would be – lots of fish, swimming in circles. The penguin exhibit was closed, which I found very disappointing. On the brochure they give you when you come in, it actually says “no fishing poles allowed.” I guess that was aimed at the LSU people.

I think I embarrassed my family a little bit when we got to the aquarium. We had pulled into the parking deck, and suddenly we had to stop behind a line of cars for no obvious reason. Then I figured out that some doofus was waiting for somebody to get in their car and pull out so he could get their spot. Keep in mind, on the next level, there were probably a thousand empty spaces.

But this guy was hell-bent on parking in this one spot. So we waited while the people walked to their car, got their kids out of the strollers, loaded everything up, put the kids in the car seats, etc. Meanwhile, there was a backup behind me that extended back out into the street. Finally the space opens up, and the guy, no doubt a Tech fan, pulled into his precious spot.

So as we went past him, and I rolled down my window and asked him, “Sir, are you retarded?” I didn’t hear his answer, but immediately afterward, I felt really bad about it and ashamed of myself, because I realize we’re not supposed to use the word “retarded” any more. If I had it to do over again, I would say, “Sir, are you mildly mentally disabled?”

See, I can be nice when I want to be.

I hereby resolve to....

Christmas Day has come and gone. As Steve Goodman once sang, broken toys and faded colors are all that’s left to linger on.

That and the 5 pounds or so I’ve put on in the past two weeks.

The period between Christmas and New Year’s is a strange time. There’s something of a letdown, but you’re still in holiday mode. I’m not going back to work until January 2, but I don’t have any idea what to do with all of the free time between now and then.

I suppose I could start working on losing some of that extra holiday weight, but come on. Everybody knows that you don’t begin any sort of weight-loss program or self-improvement project until January 2. That’s the first official day of New Year’s resolution-following. Maybe technically you’re supposed to begin on New Year’s Day itself, but don’t be ridiculous. There are football games on ALL DAY.

I make resolutions every year, and I swear it’s with good intentions. I do the usual ones – I need to exercise more, write more, lose weight, read more, pretend to like people more, kiss more behinds at work so I can get a minimal promotion and move into an even more soul-killing job.

A lot of people make similar resolutions. Have you ever been in a gym the first two weeks of the year? It’s amateur hour in there. You have to stand in line to use the equipment because there are so many people who have gotten religion and decided to start working out. But by the time MLK Day rolls around, it’s back to normal.

Some years I just make one resolution, but I make it a big one, and I try to make sure I achieve it. One year it was to run a marathon; another year, it was to finally finish my novel. Another time, it was to start a band.

I don’t want to run another marathon, and I certainly don’t want the headache of having a band again. So maybe I will write another novel. Or perhaps a screenplay. How hard can that be? Have you seen a movie lately? There’s not a lot of effort going into those screenplays. It took about, what, 20 years to make that last Indiana Jones movie, and it was terrible.

Maybe I should make a more realistic resolution, like finally getting my torn rotator cuff repaired. But that’s hardly something to look forward to. And it’s not really an accomplishment. And I flat-out don’t want to do it. It only hurts about 75 percent of the time, anyway. I can take it. What am I, a wimp?

Well, whatever I decide to resolve, I promise I will do my best to live up to my pledges. And I absolutely am going to start eating better and getting some weight off me. Later, I mean. Right now, some pecan pie is calling me from the kitchen.

Away in a manger

My Christmas acting career took an unexpected turn for the worse Sunday night at church.

We were doing a cantata, and it incorporated some of the characters from the live nativity the week before. Well, I had done a star turn as Thomas the shepherd, but then I learned that the shepherds were expected to do a dance number in the cantata, and I don’t dance. I’ve always said that if you ever see me dancing, smoking a cigar or eating jalapeno peppers, it’s time to take me home. I’ve had too much eggnog.

So I traded roles with a guy who was playing Joseph, because he wanted to dance, and all Joseph had to do was walk down the aisle with Mary, and sit there the whole time looking at the baby Jesus. This I could handle.

I wasn’t sure how to play Joseph. Did I go with a brooding, dangerous James Dean portrayal? Or maybe a quiet, strong Clint Eastwood type. Or perhaps I’d play him as a young Brando would, bristling with energy and nervous tension.

In the end, I didn’t give it much thought. I didn’t even go to the dress rehearsal. How hard can it be to walk in, sit down, and do nothing? I do that at work all the time.

The cantata started, and Mary and I began our walk down the aisle to the makeshift manger scene in the front of the church. Mary was a little young for me – maybe 15 or 16 – but since it’s a virgin birth, I didn’t feel that bad about it.

We got down to the front of the church, and Mary reached into the crib there to get the baby Jesus – and he wasn’t there. She fumbled around in the blankets for a while, but she came up empty. She looked at me with pleading eyes, and I whispered to her that she should just pick up the blankets and pretend there was a baby there. Nobody would ever know.

So that’s what she did. We sat down on chairs that were pushed together and covered by a blanket, so that it looked like a bench, and we pretended to look in awe at our imaginary Baby Jesus. It wasn’t a real comfortable seat – it was kind of lumpy – but I figured it would be over soon, and I could handle it.

After a minute or so, I noticed that Mary was looking at someone in the congregation, and then she turned to me in wide-eyed panic. She said something that I didn’t catch, so I leaned in closer and asked her to repeat it, and she said, “You’re sitting on it.”

Well, there you have it. I was sitting on the Baby Jesus. If I ever appear at the gates of heaven on Judgment Day, I may have some things to answer for, but I suspect this one’s going to top them all.

There was nothing to do then, really, but to stand up casually, and let Mary rescue the baby Jesus from under my buttocks, which she did. Thank goodness we didn’t use a real baby, like they do in some pageants.

Mary and I hoped nobody would notice what had happened, and that they would be caught up in the beautiful songs and the little kids dressed as angels and the whole spirit of Christmas, and the whole incident would be forgotten.

Then afterward, one guy comes up to me and says, “Way to pull out one out of your ass.” Another said, “You’re the guy who hatched Jesus.”

I suspect this incident will haunt me for the rest of my days at this church. No matter how much work I do or how many plays I’m in or how much money I give, I’ll always be the guy who sat on Jesus. Somebody pass the eggnog.

PLEASE DON'T DELETE

A pretty funny thing happened in my office Friday.

No, nobody got drunk at a Christmas party and Xeroxed their privates. I don’t work in that kind of place, sadly.

What happened was, some moron came across one of those chain e-mails. This one has been around for a long time, claiming that for every person you forward it to, Microsoft and AOL will send you money. Now, anybody with even one operable brain cell realizes this is a scam. It has been around for more than 10 years . Even Florida fans don’t fall for this one.

And yet, sure enough, this idiot figures, hey, what the heck? What can it hurt just to forward an e-mail? Maybe I really can get rich this way. After all, it says right there in the e-mail, “This really works.”

So, he forwards the e-mail along. Not to a few friends and family and co-workers. Oh, no. He apparently sent it to every employee in my company. That’s more than 20,000 people.

OK, that was dumb enough, but not that big of a deal. Everybody just had to delete his stupid e-mail and move on, right? But oh, no, nothing is that simple. Instead, his e-mail begat a flood of stupidity that kept some of us entertained all day long.

If you work in a company of any size, then you’ve had to deal with people who don’t understand how to use the “reply to all” feature. You know, somebody will send an e-mail to a large group about something, and somebody will send back what they think is a witty reply, but they send it to the whole group, and somebody else joins in, and before you know it there are 50 pointless e-mails in your inbox. This should be a death penalty offense.

So when an e-mail goes to 20,000 people, it’s really a bad idea to “reply to all.” But that didn’t stop folks at my company. At first, three or four people wrote to let us all know that this e-mail was a hoax, don’t fall for it. Really? What are you going to tell me next? There’s no Easter Bunny?

Then, there began a spate of people who were so irritated that people were replying to all, that they were moved to reply to all, saying “please stop replying to all.” Some were kind of nasty about it – “STOP WASTING MY TIME.” Some replied to all, threatening to report those people who were replying to all. One guy wrote 3 or 4 sentences detailing how he was too busy and had too much to do to be deleting these e-mails, so stop sending them. I figured you could delete 5,000 e-mails in the time it took him to write that.

It finally slowed down a little bit. Our IT department had to send out an e-mail that told everyone to never forward an e-mail like that to the WHOLE FREAKING COMPANY (I paraphrased that a bit), and to please stop replying to all. But a few people kept doing it anyway.

The funny thing is, it happened on a Friday afternoon just before Christmas week, and a lot of people weren’t even at work. Some won’t even be back until after the New Year. Imagine the surprises their in-boxes are going to hold.

Did I mention the guy sent the initial e-mail to every single executive in the company as well, including the CEO? I don’t know what’s going to happen to him, but perhaps he should be hoping Santa brings him a new job this Christmas.

In the spirit

I have done a few things this week to get me into the Christmas spirit. Perhaps eventually I’ll go try and buy some presents.

First, I was a shepherd in my church’s living nativity play. I guided people through the streets of Bethlehem until we came upon the baby Jesus. I had several lines, and I mostly remembered them. It was one of my best acting jobs. There’s some early Oscar buzz about my performance. Or maybe Tony buzz, since it wasn’t a movie, though some people did bring along their video cameras.

It was my first performance in a Christmas play since I was about 4 years old and going to the Nazarene Church in Griffin, Ga. We all had to wear little costumes and recite Bible verses, but I was having trouble with mine.

Now, a popular song at the time was “Harper Valley PTA,” which was pretty racy for 1968. I used to entertain my aunts and uncles by singing along every word. I couldn’t memorize that little Bible verse, but I had “Harper Valley PTA” down pat.

As I heard my mother re-tell the story years later, my big moment came in the pageant, and I froze. Apparently I couldn’t recall my verse. So I said “I can’t remember what I was supposed to say so I’m going to sing a song.”

My mother, of course, was mortified, as I began to sing that song. I believe somebody got me off the stage before I could get to the part about the man having sex with his secretary, but the damage was done.

The second Christmasy-thing I did this year was to work at the Empty Stocking Fund, helping to pass out presents to the parents of the poor chilluns. No matter how I feel about how some of their parents have gotten to this situation, in the end, it’s not the children’s fault.

We finally decorated our tree a couple of days ago, and threw some Christmas lights up on the trees and bushes out front of the house in the tackiest way possible. We always cut our tree down from a tree farm, and a large portion of the ornaments are homemade by the kids. We came across a Michael Vick ornament my son had bought a few years ago, but we didn’t put it on the tree. We threw it out back for Lucky to play with.

Thanks to the miracle of the DVR, I haven’t had to miss any of my favorite Christmas shows this year. One great thing about having kids is you can watch Rudolph and Frosty and Charlie Brown and not feel like a weirdo.

When they were younger, we would all get up on the bed, turn the lights off in the room and watch every Christmas show that came on. Now that they’re teen-agers, they think it’s a little creepy to get on the bed with dad, so we watch from the couch.

The best Christmas movie of all is, of course, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I have that one on DVD now so I never have to miss it. Some other good ones are “A Christmas Story,” “Elf,” and the version of “A Christmas Carol” with George C. Scott.

That’s what I’ll do this week. Watch some of my favorite movies, then head out to buy some presents. I mean, the stores won’t be crowded, right?

Ho, ho, ho

My wife was vacuuming the living room the other day and she complained to me that the vacuum cleaner was not doing a good job, and we needed a new one.

“Well, keep your fingers crossed,” I told her. “Christmas is coming.”

I can’t repeat what she said to me, but it won’t get her on Santa’s “nice” list, I can tell you that.

I’m normally a pretty good gift-giver, as much as I hate shopping. If it were up to me, I’d take her to Wal-Mart, hand her a $100 bill and say, “I’ll be back in an hour. Merry Christmas.” But I know I can’t get away with that.

Christmas has lost a good bit of its magic since the kids have gotten older. I used to be dragged out of bed by two little urchins in pajamas so we could go downstairs at 5 a.m. and see what Santa had left.

Now on Christmas morning, we have to go and drag two grumpy, mute teen-agers out of bed so they can come look at the things they already knew they were getting, mumble something that sounds like “thank you” in Wookie language, and then they crawl back upstairs and resume hibernation.

I remember the excitement of Christmas when I was a kid, but I guess it’s easier to get excited when you don’t have to go to malls and fight traffic and get flipped off in the parking lot by maniacal women. Kind of saps the old Christmas spirit.

Like most kids, I loved Christmas. I always wanted to leave Santa milk and cookies, like normal kids. But my parents insisted that, no, Santa would prefer some fruitcake and Pepsi-Cola. That is ridiculous, I thought. Who likes that? The only person I knew who liked either fruitcake or Pepsi-Cola was my father and he – waiiiiiiiiiiiiitttt a stinking minute!

So I went to my 4th-grade teacher, Miss Thelma Davis, who was very wise and old and vibrated when she talked, like Katherine Hepburn. She would know the answer, so I asked her: Is there a Santa Claus?

She studied me thoughtfully, and she said, “Well, Santa Claus is really the spirit of Christmas. He’s not an actual person.” A-ha! The truth was out. My parents had been lying to me for years!

Oh, I had my suspicions for a while. I once asked my mother how Santa got in our house, since we didn’t have a chimney. She said, “He comes in the door.” But we lock the door. “He has a magic key.” But wouldn’t the dog go crazy barking at him? “Shut up, son.”

After learning the truth, I had a dilemma. Do I confront my parents with my knowledge of their treachery? Or do I keep my mouth shut, since revealing that I knew what the deal was might jeopardize my future volume of presents? Sadly, keeping my mouth shut has never been my strong suit, and I told my mom that I knew what was going on.

When my kids were small and I became Santa, I spent a few years putting together things such as tricycles and the Barbie Doll House and the @#$%@$%&@ Hot Wheels Garage. The space shuttle doesn’t have as many moving parts as Hot Wheels Garage. That REALLY sapped me of my Christmas spirit. I made The Grinch look like Andy Williams by the time I finished putting those things together and crawled off to bed for a solid three hours of sleep.

But for all my grumbling at the time, I miss those days. Now I ask the kids for a Christmas list, and they just write “Cash” on a piece of paper and give it back to me. I say, is that all? And they take it back and write, “Lots of it.”

At least I can go to sleep earlier now. Merry Christmas.

Dancing up a storm

I was watching a History Channel show tonight about the decade of the 70s, and it reminded me what a truly horrible time that was in many respects.

I was a child when the decade started and a teenager when it ended, so some of my memories are a little bit hazy. I thought Watergate was a big dam somewhere. I would stay up late during the summer and watch Johnny Carson and I’d laugh at the Richard Nixon jokes, even though I didn’t get them.

Rich Little appeared on TV shows all the time and did a bad Richard Nixon impression. I thought he was the worst impressionist ever, until Dana Carvey came along.

I recall a few landmark moments in the 70s. I remember Elvis dying, and the Jonestown massacre, and President Ford being shot at twice, and the big Bicentennial celebration, and the biggest disappointment of my entire childhood, Evel Knievel’s aborted attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon on a souped-up rocket motorcycle. My friends and I talked about nothing else for 6 months, and then the event itself was a monumental letdown.

Anita Bryant was a big deal in the ’70s. You remember her – she was a runner-up in the 1959 Miss America pageant, then was an orange juice spokeswoman, but mostly became known because she didn’t care much for your homosexuals, and she made a big deal about it.

I had a brush with fame, sort of, when I danced with her daughter at a party. Apparently her family was friends with the family of a girl I was after in high school, named Nydia. I went to a party at Nyrdia’s house, and she didn’t want anything to do with me, but I wound up chatting with Anita Bryant’s daughter for a while, and we even danced together a few times. I never actually caught her name.

After that party, I never saw her again. It’s just as well. Things would have never worked out between me and her, because I doubt her mother would have approved of me. While I had a fondness for Miss America runners-up, I didn’t particularly have anything against your homosexuals, and I didn’t care for orange juice.

Things didn’t work out with Nydia, either, perhaps because I realized she wasn’t very pretty. Of course, I didn’t realize that until she turned me down for a date, but I look back at it now, and I’m like, Whew! Dodged a bullet there!

My voice cracked a lot in the late 70s, and I was introduced to acne, but by far the worst thing to happen the entire decade was disco music. Here’s the deal with disco music – it all sucks. Every single song. It all sucked then, and it all sucks now.

I was dragged to an actual disco one time. It was around 1984, well after the disco era supposedly ended, but it lived on in a few clubs around the country. One of those was a place called The Limelight in Atlanta, and I was convinced to go there by, of course, some girls. It is amazing what a hormone-crazed young man can be convinced to do by pretty girls.

I walked in the place, and I realized that I had died, and I was now in hell. The music was loud and horrific, the people all dressed funny, and I suspected that I was part of the 1 percent of the crowd not under the influence of cocaine. I wanted to leave so bad I felt like crying.

There was a big dance floor, and around it were there huge speakers, and some of the more exuberant dancers got on top of the speakers and shook-shook-shook their booties. I looked up and there was a guy I knew from high school, in tight pants, his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, doing all the John Travolta moves and having the time of his life. Anita Bryant would not have been pleased.

Discos, I hope are dead now. So is Nixon, and Ford and Evel Knievel. I don’t know where Anita’s daughter is now, but I hope she’s still dancing. But not on top of the speakers.

All in a day's work

I went to a luncheon this week where Rick Bragg was the guest speaker, and he said something that really made me think.

Bragg, as you may or may not know, is a journalist and author. He used to work for The New York Times, but I think they finally figured out he’s from the South so they got rid of him. He’s written a few books about his upbringing in north Alabama, and I relate pretty well to his stories, though I think his family was a good bit rougher than mine.

His first book, "All Over But the Shoutin’", is a great story about his childhood, focusing a lot on his mama, who sounds a lot like mine. His daddy, apparently, was a rowdy drunk, so he was nothing like mine. I think I got a better deal.

Anyway, Bragg was saying that he’s sometimes embarrassed when he’s around men who do hard work for a living – men like the uncles he grew up around – and they ask him what he does, and he tells them that he’s a writer. It just doesn’t sound very manly to say to somebody who works on an oil rig or a farm or as a mechanic, or any job where you’re going to get grease under your fingernails.

I’ve never really had an actual hard-working job, either. About the only thing I ever got on my hands was newsprint when I’d grab one of the first papers off the press in my journalism days. Not exactly backbreaking work. There was a summer in my youth when I had to pick apples in an orchard, but that only lasted two weeks.

My father worked at two places his adult life – a textile mill, then a General Motors plant. I’ve had about a dozen jobs so far, and counting, and rarely have I ever actually broken a sweat. It makes me feel a little bit guilty.

When I used to work in public relations, I always hated it when people asked me what I did, because it was kind of hard to explain. That makes you feel really important, when you can’t make people understand what you do. Hell, most of the time I didn’t understand what I did. Mostly just BS’d people. Amazing that you can get paid for that.

I have worked at a grocery store, at a candy maker, at a department store, at a state agency, at two newspapers, at two PR firms, at a bank, and three great big Atlanta companies. I have been fired three times. I have worked hard, but never done hard work.

There is no dishonor in writing for a living. It’s not like I could follow in my dad’s footsteps, anyway – the cotton mills are gone, and it looks like the General Motors’ plants may soon follow. I am thankful just to have a job, even if it’s one where my hands stay clean and my shoes don’t get muddy and I don’t come with any aches and pains, other than the occasional crushing headache.

Just don’t ask me what I do. It’s kind of hard to explain.