Mark my words

Dead zone

2012-01-27T16:43:00.000-05:00

How are we supposed to act, or feel, when people die?

Our reflexive response when someone tells us of a death is, “I’m sorry to hear that.” We say this whether or not we’re actually sorry to hear it. It just seems like the polite thing to say.

We may not be sorry, though I assume what we’re really saying is, we’re sorry that somebody we know is experiencing a loss. And if it’s somebody we knew and liked who died, then we genuinely feel some degree of grief.

It’s pretty much accepted that you’re not allowed to be happy when somebody dies, unless it’s someone despicable like Hitler or Bin Laden or Urban Meyer. (for all you wearing blue jean shorts, that was just a joke.)

One of my professors from UGA, Conrad Fink, died recently. Now, I didn’t know him well at all, but I knew a few people who did, and they always spoke highly of him. I took one journalism class from him, and a few things stood out in my memory:
• He would throw erasers at me when I was drifting off to sleep or not paying attention in his class, which was often.
• He told a highly entertaining story about when, during his days as a reporter, he had a testy encounter with the King of Borneo. I don’t know nor care if it was true, but it was a great story.
• He always said to write for the “Kansas City milkman”, which meant keep your stories simple and understandable so even the least educated among us could enjoy them. I guess today he might say to write them for people who watch Jersey Shore.
• He pulled me into his office one day and told me that he thought I was the best writer in his class (is this bragging? Probably so), but that I didn’t have any “fire in my belly” and I should forget journalism and go somewhere like Coca-Cola and get a job in the public relations department. I was offended and angered by this and went on to have a lucrative 10-year career in newspapers, which ended when I went to Coca-Cola and got a job in their public relations department.

So even though I didn’t know Professor Fink that well or for that long, he did have an impact on my life, and I did note his death with some sadness.

Then recently, another person from my past died, and this was somebody I didn’t care for too much. He was generally not a nice person, thought most people thought he was. I found him to be dishonest, manipulative and mean-spirited. Maybe, as hard as this is to fathom, he just didn’t like me, so I never got to see whatever good side he might have had.

So while I didn’t pop open a cold bottle of Pink Champale when I learned he had died, I didn’t feel particularly sad, either. And I didn’t feel bad about not feeling sad. Maybe this makes me a bad person. I just don’t know.

The idea of death used to freak me out. I can remember going to funeral homes when some great-aunt or another died, and my mother would go to the casket and proclaim, “Oh, she looks so pretty!” Uh, hello, mom, no she doesn’t. Aunt Jenny is DEAD! She does not look pretty. She looks stuffed.

In The Return of the King, Gandalf tells one of the hobbits, “Death is just another part of the journey.” Of course, that was easy for him to say, since he had already died and been resurrected by that time. Oh, and he was a wizard. But I guess if that’s the case, we should just look at it as a chance to wish people well on the rest of their journey, and if we didn’t like them, hope we don’t run into them again when our time comes.

Paint the town beige

2011-11-18T15:21:00.000-05:00

The driveway at my house generally looks like a used-car lot, in part because we haven’t been able to fit a vehicle in our garage since about a week after we moved in. There’s a refrigerator, freezer, dog crate, cedar chest and rusting universal gym in there, but no cars.

So the other day, I took notice of what was parked in front of my house:

- a fairly-new Saturn SUV, driven by my wife;
- a sporty red Ford Mustang with new rims and tires and all sorts of decals that my son added, I assume so he could attract even more police attention;
- a nice Dodge Stratus that is driven by my daughter and is only a few years old and in very good condition, except for the inexplicable make-up smears on the radio dial;
- and an absolute piece-of-crap 2000 beige Chevy Impala, with about 130,000 miles on it and a crack in the windshield that looks like an aerial view of the Snake River. This, of course, is my car.

How did this happen? My son’s car has a sound system that would be the envy of Dr. Dre, and all the Impala has is a radio and a cassette player. They stopped making cassettes about, what, 20 years ago? Do you know how tired I am of listening to sports-talk radio and Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits?

This morning went outside about 6:20 a.m. to discover the Beige Love Machine was covered in permafrost. So I got an empty cassette case, scraped off as much ice as I could, cranked the beast and headed off to work.

I’d gone about 10 miles when it dawned on me that, somehow, the air coming out of the vents was actually colder than the outside temperature. Instead of defrosting my windshield, it was glazing it. Try sticking your head out the window on I-75 so you can see where you’re going on a 30-degree morning. It’s a miracle a truck didn’t swerve into my lane and Ichabod Crane-me. My head was colder than Ted Williams’ when I finally got to work.

Before I got the Impala, I was sporting around town in a 1997 Plymouth mini-van, a chick magnet if there ever was one. But that was like a Lamborghini compared to the AARP-mobile I’m driving around in now.

Why does Dad, the guy who pays for the car insurance and makes sure the oil gets changed and the tires get rotated for everybody, have to drive the worst car? I should be tooling around in style, in some sort of turbo-charged sporty convertible while the rest of them drive Yugos that have to be parked facing downhill in order for them to start. It’s just not fair.

Nobody in the family but me and Lucky will even ride in my car, and even she won’t put her head out the window because she’s embarrassed for other dogs to see her.

Oh, well. Someday, when the house is paid for and I get the kids off the payroll, I’m going to get a nice car for myself, even if I’m too old to drive it. I’ll get something fancy that even has a CD player, and me and Bob Seger will just sit in the driveway and have the times of our lives.

Phoning it in

2011-09-26T13:46:00.002-04:00

There’s an exchange on my answering machine between me and my son that we’ve preserved to listen to whenever we want to laugh, or cry, perhaps.

It was one of those cases where I called the house and he didn’t pick up until after the answering machine had kicked on, so the entire conversation was recorded, and it went something like this:

Him: Hello?
Me: Hey. What’s going on?
Him: (uintelligible)
Me: Is your mom home?
Him: No.
Me: Do you know where she went?
Him: (grunt)
Me: Did she say when she was coming back?
Him: No.
Me: Ok, will you please tell her to call me when she gets in?
Him: (garbled):
Click.

I see these TV commercials where they tell us parents we should talk to our kids, and I’m like, YOU come try and talk to them. And bring a teenager-to-English dictionary to translate.

Of course, people under 20 don’t talk on the phone at all anymore. They send text messages with words like “u” and “r” and “l8r” and “idk” which is just a way to confuse us poor helpless parents and trick us into saying yes when they ask us if they can go to a marijuana-sampling party at a friend’s house.

When I was that age (yes, I use this phrase all the time now), it was quite different. We talked on the phone, which was a big old rotary beast that had to be dialed. We made prank calls, like calling the grocery store and asking, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”, and when they said yes, we said “Well, you’d better let him out before he suffocates!” Funny, funny stuff.

I remember my first-ever prank call. I was a little boy, less than 10, and I wanted to call somebody, but I didn’t know anybody’s number. So I just dialed 0, and when the operator picked up, I said, “Go to hell,” then hung up the phone and wondered which one of my friends I would tell first, to impress.

About 5 seconds after I hung up, the phone rang, and a stab of fear went through my body like an errant javelin. I let it ring 4 times, then picked up to hear a woman say, “”Are you the little boy who was playing on the phone?”

“Yes, m’am,” I said in a trembling voice.

“Well, I’m going to call your mother and tell her when she gets home.”

That evil crone at the phone company scared me to death. That night, the next day, and for weeks and months and years after that, I waited for the day when that fateful phone call would be made, and my mother would look at me and say, “Go get me a switch.” But the call never came, which was the genius part of the operator’s diabolical plan. She made sure I lived in fear for my transgression. To this day, I still jump when the phone rings unexpectedly. I really don’t think the punishment fit the crime here.

When I was about 15, my parents moved to a neighboring county. As hard as this may be to believe now, in those days, calls to the next county were long distance, and thus cost more. This was important to me because all of the girls I wanted to woo were in the county I moved from, not the new one. And writing a letter is not a great way to ask a girl out, unless she lives in Russia and you’re planning to buy her.

My parents, after moving me to the wasteland of Lamar County, also informed me that I would have to pay for any long distance calls that I made. This was difficult, as I had no money, and even when I got a job at the age of 16, the little bit of money I had was ticketed for the expenses I would incur if/when I ever persuaded one of these girls to go on a date.

So I had to put some change in my pocket, get into my car and drive across the county line to a quaint little town/convenience store called Orchard Hill, where there was a pay phone. This method of calling girls – which, really, is the only reason a boy, or man for that matter, ever needs to use a telephone – was fraught with pitfalls.

For one, there was no guarantee the pay phone would be available. You couldn’t reserve it, or kick somebody off it. So I was taking a leap of faith just by driving up there.

Then, you could not be assured that the girl you were calling would be home. Most people didn’t have answering machines then, so you couldn’t leave a message. I would just stand there forlornly and listen to the ring, ring, ring, hoping maybe she was just in the shower or outside and would soon hear the phone ringing and rush in and pick it up breathlessly and – but that never happened. Instead, I’d just hang up and decide whether to try again.

Then there was the dreaded busy signal. This was worse than no answer, because now you knew she was probably at home, and talking to some skunk who you thought was your best friend, but who had been lucky enough to call her before you did, and was monopolizing the durn phone, and probably asking her out! (Do I still seem angry?) In truth, it was generally just her mom on the phone, or her sister, and I would get angry and have fantasies about purchasing a handgun and shooting my former best friend for nothing.

Of course, there was no call waiting or caller ID then, so if you got a busy signal, you got a busy signal. You could, in case of emergencies, have the operator break into a call, but that seemed a bit extreme for a 16-year-old boy trying to get a date. Then again, when you think about the raging hormones at that age, maybe it did qualify as an emergency.

My pay phone of choice was unfortunately located next to a train track. A roaring locomotive 10 feet away puts quite a damper on a conversation. I’d hear that train a’comin’, and I’d either hurry up and say what I was going to say - “HeywillyougooutwithmeSaturdaynight?” – or I’d ask her to hang on and wait for the train to pass. Inevitably, she’d have hung up by the time it got quiet again, having decided she didn’t want to go on a date with a loser who asked her out from a pay phone.

I guess it is easier to ask girls out these days, but then it’s probably easier for them so say no, too. So maybe the good old days had their selling points, after all.

The heat is on

2011-06-09T16:03:00.000-04:00

A terrible calamity struck my house this week – the air conditioning went on the fritz.

Since my house was apparently built by the first little pig, I’ve gotten used to having an annual major repair. Toilets, floors, walls, appliances, siding – I need an Obama stimulus package to take care of everything that needs attention around there.

But some repairs can’t wait, and a non-performing AC unit is at the top of that list. It’s not the first problem we’ve had with it, and my daughter asked me the other day why it always seems to quit working when it’s hot.

“Because, dear,” I said, remembering that I’m paying for her to go to college, “that’s when we use it. When it’s hot.”

My wife informed me that not having a working AC unit is a hardship on her, because it makes her hair frizz. My son hasn’t really complained, because he’s 17 years old and doesn’t talk to us except in case of emergency. The dog has said nothing, but she lives outside and isn’t really affected.

Anyway, I called a repairman, and for the price of a small Volkswagen, it is going to be repaired, and peace will again descend upon my household. The whole episode has served to remind me how spoiled we’ve all become.

Of course, when I was a boy, we didn’t live in 72-degree comfort from June through September. We didn’t have central air conditioning in our ranch-style house, just a couple of window units that rattled like a 747 on takeoff, and made about as much noise. These only ran at certain times - for example, when my father was at home.

Rooms that were deemed unnecessary to cool – i.e., my bedroom – were cut off from the cool air via a closed door. When I’d step from my bedroom into the hall, it was about a 20-degree temperature drop. It’s a wonder I didn’t die of pneumonia at the age of 10.

At night, the air conditioning was turned off completely, so I slept with the windows open on summer evenings. I could hear the chirp of crickets, the croak of bullfrogs, the far-off whistle of the train, and occasional arguments from the next-door neighbors. I learned some new curse words through that open window.

When I was about 15, we moved to a house that had central air conditioning, which would have been great had we ever used it. Instead, my dad installed a ceiling fan, which circulated air throughout the house. That sounds good in theory, but 85-degree air wafting over you at night is not terribly comfortable.

No, if you wanted to get cool in that house, you just had to wait for the winter. The house also had central heat, but he preferred to use a wood-burning stove. That thing required wood, which had to be chopped into smaller pieces, then stacked, then brought into the house. Who is going to do that, I asked my dad, and he responded by smiling and handing me an axe.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “What am I, Davy Crockett?”

OK, I didn’t really say that, I just thought it to myself. I learned how to chop, stack and carry wood, all while repeating the curse words I’d learned through the open window at my old house.

The wood-burning stove was something. If you were within, say, 10 feet of it, it was as warm as Lucifer’s kitchen. Again, my dad would close off the bedrooms, so none of that warmth reached me at night. Walking through that house in the winter was like going to visit the Heat Miser and the Snow Miser every day (that joke was for fans of The Year Without a Santa Claus).

After I moved out on my own, I couldn't help but notice when I came back to visit that my dad had at last embraced the notions of central heating and air, and the house was always at a nice, comfortable temperature. I guess he was just trying to make sure I wasn’t spoiled.

Kind of Blue

2011-04-29T16:07:00.000-04:00

I have been accused in my day of not really noticing or appreciating things my wife Susan does to decorate our house.

I have to say, guilty as charged. About the only things I pay much attention to inside the house are the TV, my recliner and the contents of the refrigerator. As far as the rest of it goes, I may as well live in an Army barracks.

I tried to correct that once years ago, when she was a little frustrated after she had done some decorating and rearranging and I hadn’t noticed it. So one night I was sitting there on the couch, and I said, “You know, I like this lamp.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yes, I think it looks nice in here. I’m glad you got it. When did you get it?”

“About five years ago,” she said.

Oh, well. I tried.

One problem is, women love to watch all of those crazy home decorating and renovation shows that come on TV. They watch these shows and then they get the urge to go do some of that stuff themselves. I tried suggesting she watch a cooking show instead, but all I got was a dirty look.

The other day, riding in the car, she informed me that she had decided she wanted to paint the kitchen. I didn’t understand why. Didn’t we just paint it? I asked her.

“We painted it 10 years ago,” she said.

“Exactly!” I said. “It seems like just yesterday. Plus, I like it the color that it is.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “What color is it?”

I wasn’t sure, so I muttered something under my breath, turned up and radio loud and swerved the car violently, pretending a squirrel had run out in front of me, all in an effort to change the subject. Of course, she didn’t buy that, because she knows I hate squirrels, and am more likely to drive on up the sidewalk to run one over than I am to swerve to miss one.

Fine. So I didn’t know, from memory, the color of the kitchen. Knowing when I’m beaten, I gave in and said, sure, I think it would be a great idea for you to paint the kitchen, with an emphasis on the word “you”, cause I ain’t painting nothing!

This set off about a two-week quest to find the right color. She was going with blue, but apparently, there are about 967 different variations of blue paint available at Home Depot. She began to buy samples of the various blues, then would paint a small section of the wall to see if she liked it. Invariably, her initial reaction was to hate it; then, after a few hours, she’d decide she liked it; then she’d come around to hating it again. After a few days, there were so many different colors on our kitchen wall, it looked like the Partridge Family bus.

On about the 20th try, she called me in the kitchen, pointed out a new swath of color and said, “What do you think?” I said, “I think you need to be on Prozac. Just pick a color!”

One angry look later, she had decided on a color. It was blue. I thought it looked great. She hired some guy named Luis to come over and paint my kitchen. He had a puzzled look on his face when he walked in and saw the kaleidoscope of colors on the wall, but I just said to him, “Don’t ask, por favor.” He nodded and went to work.

Now, here’s a trick that women used that I’ve learned about. Basically, I look at home renovations in one way – how much is it going to cost? The price of painting the kitchen, and also the downstairs bathroom, seemed pretty reasonable to me, so I didn’t’ squawk much. But then, she hits you with the sucker punch – now that the room has changed color, everything else in there has to be replaced!

“I need some curtains for the kitchen,” she told me before the paint even dried. Why, I said. “Because, obviously, dummy, the green ones we have don’t match the blue walls now.” And she’s also commenced to buying new accessories for the bathroom, since it changed from whatever color it was before to blue, as well. I’ve hardly seen a woman as excited as she was the other day when she found a blue soap dispenser in Big Lots.

Hopefully, we’re through with the redecorating process for at least a few weeks. Now I can concentrate on the important stuff in the kitchen and bathroom, like leftovers and cold beverages and a stack of National Geographic magazines. I’ll let you figure out what belongs in which room.

How to talk to women

2011-03-10T17:16:00.001-05:00

As a man who has lived a lot of years, and most of them in the same house as a woman, I’ve gained a lot of wisdom, and I feel the need to impart some of it to the less-experienced among us.

Here’s the deal. In order to get along with women, you have to talk to them. They like that. They’re not like us. They can’t watch a four-hour football game during which the longest sentence uttered is, “Pass the Doritos.” They enjoy talking, which is ok, but they also expect to be listened to, which is hard, and they expect you to talk back to them, which can often just be impossible.

Why is this? Well, for one thing, they often are not talking about what you think they are talking about. If they tell you that the weather is going to be nice this weekend, it’s not an encouragement for you to go play golf. It’s a subtle reminder that you promised to clean the gutters.

If they are being quiet, and you ask them what is wrong, they usually will say, “nothing.” They don’t mean this. What they mean is, “If you really loved me, you’d know what was wrong with me, and you’d fix it, without me having to tell you.” Even if there is no way in the world you could know what is wrong with them, you are expected to know. Then you have to apologize for not knowing.

I’m going to outline a few situations that men might find themselves in with women, and I’m going to give you the correct, and the incorrect, response to each of them.

Situation: She walks in the room, stands in front of you and says, “Does my butt look big in these pants?”

Right response: No, honey, of course not. Your butt is not big.

Wrong response: No bigger than usual.

Situation: She goes to get her hair done, and she comes home angry, complaining that it looks terrible and the hairdresser did not do what she asked her to.

Right response: I think it looks good. It actually makes you look younger. You’re just not used to it yet.

Wrong response: Why don’t you go see if the hairdresser will give you your money back?

Situation: She says, “It’s really warm in here. I’m burning up.”

Right response: Ok, do you want to me open a window, or maybe adjust the thermostat?

Wrong response: Yeah, I read the other day that you’re at about the age when hot flashes begin. It will pass.

Situation: She walks into the bedroom wearing a new nightgown and says, “Look what I bought the other day.”

Right response: Wow, that looks really great on you, honey. You know red is my favorite color.

Wrong response: Oh my God, how much did THAT cost?

Situation: She decides to try a new recipe, then asks you at the table what you think of the meal.

Right response: It’s pretty good. I never even thought putting cinnamon on spaghetti would be good, but this is great.

Wrong response: Do you think Domino’s is still open?

Often, the way to handle these situations is to realize that you’re not going to win no matter what you do, so you should just pretend you didn’t hear her. Then if she presses you on it, just say, “I’m sorry, honey, I was thinking about where I could take you for dinner Saturday night. You really deserve a night out. Now, what did you say?” If you’re lucky, she’ll let it drop, and if you’re really lucky, she’ll forget you promised to take her to dinner. Just make sure you have the number to Domino’s handy.

King of the court

2011-02-28T17:00:00.000-05:00

My 17-year-old son David innocently asked me if I wanted to go to the basketball court with him Sunday. Since he’s at that cute age where he rarely speaks a sentence to me that doesn’t begin with the words, “Can I have..”, I said sure.

I warned him, though, that I was not going to play him in an actual game. I’m too out of shape for that foolishness. I might hurt myself or, in a much worse outcome, I might actually lose.

He’s been trying to bait me into a basketball game for some time. The other day he was trash-talking and I said, “Have you forgotten who won the last time we played? That’s right, it was me.”

He responded by reminding me that it was three years ago when that happened, when he was still in the eighth grade. Oh, big deal. Like there’s much difference between an eighth-grader and an 11th-grader. I mean, I haven’ t changed that much in three years, so what makes him think he has?

Anyway, we got to the court, and we started shooting, and I realized the little booger knew what he was doing. He knew there was no way I was going to let him stand unchallenged on the court. Finally I said, “Ok, I’ll run you a quick one. Let’s play to seven.”

No, he said, we always play to 12. Fine, I said, knowing I couldn’t back down. If you show weakness to these urchins, they’ll kill you in your sleep and steal your debit card. So I agreed to play to 12, which in retrospect, was a poor decision.

The game started out calmly enough. I drained a couple of jumpers, he made a layup here and there. By the time the score was 3-1, there had already been three timeouts for injury. It may surprise you to know that two of those times, he was the one who got hurt. He kept foolishly running into my elbow.

The other time, I jammed my fingers quite badly when I reached for the ball and accidentally hit his hard head. As evidence, my middle finger on my right hand is swollen to the size of a bratwurst and is turning black. Having a middle finger out of commission severely hampered my morning commute. But I stayed tough, and took a 7-4 lead, and would have at that point been the winner had I stuck to my original plan.

Then, he began to catch up, and I began to move a little more slowly. I was going to my left with all the quickness of a sea turtle on Quaaludes. After he tied the game at 7-7, I looked up and saw my wife drive up in her car. She had come to watch the fun. Trust me, I had no illusions about who she was pulling for.

It’s a good thing she showed up when she did, because it gave us an excuse to stop the game for a few minutes, and I was about 5 seconds away from a cardiac event.

“How are you doing?” she said, and I told her that I was doing just fine, but it might not be a bad idea to dial 9-1-1 on her phone and have her finger hover above the “send” button, just in case. She smiled, told me that she had faith in me, and asked me where the life insurance policies were.

The game resumed and, as you can surmise, what with my concentration thrown off and my finger hurting and the fact that the baskets were 3 inches higher than regulation, not to mention it was really a bad biorhythm day for me and my astrological signs were lined up poorly – well, I lost.

Don’t worry, though, I handled it maturely. I congratulated him, and secretly vowed to work over the next few weeks to get ready for a rematch. I’ve hired Larry Bird as my shooting coach, I’m doing conditioning work with Lance Armstrong, and I’ve begun taking steroids. If all that fails, I’ll remind him of all the times I let him win when he was younger. I’m not above accepting charity.

2011-02-08T15:28:00.000-05:00

I watched the Super Bowl Sunday, because I am a red-blooded American man and it is required behavior, like spitting in the sink or drinking straight from the orange juice carton.

I watched it at home, with my son and my dog. None of us cared that much about the game, since we’d hoped the Falcons would make it, but I guess I pulled for the Packers, and my son was for the Steelers. The dog didn’t state a preference.

My daughter was in Athens, studying, I’m sure, because that’s what college students do all weekend. And my wife was upstairs doing something else because, let’s face it, I was watching football, and that’s no place for a woman.

Don’t get me wrong. I like watching football, and I like women. I just don’t like watching football with women.

I don’t much go got football-watching parties, because these usually involve women who are allegedly watching the game, but are really there just to talk. I know, I know, there are some exceptions out there, women who actually are interested in the game and know what’s going on. But I think that’s probably a pretty low percentage, and why take the chance?

My wife will occasionally come into the room with me as I’m watching football, which is fine, except she tries to talk to me, because women think that you are supposed to communicate with your spouse, which is of course crazy talk.

She’ll try one of two tactics in her attempts to talk to me during football. First, she’ll talk about things having nothing to do with the game, like what needs fixing around the house, or how much money the kids need for something, or a story about somebody she knows who caught her husband with a dental hygienist and wants to leave him except they just spent $10,000 on in-vitro fertilization and she hopes she’s pregnant.

She soon learns that this is getting nowhere, as my only response is a grunt before I scream “Screen pass? Who is going to be fooled by a screen pass on third-and-20????”

Her second method is to try to make comments on the actual, game and this is disastrous, because the comments are not appropriate. It’s usually stuff like, “Why are they wearing that color jersey with those pants?” or “Look how long his hair is!” or “Why is he grabbing himself there?”

“Listen,” I told her the last time she tried this, “I appreciate the effort. But all I really want to hear you say when I’m watching football is, “Do you need another beer, honey?’ “ That led to a rough afternoon. Who knew divorce attorneys worked on Sundays?

My daughter is actually a pretty good football watcher, but that’s because I trained her from birth. But her mother just wasn’t trained right, and it’s too late now. It’s why we’ve had two TVs since the day we were married.

I’ve changed my football-watching behavior during the years as I’ve aged and mellowed and my home insurance premiums have gone up. I closely follow two teams – the Falcons and the Georgia Bulldogs –and I used to get quite animated during games, and perhaps would toss a few things around harmlessly. OK, I’ll be honest – I’ve thrown some fits while watching games that would cause Charlie Sheen to tell me, “Whoa, dude. Calm down.”

Now, when things are going poorly for the Bulldogs – which occurred in several games this year immediately after the coin toss – I just get quiet and watch stone-faced, and remind myself that there are people suffering in the world and war and famine and I shouldn’t get upset just because somebody FUMBLED ON THE 1-YARD LINE! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????

OK, maybe I still need some work, and maybe I’m a little bit sexist (I can hear my wife saying, “a little bit????”), but I’m a work in progress. Football is over for a few months, and now I have a lot of time to hear about what needs fixing and who’s pregnant, and I promise I’ll at least pretend to be listening.

What's on TV?

2011-01-07T15:01:00.000-05:00

I have satellite TV, and we’ve ordered the “Deluxe Jumbo 5,000 Channels of Crap” package, so I have an endless possibility of things to watch, all the while saying “I can’t believe I’m watching this.”

My wife and I often watch separate TVs, since she likes shows like “I had a 200-pound Tumor”, or reality shows about people who have 30 kids in their house, or shows where some Yuppie couple in San Jose spends three weeks deciding how to redo their kitchen floor. Meanwhile, I’m downstairs watching sports, or cool shows on Spike, like “1,000 Ways to Die.”

Have you seen that show? It depicts all sorts of crazy ways that people have died over the years – exploding toilets, a turtle dropped on a guy’s head by an eagle, a skateboarder passing out facedown in wet cement – with graphic re-creations. I can’t understand for the life of me why women don’t enjoy this show.

The truth is, I have the TV on a lot, but I don’t really watch it that much. I am thrilled that IFC is now showing “The Larry Sanders Show,” which is the best show in the history of television. But other than that, pickings are slim.

The other night I was sitting on the couch, flipping through one of the many HBO channels that I overpay for, and I saw that the movie “Up” was coming on. Well, I’d never seen it, and I thought, I’ll give it a try. I’d read good reviews, and it looked like a delightful animated adventure. My daughter said she’d watch part of it with me.

Have you seen this movie? For the first 20 minutes, I had to pretend that my cold was acting up so my daughter wouldn’t ask me why I was getting teary-eyed and sniffling from watching a cartoon. I haven’t been that emotional watching a movie since (Spoiler Alert!) Old Yeller got a bullet in his brain.

At least it was a pretty good movie. One good thing about my children growing up is I don’t have to sit through awful kids’ movies and TV shows any more. There was a point in my life when just seeing something purple could turn me homicidal, all thanks to Barney the Dinosaur. I used to daydream about driving to California and strangling that little guy on “Blue’s Clues” with my bare hands.

Now, my children watch wonderful shows like “Jersey Shore.” I wouldn’t watch that show unless I was wearing a haz-mat suit. You could probably get an STD if you watched that show on one of those new 3-D TVs. If aliens land on Earth and see that show, they’ll immediately incinerate us all, because they’ll think there’s no hope for humanity. A purple Barney was pretty bad, but an orange “Snooki” is too much to bear.

I suppose I could do something productive instead of just sitting on the couch in front of the TV set. I could, but I’m not. It’s cold outside, it gets dark at 5:30, and by the time I get home from work, my brain needs rest, not stimulation. Hopefully there’s a good bowl game on tonight.

Shopping in a warehouse

2010-11-22T15:44:00.001-05:00

The other day my wife and I found ourselves in the parking lot at the enormous warehouse store, Sam’s Club. We got out of the car and I looked at her and asked why we were there, and she said, “I don’t know.”

This was surely a sign that we should have gotten in the car and gone back home, but no, we forged ahead, with a pledge to each other not to spend too much money. An hour later we were $200 poorer and headed home with a carful of stuff, and I have no idea why we bought any of it.

When we first walked in, I was greeted by dozens of flat-screen TVs. It was Sunday, so there were football games on. I stood there, mesmerized, like a 15-year-old boy in a strip club, with my mouth watering almost as much.

Never mind that just last month I was contemplating putting my baseball card collection on EBay just so I could pay the cell phone bill. I was stricken with flat-screen TV fever, and found myself thinking things like, “You know, $2,500 is not really a bad deal for a TV like that. I mean, think how much use I’ll get out of it!” We’re probably the only people on our block who still have a round-screened TV, or whatever you call those old things.

Those warehouse stores are the devil’s workshop, I can tell you that. There are three people living in my house right now, so why would I need a package of 60 rolls of toilet paper? Yet we bought one. You go in those places thinking you’re just going to buy paper towels, and you walk out with a new living room set, a pressure washer and 27 pounds of frozen shrimp.

The most crowded part of the warehouse store is the food section, because of all the free samples. There were people lined up, 8 or 9 deep, at some of the sampling stations. I swear, some people come there for their Sunday dinner, which is fine, if you want to eat your entire Sunday dinner off of toothpicks.

I bought some interesting things on my most recent trip there. I got a new white dress shirt. Some men buy their clothes at Brooks Brothers, I get mine at Sam’s Club. It might explain why I’m not exactly shooting up the old corporate ladder.

I also bought an enormous collection of hot chocolate. There are, like, 8 different kinds of hot chocolate in there, which seems great, until you get home and realize that your favorite flavor of hot chocolate is, you know, chocolate. That, and I drink about 5 cups of it a year. So I’m covered when it comes to hot chocolate until 2021.

We grabbed a few other things we desperately needed while there – a box of pomegranates; 50 chicken wings; a pack of reading glasses; and enough laundry detergent to wash 212 loads. We chose this one over the laundry detergent that could only promise 210 loads. Since our daughter came home from college this weekend and brought her laundry, we’re already down to about 110 loads left.

I think I need to stay away from Sam’s for a while. I’ll go back when I run out of toilet paper, which should coincide with the next visit from Halley’s Comet, unless I actually need something from there in the meantime. You know, I could really use that pressure washer…..

Home remedies

2010-11-19T16:07:00.001-05:00

I try not to do the “you kids don’t know how easy you have it” speech with my children very often, because I realize that each generation has its own set of problems and issues to deal with. For example, it is very hard for my son do his homework while playing a video game online with his friends and texting his girlfriend. I didn’t have these pressures. I just, you know, did my homework.

But I must say that there have been some improvements in medicine that have definitely worked to their advantage. For example, they have never had their skin burned by the compound of red death otherwise known as “merthiolate”, or “mercurochrome.”

My mother loved me, I am sure, but she did not miss an opportunity to put this stuff on me. It supposedly was some sort of antiseptic, and every time I had the smallest of scratches, she would drag me into the bathroom and get out the little dropper and put some merthiolate on me.

Words can’t describe how this stuff burned. She may as well have dipped a fireplace poker in the fire and branded me with it. And not only did it burn, it turned your skin bright red. How did anybody think this was a healing agent?

It got to where I would hide my injuries. I could have walked into a running chain saw, and I wouldn’t have told my mother, because I knew exactly what she would do. This got to be difficult, because I was a little boy and naturally got scratched and scraped up daily. But I would just put on long sleeves and long pants and a stocking cap until everything healed up.

I did some research on this and I’ve discovered that they don’t use merthiolate or mercurochrome much anymore because, for one, it doesn’t work, and for two, it’s TOXIC! Well, heck, I could have told you that when it was burning a hole in my skin.

Another favorite cure of hers was hydrogen peroxide. This wasn’t as bad; it didn’t burn, it just bubbled on your wound. Again, I’m not sure that something that causes a chemical reaction on your skin is doing you much good, but it’s good for a few minutes of fun if you’re sitting around the house bored. Wait, am I the only one who does that?

When I would get ulcers in my mouth, my mom had another homemade remedy – Goody powders. Ulcers are very painful, so I was willing to try anything to make it feel better when I had one. It was simple, you just poured a Goody powder directly onto the ulcer. For about five minutes after doing this, the pain was unbearable. I would literally drop to my knees, tears running down my face, as the throbbing pain coursed through my mouth. I remember looking at my mom the first time she had me do this and wanting to say, “Why do you hate me?”, but of course I didn’t say anything, because my mouth felt like I had swallowed burning charcoal.

But, before long, that pain went away and the ulcer didn’t hurt at all. I could eat and drink all I wanted without pain, until the Goody’s powder wore off in a couple of hours. I have since learned from a dentist that putting a headache powder on an ulcer like actually burns the skin and prolongs healing, and is a bad idea. I have to tell you, though, it brought me a lot of relief back then. I will neither recommend nor discourage this home remedy.

If I got a fever blister, which I often did, my mom had a special remedy that she got from a local pharmacist. This stuff wasn’t over-the-counter, it was under-the-counter, because it was a homemade concoction that the guy had come up with. It contained ether and was, apparently, illegal. But I have to tell you, it worked. That pharmacist either retired or got arrested, I’m not sure, but I know you can’t get his ether cure anymore.

Some of this sounds pretty bad in retrospect, but I survived it. My mother meant only the best for me, and even if her home remedies could have killed me, it would have all been out of love.

All's fair at the fair

2010-10-12T17:25:00.001-04:00

The fall of the year, as my mother used to call it, is upon us, and that brings back memories of the old Griffin-Spalding County Fair. I remember being excited when the multi-colored billboards would start to appear around the county, promising the coming of the fair with its rides and games and incredibly unhealthy but delicious food.

I always loved going to the fair. I loved riding (some of) the rides. I loved eating corn dogs and cotton candy. I even loved going to see the livestock exhibit, which smelled to high heaven, but where else was I going to see goats and pigs and enormous piles of cow droppings?

As I look back on it now, though, the fair could be a pretty dangerous place. My parents, once I got old enough, used to drop me off, then come back and pick me up. We don’t do this anymore with our children, since we’re all over-protective, and we’ve seen episodes of Dateline on NBC.

The most dangerous aspect of the fair was, of course, the people who traveled with the carnival. Do you remember when, just before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein opened the doors to all of the prisons and insane asylums in Baghdad and let the inhabitants roam the streets? Well, that pretty much describes your average collection of carnival workers.

These dregs of society manned the rides and the carnival games. Here’s a fun guessing game – which does the guy running the game have more of, fingers, teeth or times arrested? Ok, it’s not really a fair game. “Times arrested” always wins.

Then there were the rides, which were rusty and creaky and probably hadn’t been inspected since FDR was president. I can remember excitedly climbing on those rides, paying no heed to the fact that they were being held together by Scotch tape and chewing gum.

There was one particularly insidious ride called the “Skydiver.” On this contraption, you were strapped into a metal cage which was attached to a big wheel, similar to a Ferris wheel. And as you went around in circles, the cage would roll over. You could control how much it rolled, if it all, with a steering wheel inside the cage of death. Why this appealed to anyone, I never knew.

I would never ride it as a kid, always making the excuse “that looks lame” or “it doesn’t go fast enough.” The truth was, the mere sight of it scared me to death. Who were these crazy people climbing on that thing and letting the winner of a Charles Manson look-alike contest pull a lever that controlled their fate?

So one year, when I was a little older and had a fancy job at the Food Giant grocery store and a 1968 Mustang with a white vinyl top and a little spending money in my pockets, I took a young lady to the fair. That’s a romantic scenario you see in a lot of movies, right? Young lovers, strolling down the midway hand in hand, the girl eating some cotton candy while clutching a stuffed unicorn the boy won for her at a carnival game; the boy, strutting on the sawdust, pulling his girl close and hoping to steal a kiss on the merry-go-round.

Well, I take this crazy chick to the fair, and the first thing she does is point to the Skydiver and say, “I want to ride that!” I pretended to not hear her, and instead steered her to the carnival games. “Let me win you a stuffed animal,” I said. She said OK, but I saw her cast one more glance filled with desire at the freaking Skydiver, and I knew I was in trouble.

The first game we went to required me to knock over some bottles with a softball. This, I thought, would be easy. I was a pretty fair country ball player and had a good arm. What I didn’t know was that the parolee running the game had filled the bottles with something like iron or kryptonite, and it would have taken a hydrogen bomb to knock one down.

Then we went to basketball shooting game. I was a good shot back in those days, but all three of my attempts clanked off the rim which, I’m guessing, was actually smaller in circumference than the basketball. I was running out of money and pride, and not impressing my date.

Finally, I found a game where you tossed softballs into a basket. This seemed pretty easy, so I stepped up and did it on the first try, and beamed at my date, and the chain gang escapee handed me, I’m not kidding, a small piece of shag carpet. Wait a minute, I said, pointing to colorful stuff elephants and giraffes, what about those? Oh, to win that you have to throw it in one of those, he said, pointing to a basket about as big around as a doughnut. I knew I had been defeated.

“Come on,” I said to my date, once I found her again, “let me buy you a corn dog or some cotton candy.”

“That stuff is gross,” she said. “Let’s go ride something.”

“OK,” I sighed, and before I could point her toward the Tilt-o-Whirl, she grabbed my hand and began sprinting toward the Skydiver. My fate was sealed. The only possible chance I had at even getting a peck on the cheek was to climb aboard that death machine and test my fate.

We got on the thing, and I tried to lean in close to her, but this maniac was already turning the steering wheel, trying to get us upside down before the ride even started. I took my arm from around and began to fight for control. I saw that I was losing this battle, and I decided right then and there that no kiss was worth this, and I tried to open the door and get out, but Cool Hand Luke hit the start button, and away we went.

Around and around we went, with Sybil beside me trying to make the cage spin, and me holding on for dear life. I may as well have not even been on the ride – she was in love with the thrill, and not me. After about 10 times around, we get to the top of the ride – and it stops. Dead. Apparently, there was a mechanical issue with the ride.

I look down, and the guy’s walking around with a screwdriver, trying to figure out how to get the ride going again. I was thinking of jumping out, but my date keep spinning the cage, and finally I told her, “If you do that one more time, I’m going to throw up on you.” I guess the greenish tint to my face convinced her that I was serious, so she stopped her foolishness, and sulked as I held the steering wheel steady, keeping us upright until the ride got going.

Finally, it started up again, and when I reached solid ground I bolted out of the door and began wobbling back up the midway, ready to go home. My date was walking behind me when she saw a group of her friends, and she said, “If you’re not feeling well, I’ll just hang out with my friends and have one of them take me home and you can leave.”

I nodded my head, mumbled something and left her in the sawdust. I glanced over my shoulder and all I saw was her blonde hair bouncing as she ran back toward the Skydiver, and we didn’t go on any more dates.
Oh, and I kept the piece of shag carpet.

It's in the bag

2010-09-10T10:09:00.001-04:00

The other night I heard a cell phone ringing somewhere in the kitchen. I knew it wasn’t mine, because my ringtone is the opening riff from “Whole Lotta Love,” cause I’m just cool like that.

I figured it must be my wife’s, and I could hear that she was upstairs in the shower, so I decided to go get it and, depending on whose number showed up on caller ID, answer it and let whoever it was know that she wasn’t available, or just pretend I didn’t hear it ringing.

I finally traced the signal to somewhere on the kitchen table, then realized it was coming from the bowels of her purse. So I opened the purse, looked in and realized I would not be able to find an atomic device in that mess, let alone a small cell phone.

What is it with women and their purses? I actually dug in there a little bit to try and find the phone, and came up with all sort of stuff – receipts from the 1990s, emery boards, mysterious clumps of keys, makeup, tissue, and about $17 worth of pennies and nickels. It looked like a miniature recycling center in there.

A woman’s purse is a mysterious hinterland best left alone by men. My mother used to call hers a pocketbook, but I don’t hear that term much anymore. I can remember when I was a kid, she could reach in there and produce anything she needed. For example, she always seems to have a wet rag in a plastic bag, which she would use to wipe my face before we went into a store or somebody’s house. And if I needed a Band-aid or an aspirin or a cough drop, she’d reach in there like a magician and, voila, pull it out.

I have seen women around my office carrying purses that are as big as they are. And most of the women I see at work are not just carrying a purse, but also a couple of other bags draped around their body. I feel a little guilty sometimes when I get on the elevator in the morning, not carrying a thing, everything I need stuffed into my pants pockets, when some poor 100-pound woman gets on looking like a roadie for The Who, carrying twice her body weight in assorted purses, bags and satchels.

What is in all of these bags? Are these women carrying out secret company documents? Are they smuggling drugs? I just don’t see the purpose.

They like to change their purses a lot, too. I’ll carry a wallet around until it’s held together by duct tape, but they change purses like they change their underwear. My wife will say, “I need a new purse,” and I’ll say, “But you just got one,” and she just says “It’s a woman thing. You don’t understand” And since I’ve admitted that I don’t understand women, I’ve painted myself into a corner and I don’t have a defense.

I could deal with it until one day, she took me into a Coach purse store. Apparently, Coach is a brand of purse that’s not available at, say, Walgreens. I mean, I should have known what I was in for when a brand of purses has its own store.

Anyway, I got bored, as a straight man is bound to do in a store pull of women’s purses, and I decided to just look at a couple of the price tags, to see what this was going to set me back. Holy Moly! “Are we buying a purse or a Toyota?” I asked my wife. I mean, when you have to finance something that you just use to carry stuff around, you’re paying too much for it.

Maybe I exaggerate, but I don’t think anyone will think any less of my wife, or any women, if they carry the same purse around for more than two weeks at a time. Just get a shovel and clean it out once in a while, and it will last you a good long time.

Rock and roll!

2010-08-13T15:21:00.002-04:00

I dropped my daughter off at the University of Georgia Wednesday, as we moved her into her dorm. I’ll give them credit at UGA – they’ve made the process of doing this so incredibly hot and difficult that you wind up being too tired to break into tears when you say your goodbyes.

Instead of going home and moping, my wife and I went to a concert at Philips Arena that night. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were the headliners and, let me tell you, they flat-out rocked the house. You can tell I’m old because I use phrases like “rocked the house.”

I had scored some last minute seats that became available for only $20 apiece. They were on the side of the stage, but very close, so we had a great view and didn’t need a second mortgage to buy the tickets, like the people right in front of the stage had to do.

The opening act was Crosby, Stills and Nash, as part of their “Can you believe we’re still alive?” tour. I’ve always said there were only three things I didn’t like about Crosby, Stills and Nash – Crosby, Stills and Nash. But, I reasoned, how bad can it be? At the worst, they’ll just come out and bore us to death with acoustic guitars.

Man, was I wrong about that one. They came out and bored me to death with electric guitars. At 7:30 sharp, David Crosby’s liver crawled out on stage, and the boys kicked into their version of “Woodstock.” The guy sitting next to me in a Woodstock 1969 t-shirt seemed to enjoy it, but that was probably just the acid flashbacks talking.

The sidestage view allowed me to notice some things I normally wouldn’t have seen. For instance, Stephen Stills has a bald spot the size of a manhole cover. David Crosby at one point turned his back to the audience, walked over near the drummer and very subtly, um, adjusted himself. As for Graham Nash – he was barefoot, and walked around with a glass of wine, and, well, I’m not entirely sure why he was even there.

I also noticed they had a monitor in front of the stage that was scrolling the lyrics to the songs. Really, guys, you don’t know “Teach Your Children” by now? Of course, I guess at their age, they probably can’t even remember if they put their teeth in that morning. I also saw a few young ladies on the front row throwing some fetching glances at CS&N, and dancing a little suggestively, though I’m not sure how you dance to those songs. Now, come on, girls. You’re going to need a case of Viagra and a defibrillator if you plan to hook up with these boys after the show.

All right, all right, I’m just kidding about the age thing. I sort of admire that men of advanced age can still get on stage and perform. It’s just that nobody ever thought rock and roll, and rock and roll musicians, would last this long. I remember seeing an old interview where a very young Paul McCartney said he’d feel silly, standing on stage at 30 years old singing “All My Loving.” He’s about 70 now and still doing it.

However, some of the concert attendees – well, they perhaps should make a concession or two to their age. Some of these women apparently have a magic mirror in their house, so when they look at themselves in their mini-dress and halter-top, they see how they looked in 1985. The rest of us, however, are subjected to how they look NOW, and it’s often not a pretty sight.

I used to think it was pathetic for old (over 30) people to go see old (over 30) rock stars play music, but now, what the heck? I’ll probably keep going even after the bands come onstage with a walker, and I’m hooked up to an oxygen tank. Long live rock and roll.

All grown up

2010-08-06T10:18:00.000-04:00

It was the early morning hours of Jan. 2, 1992 in a small rental house in Milledgeville, Ga. I had just crawled into bed after watching the New Year’s Day football games. Miami had defeated Nebraska in the Orange Bowl, and I was tired after a hard day of eating Doritos and manning the remote control from the couch.

Not long after I got under the covers, my wife Susan said, “Mark, I think something is happening.” I muttered something along the lines of “arrgehhhummfff” and went back to sleep.

Then she stood up and she said, “I’m serious. My water just broke.”

“It’s ok,” I mumbled, half-asleep. “I’ll get you another one.”

Then recognition crept in, and I realized what she meant. I jumped out of bed and ran around the house like Ricky Ricardo, getting everything ready to drive 40 miles to a Macon hospital for my wife to give birth to our first child.

We got to the hospital and, a mere 18 hours later, our new baby came into the world, a daughter we named Alice Susan and decided to call Allie. She came in screaming her head off, which was a sign of things to come.

I was accused by other members of the family, specifically my mother-in-law, of monopolizing my little girl in her first few days of life, not letting anybody else hold her. Most photographic evidence from the time supports this, as she seems to be in my arms in every picture. Fine, guilty as charged. My message to the world was clear – she’s mine. You can’t have her.

We brought her home and her first night, a miracle happened, as snow fell softly outside during the night, something that almost never happened in Milledgeville. Little did we know, this would be our last peaceful moment for the next six months.

This child did not like to sleep. Well, not at night, anyway. Being a modern dad, I alternated with my wife getting up with the baby, to feed her or change or just listen to her scream for half an hour. We both began to dread the words, “It’s your turn.”
But we survived, and the beautiful little baby turned into a beautiful little girl, with an angelic face, and a healthy dose of attitude. One of my most vivid memories came when she was not even two years old, and was sitting in the living room watching “Barney”. She was very close to the TV set, so I said “Allie, honey, back up from the TV. You’re too close.” She ignored me, so I said “If you don’t move back, I’m going to turn the TV off.” So she scooted back a little, and I heard her say, under her breath, “Whatever.” I swear I’m not making this up.

Being a parent makes you go a little crazy. It makes you want to walk down the street and slap a 6-year-old girl who made your daughter cry. It makes you want to call for a federal investigation into the basketball coach who didn’t put her on the team. It makes you cry at kindergarten graduations and it makes you tremble in fear every time you hear a siren and your child is not at home.

There’s a line in a John Prine song, “Time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps.” That is so true. Because 18 years have leapt by me, and next week I am going to take my baby up to The University of Georgia – which, just last week, was declared the top “party school” in the United States. Well, that’s just great.

I know a lot of people who have had children go off to college, and when I talk to them about it, they give me this look of pity that says, “You don’t know what you’re in for.” Well, I know it’s not going to be easy. I can imagine that drive back from Athens is going to be a pretty quiet one.

But I also know that, at some point, you have to let them go. You have to let them become adults, even though they give you reasons daily to wonder how they’re going to survive in the world. But she’s a smart girl, and she’ll make her own mistakes, and she’ll figure it out.

I can only hope that all those times I’ve annoyed her by telling her what not to do, and all of those times I’ve treated her “like a baby”, and all of those words of advice that caused her to roll her eyes, are going to actually have a positive effect.

And even though she’s going to be on her own, my message is the same. She’s still mine. You still can’t have her.

Aging ungracefully

2010-07-21T15:02:00.000-04:00

I don’t know how much I’m enjoying getting older.

Oh, wait, yes I do – not at all.

I’m sure you’ve heard all that crap about the advantages of getting older – wisdom, experience, maturity. It’s all overrated.

Do I know more things than I used to? Theoretically, yes. But I also forget things much more often. So knowledge may be flowing into my brain, but it’s flowing right back out, sweeping along with it all sorts of important information, like “Where did I park today?” and “Why did I walk into the bathroom?”

I mean, I am forgetting things immediately. This morning I had a headache, and I took down the bottle of pills, and 30 seconds later I looked at the pills and thought, “Wait. Did I just take two of those?” I honestly couldn’t remember. So to be safe, I took two more. The headache is gone, though my liver may now be damaged.

I will frequently go to google.com on my computer, and just sit there and stare at the screen, because I’ve already forgotten what I was searching for. Usually it’s something important, like “How old is Salma Hayek?”

Another not-so-fun part of aging is that I tend to repeat myself. And not only that, but I tend to repeat myself.

Then there are the physical ravages of time. I have a debit card with my photo on it. That photo is about 10 or 11 years old. In my mind’s eyes, that’s still the way I look – dashing, handsome, a little danger lurking behind the eyes. (Keep in the mind that I’m jacked up on headache meds as I type this).

Anyway, a friend sitting next to me saw my card and then looked at the real me and said, “Wow, all of that in only 10 years.” Meaning, Dude, you have gone downhill! Then to soften the blow, she said, “It happens to us all.” That was comforting. That’s like telling somebody, “Hey, you’re not the ugliest person I’ve ever seen.”

And the old body sure ain’t what it used to be. I used to run a lot. Less than two years ago, I did a half-marathon. But circumstances caused me to take a long break from running, and I’ve recently tried to get it going again. I’m not really sure you could what I’m doing “running.” Last time I ran, a turtle passed me. My legs felt like they were encased in cement, my lungs burned, and I was sweating like a Tennessee football player taking a drug test. And this was just walking from the car to the track.

I have hairs growing in new places and hair that’s turning gray. I had an MRI the other day and the doctor called to tell me that I have a fatty liver. So now, I’m on some liver-cleansing diet. It’s as wonderful as it sounds. The good news is, I’m bound to forget that I’m on it soon, and I’ll start eating real food again.

And yes, I know, getting old beats the alternative, and I should be thankful that I’m as healthy as I am, and I agree with all of that, I suppose. Wait, what was I talking about again?

Leaving the nest

2010-06-28T16:08:00.000-04:00

As a parent of teenagers, I am starting to face the oncoming empty nest syndrome.

My daughter has a job now, and will soon be heading off to the University of Georgia. My son has a girlfriend, car and drivers’ license, so I see him about as often as Halley’s Comet. Sometimes I walk through a quiet house that once was full of life and I get a little sad, thinking of them being gone for good.

And then other times I think, “Bring it on!”

Sure, I’ll miss them. But there are a lot of things I won’t miss. I won’t miss, for example, having to move three cars every time I need to back out of the driveway. I won’t miss lathering up my face with shaving cream, then opening a drawer to discover my razor has been “borrowed.” And I won’t miss never getting a good night’s sleep.

The other night, my wife and I were lying in bed asleep, since it was after 11 p.m. and we’re old. The bedroom door burst open and in stormed my 18-year-old daughter. She is a very girly, pretty, sweet girl, but at night she walks around the house like a water buffalo. She slams doors and cabinets and makes enough noise to scare away the devil. I should have known something was up when she didn’t sleep through a single night the first six months of her life. It was a bad omen.

On the night in question, she stomped through the room, opened the bathroom door, flipped on a light, grabbed something, and walked back out. “Don’t mind us,” I called out as she slammed the door behind her. “We’re just sleeping.”

The next night, I had hope of actually getting some sleep. My son was off at a church camp about 30 miles away, and my daughter was working late and wouldn’t be home until midnight. I was hoping I could be sound asleep by the time she blew into the house like a hurricane, as is her style.

At about 11:30, the phone rang. Any parent with children of driving age knows the absolute terror that sound can cause. You answer the phone in fear, praying that you won’t be hearing a state trooper on the other end of the line, or that your child is not calling you from a pay phone in the county jail or a wedding chapel in Gatlinburg. My fear quickly subsided, though, when I heard, “Uh, dad, see, what happened was, my car keys jumped out my hand, and got stuck in the ignition, and then I panicked and accidentally hit the lock button and closed the door, and…”

Suddenly, feared turned to anger. At this point I was fully awake and I said, “You locked your keys in your car AGAIN?” Then, to make sure I didn’t say anything that would be used against me later in a child protective services’ hearing, I did the smart thing and handed the phone to his mother. I tried to fall back asleep as they worked out the details of how to get the spare key to him. I knew I was going to wind up getting screwed in this deal, so I figured I’d at least try to get rested before my early morning drive.

Of course, within a few minutes the phone rang again. It was my daughter, thoughtfully letting us know that instead of midnight, she might not get home until 12:15. I know, I know, I should count my lucky stars that she was thoughtful enough to call me. Yep, that’s exactly what I was thinking. I’m a lucky, lucky man.

Speaking of Lucky – I had just laid my head down on my pillow when she decided to add to the fracas with some poorly-timed and very loud barks. I went to the back door and put it to her straight – “Look, I can’t do this with the rest of them, but if you don’t shut up I will duct-tape your mouth closed and put you in the trunk of a car until the morning.” She’s not leaving the nest, so I have to be a little more proactive with her.

Before I know it, I’ll be getting a good night’s sleep, I’ll always know where my razor is, and I won’t have to drive 60 extra miles on the way to work to unlock somebody’s car. And I’ll probably hate it.

Cold hard cash

2010-06-08T15:46:00.001-04:00

My daughter got her own debit card the other today. I haven’t read the Book of Revelation lately, but I’m pretty sure that’s one of the signs of the apocalypse.

I think my kids believe that debit cards are magic. They don’t fully comprehend the concept yet that without money in the bank account, the debit card is worthless. It’s like the old joke, I can’t be broke, I still have checks!

I was a full-grown adult by the time debit cards came into existence, and replaced cash in my wallet. You can buy just about anything anywhere with a debit card, but every now and then that dependence jumps up to bite me.

For example: I went to a CD store today to buy tickets to go see one of my favorite bands, Blue Rodeo, at Smith’s Olde Bar. I talked to the aging hippie who runs the store on the phone and, when the pot residue allowed him to make a complete sentence, he told me that if I got to the store by 2, I would be able to get my tickets.

So I drove all the way up Alpharetta, which is about halfway to the Yukon Territory from my house, and I went in the store, where Anglo-Cheech tried to sell me the tickets. After staring at the computer screen for a few minutes like the little girl watching TV in Poltergeist, he said, “Ok, there it is. That’ll be $34, dude.”

I pulled out my debit card, and he said, “Oh, it’s cash only for tickets.” Cash? What the heck is going on? Who outside of drug dealers, strippers and Congressmen demands to be paid only in cash?

As luck would have it, I did have some cash in my wallet, so I started counting out the bills, laid everything I had on the counter, and it came to – wait for it - $33. I looked at the guy pleadingly and I said, “I have $33 right here.” And he just stared back at me. He wasn’t having it.

“Hang on a sec,” I said, and I went out to my car, got on my hands and knees, scrounged between the seats and under the floor mats and I was able to come up with a quarter, six dimes and three nickels. I now had $34 on the button, so I went in the store, reminded the guy who I was and why I was there, then paid him and walked out with my tickets.

I got in the car, started heading back south, and it hit me – I had to go through the toll booth on Georgia 400, and that costs 50 cents, and I didn’t have it, cause mister dazed and confused wouldn’t cut me a break on the tickets! I got off at the next exit, found an ATM, withdrew some money, stopped in a convenience store for some gum so I wouldn’t have to break a $20 bill at the toll booth, and got back on the road.

I had always wondered what would happen to you if you got to the toll booth and you just flat-out did not have the 50 cents required to go through. Would they drag you out of your car and beat you? Would they impound your car and make you walk home? Do they take IOUs?

I was about to find out. I pulled up to the one of the booths with a cashier, since I didn’t have exact change, and noticed the brand-spanking-new sports car in front of me, which probably cost about $50,000, wasn’t moving, because the driver didn’t have 50 cents! He was talking to the toll-booth lady, who got out of the booth, walked behind his car, took a photograph of his license plate, went back into her booth, then handed him a slip of paper and lifted the gate. Ok, so THAT is what happens.

The moral of this story is, always keep a little cash on hand. You never know when you’re going to run into a toll booth or a Congressman.

Off the payroll

2010-05-11T13:44:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine the other day said she gets sad when she hears that song “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin, which is about a dad growing melancholy when his kid grows up and doesn’t seem to have time for him anymore.

Well, yeah, I suppose that can be sad. But I don’t know if it’s as sad as the moment when you realize you’ve been stupid enough to let not one, but two, teenagers have access to your debit card and PIN number.

This is what I was going through the other day. Sometimes I get to feeling masochistic and I want to do bad things to myself, so I sign on to my online banking account and check to see much money has flown out the door the past few days. Here’s a financial tip for you – as long as the rest of my family has access to a debit card, you should invest heavily in Target, Wal-Mart, Kroger, Walgreens and all fast-food restaurants. We’re singlehandedly keeping those businesses in the black.

I joke all the time that I need to get my kids off the payroll. Oh, wait, those aren’t jokes at all. It’s just wishful thinking. Ever gotten a car insurance bill after adding two teen-aged drivers to your policy? I suggest you open it in a bean-bag chair with some smelling salts nearby.

I actually heard “Cat’s in the Cradle” the other day, and I came up with a new song that is sung to the same tune, called “Kid’s on the payroll.” Here it goes:

“Well, the kid’s on the payroll
And I’m always broke
Tell them to save
And they think it’s a joke

When you moving out?
Dad, I don’t know when
I’ll have some money then, son
You know I’ll have some money then.”

I think it could be a hit.

The other day my son went off to the grocery store, his mom’s debit card in hand, to pick up a few things for dinner. Somehow, a few unnecessary things seemed to have jumped into his shopping cart, like a box of cupcakes and a big bag of Doritos.

Later that evening, I took the bag of Doritos from the kitchen and headed out back to grill something for supper and spend some quality time with Lucky, who loves Doritos almost as much as she loves me. My son saw me and said, “Hey, what are you going with my Doritos?”

I looked at him and said, “Your Doritos?” “Yeah,” he said, “I bought them.”

“Oh, you bought them, did you? Tell me, how much did these Doritos cost you?”

“It was like four dollars and something,” he said. I could tell he wasn’t grasping the point, so I said, “No, how much” – and I pointed at his chest, for emphasis – “did they cost you?” Again, he said “Four dollars,” so I said, “Oh, so you paid for these with your own money, or did you use the debit card?”

He said he used the card, so I said, “Well, unless you have opened a secret checking account I don’t know about, you bought these Doritos with MY money.” At which point I opened the bag and ate about 30 of them right in front of him. I gave the rest to Lucky, who is the only one in the family without a debit card, and therefore my current favorite.

Stupid cats

2010-04-29T20:57:00.001-04:00

I used to love to read the Peanuts’ comic strips. One of my favorite storylines was Snoopy’s ongoing battles with the cat next door, which he always referred to as “that stupid cat.”

I know how he feels. After I conquered the Chihuahuas owned by the rednecks renting the house next door to me, they’ve unleashed a new instrument of terror – stupid cats.

There are two and perhaps three orange cats at the house, and they let them roam freely. Which means, into my yard. Now, ordinarily, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Cats can’t do a lot of damage, right, and they don’t bark or chew up stuff. Sure, one of they may get run over because they tend to like to sleep under our cars, but things happen. They have eight more lives anyway, right.

But things have changed. See, I have a bare spot in my yard, and the other day I decided to fix it. I put out some seed, covered it with topsoil and fertilizer, and laid some straw on top. I could have gotten some sod, but that seems like cheating.

So I look out the front door the other day, and two orange cats are right there where I planted the seeds, rolling around and knocking the straw everywhere. I went outside, cursed them, yelled “Git!” at the top of my lungs, and they scurried away. What got into those stupid cats, I thought? But I tidied everything back up and went inside.

Next day I walk out, they’re doing it again, only this time it’s obvious they’ve been rooting around in there for a while. I yelled, and they just looked at me, so I picked up a football and fired it at them, and they skedaddled. I walked over to fix up their mess, and then it hit me – they had found a new litter box. They had left some, well, evidence. Those blankety-blanking cats were out there blankety-blanking in my blankety-blanking front yard!

This reminded me of why I don’t like cats in the first place. It took my mind back to when I dated a girl back in high school, and her family had some ridiculously pampered cats. It was rumored they paid $500 for them - $500 for a cat! – and I disliked them from the start.

I remember our first date. I dropped her off at the door. She stood there with the sliding glass door slightly ajar, and I told her that I had a good time, and I closed my eyes and leaned forward to do what teenage boys do at the end of a first date, and – whoosh. I felt something brush past my pants leg.

I opened my eyes to find my date not standing there expectantly with puckered lips, but instead looking past me, frantic and wide-eyed. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “The cat got out!” she screamed. “Oh, it will come back,” I said, and moved in again, but I wound up clutching air, because she was past me and headed toward the back yard.

Great, I thought. This stupid cat has ruined my date. I reluctantly followed the girl into the back yard, and learned that there was a creek back there. A creek with a very high bank. And that stupid cat was down by the creek, looking up at the high bank and meowing helplessly, since it was apparently not capable of climbing back up.

So you can guess what happened. I climbed down into that creek, I grabbed Fluffy or whatever the stupid thing’s name was, and I carried it back up the bank, slipping a time or two, and returned the expensive fur ball to my date. And did I get rewarded for my chivalry? No, I couldn’t even kiss her goodnight, because she was standing there holding and stroking the blankety-blanking cat.

With that memory coming back, as well as the sight of cat doo-doo in my front yard, I walked over to the neighbors’ house and rang the bell. A young lady with a blank look on her face came to the door and listened as I explained, politely, what was going on, and asked her to please figure out a way to keep the kitties out of my yard. She said she would talk to her mother about it.

I haven’t seen them since, which is good, because if I catch them doing number two in my yard again, I’m going to take them out in the back yard and introduce them to Lucky. She’d love to play with a couple of stupid cats.

Men vs. women

2010-04-08T14:14:00.001-04:00

I was thinking this morning (a rare occurrence) about some of the ways men and women are different.

Of course, women are crazy – and I say that with affection - but I mean other than that. There is a great divide between the behavior of the genders.

The difference came up the other night, when I was at the grocery store with my wife and daughter, and I was pushing the shopping cart out to the car, when I did what any man would do – I jumped up on it and rode it part of the way across the parking lot, pretending I was Richard Petty, hopping off just before we reached our car.

My daughter was predictably embarrassed at this childish behavior, but my wife assured her that it was normal, and that my son does it too. It’s in our genes, like the urge to scratch inappropriate places in public settings. It’s what we do. It’s how we roll.

There are quite a few things men do that you never see women do. For example, you never see a woman walk into a room, then jump as high as she can and try to touch the ceiling. But most males do this, or at least we do until when we’re about 40, when such an activity would make our hamstrings pop like rubber bands stretched too tight.

We don’t just throw away used paper towels or crumpled up pieces of paper; we pretend the garbage can is a basketball goal, and we shoot. Sometimes we’ll do a hook shot, or a fadeaway jumper, or if nobody is looking, a vicious 360 dunk.

We pick up any long, slender object nearby (umbrella, yard stick) and we swing it like a golf club or a baseball bat, or, if you were one of those weird Dungeons and Dragon kids, pretend it’s a sword. This impulse never goes away.

I have never seen a woman kick a rock down the sidewalk as she walked, trying to keep it going for as long as she can, and pretending in her head that if she can get past three more driveways, she will have set a new world record.

I’ve never seen a woman try to catch pennies off of her elbow. I will still occasionally bend my arm back, stack up some pennies and then try to snag them without letting any hit the floor. My friends and I used to practice this all the time. My personal record is 37.

You very seldom see a woman play air guitar, and that’s good, because quite frankly, they don’t do it very well. But if you take any man of a certain age and crank out the opening to “Whole Lotta Love” or “Sweet Child O’Mine,” he will almost instantly drop his right hand to his side and pretend to hit the strings with his imaginary pick. Depending on the situation, he may soon start doing windmills, making funny faces and sliding across the floor on his knees.

A man cannot stand and simply hold a basketball or soccer ball or tennis ball. He must instinctively bounce it, and will do so until a woman screams in anguish for him to stop. They have these super-bouncy balls in Dick’s Sporting Goods, and when I was in there with my son recently he picked one up and bounced it, and it almost reached the ceiling. Of course, I got on to him and told him to stop, but inside I was thinking, “Dude. That is so cool.”

This is just a small list of some of the fun women are missing out on in life. They don’t make paper footballs or throw spitballs or thump each other on the ear or all sorts of other fun things, but I think they should give it a try. Might make them not so crazy.

The good, the bad and the ugly

2010-03-29T16:23:00.001-04:00

I had a pretty interesting weekend, I must say. It consisted of the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good - I learned that my daughter Allie has been accepted into the University of Georgia. The bad - I got “Pete Best-ed” from the church band. And the ugly – I turned 46 years old Friday.

Let’s concentrate on the good. I was filled with elation upon learning that she’d gotten in to UGA. We were sweating it out, because it’s a lot harder to get in there now than I was when I attended. I think all I had to do was spell “UGA” and demonstrate that I knew which foot the proper shoe went on. For football players, they waived the spelling requirement.

But now they look at all sorts of crazy things like grade-point average and high school curriculum and test scores and what not, and it’s pretty competitive.

After the initial elation and pride that I felt, reality came barreling down the track and smacked me like it was Ike Turner and I didn’t have supper ready on time. The first blow was when I realized that college isn’t free, even with the HOPE scholarship. After getting word that she’d been admitted, my daughter asked me to buy her a new Georgia shirt as a reward. I pointed out that I was about to “reward” her for the next four years.

But the money can be raised, hopefully without me getting a second job or having to sell an organ on Craigslist. Now it’s the thought of turning my baby girl loose in Athens that’s giving me an ulcer the size of Lake Huron.

Of course, things have changed when I was a student there. Really, all I did was study, go to the library, attend the occasional Bible study and maybe play some Parcheesi with my friends, if I could find time after I finished up my work at the homeless center.

Okay, so that’s not exactly all 100 percent true. I lived in a house with four other guys for a year and prayed every time there was a knock on the door that it wasn’t a DEA agent. I wasn’t doing anything illegal, mind you (I’m being honest this time), but I’m pretty sure somebody in the house was at any given time.

The next year I moved into an apartment. I had a weirdo roommate who left town in the cover of night about halfway through the year, owing me and a bunch of other people quite a bit of money. They don’t put this sort of thing on the college brochures.

I only went to UGA for two years, after first graduating from a junior college. I never lived in the dorms or ate in the campus cafeterias, so my daughter will get to experience a side of college life that I never saw. She will meet new people, which is good, since I mostly hung around guys I already knew from high school and had also moved on to Athens. Two of them who lived in the house died before they reached 40, so in retrospect it was perhaps not the best decision.

But she will do great. She’s smart and ambitious and I know she will continue to make me proud. Just thinking about it makes me smile, and helps me get over the sting of being asked to hand over my drumsticks, and getting one year closer to 50.

Driving me crazy

2010-03-16T17:44:00.001-04:00

My 16-year-old is driving now. Not just driving me crazy, but driving his own car. Well, it’s my car, but I’m letting him drive it.

Now we have four drivers at the house, which means my monthly car insurance costs are roughly equivalent to the Obamacare health reform bill. Car insurance is apparently so high because they spend $800 billion dollars a month on TV commercials. That should be your priority, mister president. Get Flo from Progressive off my TV.

The other day my son informed me that he was going over to some girl’s house. I asked him who all was going to be there, and he said two girls, and him, and another boy. Oh, he added, and her mother.

So as he was leaving, I said, “Can you leave me the mother’s phone number? You know, just in case I need to call her.” He looked at me kind of incredulously, and then he said, “Why, you don’t trust me?”

Well, that was an easy one. “No,” I said.

He wanted to know why I didn’t trust him. That’s another easy one. He’s a 16-year-old boy. I used to be one. I know what they do.

Now, in truth, other than mental anguish, my two teenagers have not caused me much trouble so far. No arrests, no lawsuits, no TV news crews on my front lawn or subpoenas or calls from the producers of the Maury Povich Show asking me to sign a waiver. But you have to keep an eye on them, especially boys.

They’re great when you’re teaching them to drive. They keep both hands on the wheel, they pay attention to what you say, they don’t turn the radio on, and they are very careful about everything they’re doing. But let this be a warning to all parents – it’s a lie. When you’re out of the picture, all bets are off.

I was standing in my driveway one day and I thought, why is a jet plane landing in my neighborhood? Then I realized it was my daughter coming down the road at Daytona 500 speed. I half-expected to see police cars chasing her and a TV news helicopter flying overhead. We had a “talk” and she doesn’t do that anymore, at least not when she thinks I might be able to see her.

We now have four cars at my house, none in the garage. We could do like our trashy neighbors and just park all over the lawn, but instead we have a game of musical chairs every night or morning trying to get us all lined up, like airplanes on a runway. The other morning I went out to my son’s car so I could get out, and when I put the key in the ignition I got quite a shock, as his stereo was turned up to 11 and I got blasted by an ear-splitting rap song. I looked like Wil E. Coyote after he accidentally electrocutes himself. Again, we had a “talk”, once I regained consciousness.

He has one key for his car, and I’ve suggested about, oh, a trillion times that he should go get an extra key made. When I say that, or pretty much anything, here’s what he hears: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. So of course, I was right in the way that dads inevitably are, and I got a phone call Sunday afternoon that he had locked his keys in his car. Luckily for him, he was at the church at the time, and my reaction when I got there was somewhat muted.

You can’t break into these newer cars as easily as you could back in my day, so I had to call a locksmith, who came right away because we were at our church and gave us a discount because, in his words, we were “good Christian people.” Luckily, he could not read my mind at the time, or he might have come to a different conclusion.

Talk talk

2010-03-04T13:13:00.002-05:00

I find myself more and more talking to inanimate objects that are incapable of understanding what I am saying and answering back.

No, I don’t mean my children. I mean other things in life that have me questioning my sanity.

For example, I’ve gotten really bad about talking to the TV, especially during sporting events. This past Georgia football season, I had quite a few one-sided conversations with Bulldogs’ quarterback Joe Cox. Most of what I said cannot be repeated in mixed company nor near my preacher.

Talking to the TV can cause some confusion around the house. I’ll yell, “What the hell are you thinking?”, and my wife will yell back from the kitchen, “I’m unloading the dishwasher, is that a problem?” I have to explain that I was not talking to her, I was talking to Matt Ryan. So then I’ll say, hey, while you’re up, can you bring me something to drink? At which point she yells, “What the hell are you thinking?”

I also like to talk to golf balls. I’ll yell “Stop!” or “Go!” or “Don’t go in the woods, you stupid Q@#$@!#$^@#$!” Of course, the golf ball doesn’t listen and does what it wants anyway, but I guess it makes me feel better to say something. It’s a lot like writing a letter to your Congressman.

I talk to other drivers in traffic. It’s probably a good thing they can’t hear me, especially if they have a gun in the car, because I’m rarely complimenting their driving skills or saying top-o-the-morn-to-ya. If I ever get cut off by a lip-reader with a loaded gun and an itchy trigger finger, I’m probably in trouble.

I talk to my computer screen at work, saying stuff like “Yeah, right,” especially when I open an e-mail from somebody asking me to do something unreasonable, like extra work.

I have a lot of one-sided conversations with my dog. She is a pretty good listener, though I suspect she’s hoping that no matter what I’m saying, at some point I’ll get to “Come on, Lucky, time to eat.”

I talk to myself a good bit, too. I think a lot of us do that. But with me, it’s never positive in a Stuart Smalley kind of way. I don’t say, “Wow, Mark, you really look good today,” or “Hey, that was a good decision, buddy.” No, it’s usually “Wow, could you be a bigger idiot?” or “If you get any fatter, they’re going to be taking you out of the house with a crane as Oprah watches with empathy.”

This is probably pretty normal behavior, and I guess I should only be worried if the TV and the computer or the golf ball start talking back to me. Lucky doesn’t talk back, she just licks my toes. The children talk back, but it’s often unrelated to what I’ve said to them. And no, I don’t answer when I’m talking to myself. What the hell are you thinking?

Barking up the wrong tree

2010-02-22T11:30:00.002-05:00

My next-door neighbors never come outside. I don’t know if it’s a Barnabas Collins deal or if they are allergic to the sun, but we never see them, which is fine, because I don’t want to have to remember their names and make small talk with them.

But we may be headed toward war, thanks to their dogs. Two things you don’t want in your life are neighbor trouble and in-law trouble, but I may not be able to avoid the former.

The other morning, Lucky, my dog, was in the back yard going crazy, growling and barking and making kamikaze runs at the fence. This meant that something was on the other side of the fence that was disturbing her. With Lucky, you never know – it could be a cat or a neighborhood kid or an al Qeada sleeper cell. Her reaction is the same.

So I went outside to investigate and saw the culprit – a rat was running around my front yard. I yelled at it to get out of there, and then it barked at me. Well, I’m no Marlin Perkins, but I know that rats don’t bark, so I looked more closely and realized it was the neighbor’s Chihuahua.

I despise that Chihuahua. Actually, my vampire neighbors have two of them, and they bark non-stop every second that they’re outside. The neighbors have a wooden swing set in their back yard, and the Chihuahuas find it entertaining to scurry to the top of it, which gives them a good vantage from which to look into my yard and bark their high-pitched incessant noise at Lucky. I can’t speak dog language, but I’m pretty sure whatever they’re saying is insulting.

This hurts Lucky’s feelings, since she’s never done anything to those yappy beasts, and so she naturally responds by barking back at them. I can’t blame her, but I don’t want to hear it, so then I have to go out back and curse at Lucky, which makes us both feel bad.

Anyway, on the morning I saw them running around – there’s a brown one and a black one – I went next door to tell the neighbors that their dogs had gotten out of the fence. I wasn’t really being nice; I just wanted them to get away from my fence before Lucky had a heart attack. Eventually a woman came to the door – I could only assume that she was the lady of the house, since I haven’t seen her outside in five years – and I told her that I believed her cute little dogs had gotten loose.

This woman looked like she’d just risen from a coma. She didn’t say a word to me, just said over her shoulder, “The Chihuahuas are out,” turned her back to me and crept back to her coffin. In a few seconds an older woman appeared, and she brushed past me out the door, looking for the miniature menaces.

I walked around to the side of the house and pointed to a spot where the dogs had dug out under her fence. She just grunted, then pointed to some boards that had been tossed into the ditch between your yards and said, “Are those your boards?” I said, “No, m’am, I don’t throw crap in the ditch and leave it.” She missed my sarcasm and went to get a board to seal up the hole. Nice people.

Sunday I took Lucky for a walk, and as we walked past the neighbor’s house, I heard the yapping again. The brown Chihuahua was again running free in the front yard, and it was coming toward us in a menacing manner. Lucky glanced at it with a look that said, “One step closer and I’m going to have an early supper,” and I told the dog, “Don’t make me step on you, Taco Bell.” It finally backed off, but never shut up.

In addition, there are other dogs added to the mix. From their back yard I often hear a deep, bellowing bark, coming from some sort of hound dog. And lately, in addition to the escaped Chihuahua, there is often another small dog in front of their house, tied to a bush, trailer-park style. That’s really going to help property values.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. Hopefully they’ll fix it so the Chihuahuas can’t get out of the fence, or maybe they’ll keep them in the house, or maybe they’ll just run away. I just hope I don’t get one of them on my shoe.

Call me Mark

2010-02-03T10:28:00.002-05:00

At church Sunday, two separate people called me David. Granted, I’ve been called much worse than that, but it irritated me a little bit, because that’s not my name.

Well, OK, it IS my name, but it’s not the one I go by. I go by Mark. Don’t ask my why I go by my middle name. That was my parents’ doing. By the time I realized that, I was well-established as a Mark and there was no going back.

I probably had it coming to me, anyway, because last week I went to a music store in Griffin with my daughter, and introduced her to a guy who works there that I’ve known for about 20 years. “This is my friend, John,” I told her. I noticed John had a bit of a strange look on his face, and I realized why later in the car, when it occurred to me that his name is actually David.

And there’s another guy at church who called me David for years, which is all right, because I called him Bill all that time, and his name is David. Complicating matters as the fact that my son is also named David. What is it about that name?

I have a neighbor who lives across the street from me, and for many years we have stood outside in our yards and talk about football or golf or yard work and other important man-stuff. I would say, “Hey, Clay, how are you doing?”, or “See you later, Clay.”

One day my wife saw his wife in the grocery store, and the woman made a couple of references to somebody named “Thad.” Finally my wife said, “Is your husband named Thad?” Yes, she said, he is. I’d only been calling him Clay for, oh, eight years or so.

I wonder why he didn’t correct me? But then again, I didn’t correct anybody at church, and the guy in the music store didn’t correct me. I guess we don’t want to embarrass people.

I used to work for a guy, now retired, who would always pass me in the hall and say, “Hey there, buddy.” I thought, wow, isn’t that nice, he’s the head of the whole department and he thinks of me as his buddy. What a friendly guy.

As a couple of years passed, though, I noticed that he only called me buddy, never Mark. So I figured either he thought my name WAS Buddy, or that I was so low on the totem pole that he didn’t feel the need to waste any energy learning my real name. Turns out the latter assumption was correct.

Whenever I answer the phone and somebody asks to speak with David Williams, I hang up, because it’s generally somebody looking to sell me something I don’t want or collect money I don’t have.

I don’t know what to do about getting my name right at church. It’s not a big church, and I’ve been a member there for four years. Maybe I should just wear a nametag.

Work it out

2010-01-27T11:59:00.002-05:00

I went to the gym the other day. When I signed in, I swiped a little key card, and my name came up on a computer screen, along with a little information about me. For example, it read “Number of visits this year – 1.” Well, it’s only January.

But underneath that it read, “Number of visits last year – 1.” Wow, now I’m getting mocked by a computer. It was a scene right out of 2001.

OK, so last year was a tough year, but this year I’m committed to at least tripling my workouts from the previous 12 months.

I went into the locker room and began changing clothes, and caught something out of the corner of my eye. “Whoa,” I said to myself, “when did they start letting women come in here? And ugly ones, at that!” Of course I soon realized I was looking in the mirror, and those breasts were mine. Now it made sense why that woman had a goatee.

I have to tell you, being this out of shape is making me miserable. I get winded changing the channel on the TV. I used to be in pretty good shape. Now I just have a pretty bad shape. I don’t have washboard abs, I have washtub abs. Babies look at my chest and lick their lips. I spotted myself, or at least my backside, on one of those TV news segments about how Americans are obese.

The tightness of my clothes has become an issue. When I wear blue jeans, I’m afraid that at any minute the button is going to pop and become a small missile. When I take them off, it looks I have tattooed the word “Levi’s” backwards just under my belly button.

My first workout of the year was not particularly strenuous. I got on the treadmill and put it on the “Old man walking to the front of the room to collect his bingo prize” setting. Then I bumped it up to “Teenager working in a retail store” speed. Pretty soon I was sweating like a Tennessee fan taking a drug test (they always worry that they didn’t study enough). Since I wasn’t sure anybody around me knew CPR, I cut the workout short at about 20 minutes.

Hey, it’s a start. I didn’t get this big overnight. I’m going to ramp up my workouts and cut back on my eating and before long I’ll be able to drive home without unbuttoning my pants, and I’ll be able to take my shirt off in the summer at the beach without somebody calling Sea World and reporting an escape. I may not look like Fabio, but I can at least stop looking like a slightly-hairy pregnant woman, and I’ll make that stupid ridiculing computer eat its words.

No rest for the weary

2010-01-13T15:25:00.001-05:00

I was sitting on the couch the other night, wearing my colorful superhero pajama pants and a T-shirt. I had a fresh sleeve of soda crackers, a cold drink, a Georgia Bulldogs snuggie over my knees, something about Hitler playing on The History Channel, a fire in the fireplace, a book to read in case the show was boring, and a fat dog stretched out by the couch, snoring and farting in unison. It was 8:05 p.m., and I was settled in for the night.

Take it easy, ladies. I know that visual is making you hot.

There should be a rule. Once a man has settled in for the night, he should be expected to do nothing that requires any effort until the next day. It’s a cutoff point. This lane is closed. Come back tomorrow.

But, no. My reverie was shattered by groans and semi-curses from the kitchen. “There’s water everywhere under the sink,” my wife said, to nobody in particular, but loud enough for me to hear. I suspect that was on purpose. However, that did not prevent me from pretending I didn’t hear it.

“Oh, this is great,” I heard her say, a little louder. I was going to my offer my opinion that it was probably a short-term, one-time, minor leak, and I would look at it the following morning, when she said, “There’s water shooting out everywhere.” Well, now I had a dilemma. It was looking more and more like I was going to have to go check it out.

Look, I don’t mind doing things around the house, but once you’re settled in, if you break out of it, well, you’ll never get that comfortable feeling back. Once the spell is broken, it can’t be remade. But one more scream from the kitchen convinced me that I had better go check it out, or at least pretend to.

After unloading everything under the sink and drying up the water (the volume of which had been highly exaggerated, I might add), I crawled under there and found the issue – there’s a crack in the hose for the sprayer attachment. I instantly solved the problem: “Just don’t use the sprayer any more,” I said. But she told me that she uses it all the time, so I said OK, I’ll fix it. Just not tonight.

I got back to the couch, but as I’d feared, the thrill was gone. Hitler had invaded two more countries since I’d left the TV, Lucky wanted to go out (to escalate the farts, I assumed), my drink was flat, and the fire had almost died. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot and crawled back into my little slice of paradise.

Then I hear, “Dad!” Let me tell you something about kids. Once they reach a certain age, anytime you hear “Dad”, it is followed by something that is not good. When they’re little, it’s “Dad, I drew you a picture,” or “Dad, can you read me a story?” In the teen years, they either want something or they’ve broken something.

My son says, “You need to come check out the sink in my bathroom.” What is with the sinks? Why, I asked. Well, he explained it, but by now he was speaking Teenagese, which sort of sounds like a drunk person with cotton in their mouth speaking Mandarin Chinese underwater, so I went up to check it out myself. It turns out the stopper was stuck down in the drain, and the sink was full of water which would not go down. I’m not going to claim I fixed the problem, but using a plastic cup and a Swiss Army knife, I at least got rid of the water.

So now, I have at least two minor plumbing jobs ahead of me this weekend, assuming nothing else breaks before then. I finally made it to back to the couch, but by then it was close to bedtime, so I didn’t get to enjoy it. I closed my eyes and dreamed of a better day ahead.

No such luck. This morning involved a screaming match, a frantic search for a lost inhaler and a car with a dead battery. I wonder what joys tonight holds in store?

Snow day

2010-01-08T13:39:00.001-05:00

It snowed a bit here last night, just enough to make us go crazy and to make all the transplanted Yankees make fun of us for closing school due to a half-inch of snow.

Well, anybody complaining about our snow excitement can do what Jerry Lee Lewis told England to do back in the ’50s. If we want to go insane over a few flakes, that’s our right. We ain’t hurtin’ nobody.

I can remember as a child getting so excited at the prospect of snow. My mother would look up at the sky some times on cold winter days and pronounce authoritatively, “Those are snow clouds.” Now, my mother was born in Hawkinsville, Ga., and never lived outside of central Georgia her whole life. So she wouldn’t know a “snow cloud” from a snow pea, but I believed her back then.

She would also say sometimes, “It’s too cold to snow.” I guess maybe she was just saying that to help me deal with my disappointment, in case nothing happened. It didn’t strike me until years later that it snows quite a lot at the North Pole, for example, and it gets pretty stinking cold up there. Colder than it ever got in Hawkinsville.

The prospect of playing in the snow was always better than the reality. Because once you got out into it, you realized that this stuff was cold and wet and pretty much unpleasant. I’d be good for about 15 minutes, and then I’d be banging on the door to come back in and drink some hot chocolate.

The reason we didn’t have much fun playing in the snow is we weren’t equipped. We didn’t have big heavy coats and galoshes and gloves. There was no need for them. So my mom would send me outside with empty plastic bread wrappers tied over my tennis shoes. Instead of gloves, she would put socks on my hands, and I would be wearing my dad’s too-big coat and a stocking cap. I looked like something out of a Dickens’ novel.

I can only remember a couple of really major snow events in my life. In 1982, a snowstorm hit in the middle of the afternoon unexpectedly, and it was followed by several days of sub-freezing temps, so the roads could never get passable. I was stranded at a friend’s place and spent three days in a small house with five people and a surly Chihuahua. There was no Internet or cell phones or Playstation then, and most people didn’t have a satellite dish, so we ate Little Debbie snacks and watched re-runs of “Meadowlark Lemon and the Bucketeers” on cable TV. Good times.

The other big snowstorm happened in March of 1993, part of a major storm that affected the entire Eastern United States. That one wasn’t much fun because I had a baby, a pregnant wife and no electricity, so we had to stay at my brother’s house for a while. At least he didn’t have a Chihuahua.

I guess we’re about due for a good, old-fashioned snow event that shuts down the whole state for a few days. All it will take is maybe two inches of snow. Well, bring it on. I have firewood, a supply of Little Debbies and a big dog with a good disposition to ride it out with.

Not off to a flying start

2010-01-05T15:16:00.000-05:00

This new year has begun, but I want a do-over.

Oh, it started out all right. The first few days were fine. My daughter turned 18 and to celebrate, we took her to a nice restaurant in Atlanta, where I dropped a couple of benjamins on dinner. It sort of made me miss the days of Chuck E Cheese.

Then, Monday came, the first day back at work of the new year, a time of promise, and renewal, and rededication, and what the hell am I talking about? It was a miserable day.

First off, I woke up and it was 18 degrees outside. Hello, I live in Georgia. I don’t function in cold weather. If I wanted this, I’d move to Saskatoon. I was promised there would be global warming, but no. I get 18 degrees. There’s an inconvenient truth for you.

I went and cranked up my car and let it sit in the driveway for about 10 minutes, so it could warm up and wouldn’t feel like the inside of a refrigerator when I got in to go to work. Well, I climbed in, and it didn’t feel like a refrigerator, it felt like a freezer. I had the heat on maximum, but it was blowing out air colder than Hitler’s heart. My fingers froze to the steering wheel. Note to self: get car’s heater fixed.

I drove on to work, and after about 30 minutes, the air changed from frigid to tepid, so I didn’t become the first person to ever freeze to death on I-75 in a 2002 Chevy Impala. But, it being Monday, and in Atlanta, and the first day back to work, traffic was a nightmare because there was ice on the highway.

So I took a detour and rode through a lovely stretch of Atlanta called Metropolitan Parkway, formerly known as Stewart Avenue. Let’s just say this is not the part of the city that the chamber of commerce puts on its brochures. Luckily, it was so cold that even the hookers and pimps stayed indoors.

At this point I looked down and noticed that the car’s fuel gauge was on “less than empty.” Well, now I was faced with the prospect of running out of gas in a sketchy part of town – oh, and did I mention it was 18 degrees? Finally I located a gas station in the shadow of the Georgia Dome, and breathed a sigh of relief, until I noticed that every single pump was covered by a black garbage bag, the universal sign of, “We ain’t got no gas.”

I held my breath and decided to risk it, and I made it to work without running out. That’s when I realized I had left my employee badge at home. If you work in a big company, you are nothing without your employee badge. You can’t even get into the bathrooms. This was foretold in the Book of Revelation.

So instead of getting to park in the employee deck, I was forced to park in the visitor’s lot, which is conveniently located about 10 miles from the building’s entrance. After walking into a freezing 40-mph wind, leaning forward at a 45-degree angle so I wouldn’t get blown away, I got to the building, picked up a temporary badge and began to eagerly do my work.

By noon I felt like I had the Black Plague (trust me, it’s bad), so I went home and flirted with death for a couple of hours. I fell asleep, only to have my daughter enter the bedroom and say, “Dad?” “What?” I moaned. “Nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you were alive.” Yes, I told her, I was alive, and now, unfortunately, awake.

I made it through the rest of the day without incident, all the while silently hoping that the year was only going to get better from here. This morning, I awoke a new man, ready to start again. I had my badge with me, I heard on the TV that traffic was light, and I was going to drive the Mustang I bought for my son to work so I wouldn’t freeze during the commute.

I showered, got dressed, and went outside to warm up his Mustang before I left for work. That was when I discovered that he had a dead battery, as he had left the headlights on all night. So now, I had to drive to work in mostly-heaterless Impala yet again. Did I mention that it was again 18 degrees outside?

This is gonna be a long year.

Goodbye, my friend

2009-12-26T17:07:00.002-05:00

A long time ago – I don’t remember the exact year, but I think it was 1983 – I was attending Gordon Junior College, a little school in Barnesville, Ga., and I had one of those chance encounters that changed me.

I was standing outside the small student center there, and I noticed this odd-looking little guy standing next to me. He was several inches shorter than me, and he was wearing a dark coat and carrying what I thought at first was a briefcase, but turned out to be a trumpet case. What a nerd, I thought.

But we began to talk, and after a few minutes, we discovered that we had something in common - music. We were both big Beatles fans, and there were several other groups that we both liked, and before long we were discussing how cool it would be form our own band.

That’s how I came to know Vic Chesnutt, who died on Christmas Day in an Athens hospital, only 45 years old, his body and his spirit apparently broken, 20 years after the world discovered the wonder of his music.

We never really got a band going back then, in part because I had no discernible musical ability. But Vic did. He could play guitar and keyboards and trumpets and he was already writing his own songs. Many afternoons I would go over to his house near Zebulon, along with our friend Todd McBride, and listen to music and try to play some and sing and make each other laugh. I don’t think I was ever around him for more than 10 minutes without laughing, and vice versa.

The laughter was interrupted one night when Vic lost control of his station wagon and crashed into a ditch, a wreck that left him partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. A few of us went to see him shortly after the wreck at the Shephard Spinal Center in Atlanta, and it was a very difficult thing to deal with. But even that day, he made me laugh. We were on an elevator with a group of nurses and doctors and he put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and said, “Mmmm, good doobie. Good doobie.”

Though he was never able to fully regain the use and agility in his right hand, he figured out a way to play guitar, and was soon making music again. Several of my friends and I found ourselves in Athens, eventually, some going to college, some playing in a band. Vic and Todd and some others formed a band, and for a few short months, I actually joined them as their drummer. Those were some of the best times of my life.

I can recall many times, sitting around at somebody’s house in Athens, hearing Vic play his newest song. I was always amazed. His songs were quirky, funny, heartfelt, personal, and unlike anything else I’d heard. You don’t really see his music compared to many others, because he was that rarest of breed, an original.

I graduated from UGA, moved away, started raising a family, so my trips back to Athens and my chances to see and talk to Vic became rarer and rarer. He gave me a guitar, a cheap Yamaha acoustic that he had adorned with plastic stickers. He encouraged me to learn how to play, and to write songs, and I did, though none of them are as good as his. I still have that old guitar, even though it’s long past being playable, and it is one of my most treasured possessions. I’m glad he never asked for it back.

Vic got his big break not long after I left Athens. Michael Stipe, always a big fan of Vic’s, produced his first two albums, and they were a sensation – Little, and West of Rome. Music critics loved him, as did other musicians. Vic never made it big commercially, but he had a devoted following all across the country and in Europe. He was friends with Lucinda Williams and recorded with Emmylou Harris and was in “Slingblade” with his friend Billy Bob Thornton. He was, in my eyes at least, a huge star.

As too often happens with old friends, we grow apart, we lose touch, we go years without seeing each other or talking to each other. The last time I saw him was several years ago, in an Atlanta club, where was playing a show to promote his CD Silver Lake. I only got to speak to him a few minutes after the show, but when he saw me his eyes lit up and he started pointing at me, and for that few minutes we were the same as we were in 1983, laughing at each other’s dumb jokes and enjoying each other’s company.

For many, many years, I would have regularly have dreams in which Vic would appear, and in all of them, he was not in a wheelchair, but he was walking and running. I guess that’s the way my mind wanted to remember him. Today, and for the past couple of days, he’s been not in my dreams, but in my waking mind, and I don’t picture him running or walking, but I picture him laughing, and pointing at me, and picking up his guitar to blow me away again. That’s how he will always live in my mind. Rest in peace, my friend.

It's almost here

2009-12-22T14:55:00.000-05:00

Here it is, three days before Christmas, and I’ve already finished my shopping. It’s kind of a letdown. I don’t know what to do with myself now. I’m a guy who’s been known to bang on the doors of a K-mart store that just closed on Christmas Eve like Dustin Hoffman at the end of “The Graduate.”

I guess it helped that we’ve sort of eliminated the element of surprise when it comes to gift-giving in my family. I bought gifts for my wife and both children while they were in the store with me. They actually all tried their gifts on before I bought them. Then we came home and wrapped them and put them under the tree, for some reason.

And I know what I’m getting from the kids, too. Allie is giving me a new putter, which I practiced with in the sporting goods store before she “bought” it. I’m pretty sure she used my debit card to pay for it. David went out shopping for me and I got a text that read “What size belt do you wear?” I took that as a pretty good clue.

I don’t mind knowing that the gifts are. It’s better than getting something you don’t want. My dad probably still has unopened boxes of Aqua-Velva and soap-on-a-rope lying around his house somewhere.

I still had to go in a few stores this Christmas season, but I pretty much avoided the mall, except for a couple of brief excursions. I learned long ago that the trick, if you’re married, is to make every trip to the mall so unpleasant and excruciating for your wife that she’ll never ask you to go again. They should write this into the wedding vows – “Do you promise to love, honor, obey, and never try to drag your husband to a shopping mall?”

The people who work in retail stores must go insane in December. Not only from the big crowds and frantic shoppers, but from the incessant Christmas music that every store feels it must play 24 hours a day. I was in one store and “Frosty the Snowman” was playing the whole time, in Spanish. It’s irritating enough in English. Those poor women had to be homicidal by the time they went home from work.

I really don’t care what I get for Christmas. I never could name anything specific when I was asked what I wanted. Though I really could use some nice new pajama pants. Maybe it’s not too late, depending on who’s reading this.

The spirit of Christmas

2009-12-13T16:53:00.000-05:00

People had begun to look at me funny recently when I told them we didn’t have a Christmas tree up yet, so the family and I trundled off together to a tree farm Friday to continue our family tradition of cutting one down.

We argue every year about whose turn it is to pick out the tree. We decided long ago we would rotate, but we basically haven’t known whose turn it was since 1999. I don’t believe I ever actually picked out the tree. This year, my daughter claimed to have written documentation that it was her year, but I’m not convinced it wasn’t a forgery.

Anyway, we got to the farm about 10 minutes before dark, and it was extremity-numbing cold, so we picked out the tree in record time this year. One of the good parts about the kids getting older is my son is now old enough to saw down the tree. It gave me a warm fuzzy feeling handing him that saw, let me tell you. Not because it made me proud to see him becoming a man, but because my back was killing me.

As usual, we cut down a tree that scrapes the ceiling in our living room. Every year, we look at our tree and say, “Wow, that was too big, we need to get a smaller one next year.” And every year, we don’t. We’re like alcoholics waking up on Sunday mornings with a hangover, swearing we’ll never drink again.

The fun begins with these trees when I have to get them into the Christmas tree stand. There are some inventions that have not advanced technologically in hundreds of years – toilets, toothpicks, slingshots, and Christmas tree stands are among them. King Charlemagne probably used a Christmas tree stand exactly like the one I bought at Walgreens last year.

My son offered to help me get this year’s cypress beast into the stand. By help, he meant stand there with one hand on the tree while text-messaging a girl with the other. I’m lying on the floor, twisting a rusty screw into a gnarled tree trunk, and he’s tapping out “I wnt 2 C U 2” to some girl on his phone.

I did not realize we had cut down a tree that would defy the laws of physics. But every time I’d get it straight up and down in the tree stand, I would step back and it would start to lean and wobble like Otis Campbell on a Saturday night. At one point I was lying on the floor, the tree on top of me, the pungent odor of branches in my nose and the tap-tap-tap of cell-phone Romeo in my ears. I perhaps uttered a mild curse word or two and asked the boy to either help me, or have a Marvin Gaye experience with his father. He saw the light.

After a couple more false starts, and me slapping the phone out of his hand, we got it to stand up, albeit at a 45-degree angle. Well, that’s nothing that a few magazines can’t fix, so we wrestled it into a corner of the living and held our breath. When after 30 seconds it didn’t fall, we both exhaled and figured our job was done.

My wife and daughter got home, and it didn’t take Nostradamus to predict what they were going to say – “It’s not straight.” Well, I told them, it as straight as it’s going to get. Christmas is not about everything looking perfect, anyway. It’s about the birth of Jesus and giving presents and being with family and friends and watching Christmas shows on TV while the room is bathed in the light of a crooked, too-big tree filled with home-made ornaments and a strand of lights where only half the bulbs work. That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Falcons' "fans" are embarrassment

2009-12-07T11:00:00.002-05:00

I have been a Falcons’ fan for as long as I can remember, and believe me, it can be pretty tough.

I was a Falcons’ fan when they lost 59-0 to the Los Angeles Rams. I was a Falcons’ fan when we had to suffer through terrible coaches like Dan Henning and Marion Campbell and June Jones. I endured the embarrassment of the team being led by the likes of Jerry Glanville and Jim Mora Jr., and I have been able to still support them despite the presence of idiots like Andre Rison and Deangelo Hall and Jeff George.

But yesterday in the Georgia Dome, I believe I witnessed a new low in Atlanta Falcons' history – specifically, in Falcons’ fans’ history. I walked out of that place shaking my head, embarrassed and disgusted and believing that the city of Atlanta does not deserve a pro football franchise.

It wasn’t so much that they lost to the Philadelphia Eagles. Five of the team’s offensive starters were injured and missed the game, so it wasn’t surprising that they would lose. But there is no excuse for the behavior of many of the team’s so-called “fans.”

Sunday marked the return of the disgraced Michael Vick to the Dome. The lazy ignorant dog-killer quarterback is back in the league with the Eagles after taking $100 million and almost single-handedly destroying the Atlanta franchise. He’s with the Eagles now, and I don’t begrudge him getting a chance to play. He did his time, so he should be allowed to come back.

As I looked around and saw all of those morons wearing Vick jerseys in the crowd, my faith in humanity was challenged. I don’t understand grown men and women wearing football jerseys anyway, but that’s another story. But here’s what those people were saying – we’re not Falcons’ fans, we’re Michael Vick fans.

And don’t let anybody fool you. It was not a mild reaction to Vick. There were thousands of people cheering for him in that stadium. They cheered when he scored a touchdown. That’s right, people wearing Falcons' jerseys, in the Falcons’ stadium, were excited when a player from another team scored a touchdown to help beat Atlanta. In the fourth quarter, they chanted “We want Vick!”, and celebrated like he was a conquering hero when he trotted on to the field. And when he threw a touchdown pass, you would have thought the Falcons had just won the Super Bowl, the way it sounded in there.

Make no mistake; there is a definite racial element to all of this. Almost all of the Vick supporters were black. Can someone please tell me what they see in him? Do they like him simply because he is also black? Because I can see no other reason that they would go so crazy for him.

Here’s the thing, people. When he was here, he didn’t care about you at all. He didn’t stay in Atlanta in the offseason and work in the community. He high-tailed it back to Virginia as soon as he could to hang with his homeboys and watch over his fighting dogs. He flipped the fans off, he embarrassed the franchise with some of his public actions, and by his own admission he didn’t bother looking at film, learning the offense, or working hard at helping the team win. He wasn’t even that good of a quarterback. Every now and then he would break off an exciting run, but he never progressed as a passer, and his last two seasons with the team, they didn’t even make the playoffs. This is your hero?

And even if you thought he was a great player, which he wasn’t, did his absolute lack of character not bother you at all? Do you really want your sons to emulate him and see him as a role model?

Thank goodness the Falcons actually have a real quarterback now, one who comes early and stays late, who is conscientious and works hard and does the right thing. I will gladly continue to cheer for Matt Ryan, but I will do it from the comfort of my living room. I don’t want to be surrounded by those people again.

Mmmmmmm mmmmmm goood

2009-11-30T14:05:00.002-05:00

I’ve rediscovered something in my life that has been missing for a while, and I’m glad to have it back.

No, I’m not talking about exercise or motivation or hair that’s not grey. I’m talking about potted meat.

When I was younger, I loved potted meat. It was one of my favorite snacks. Give me a little can of potted meat and some saltine crackers (which we used to call soda crackers) and a Coke to wash it down and I could make a meal out of it.

The uninformed will often look at potted meat and just go, “Ewwwwww!” This is what everyone in my house feels compelled to do every single time I sit down to enjoy my processed meat delight. But as caviar is more than just fish eggs, and escargot is more than just snails, potted meat is more than just some congealed meat by-product.

What is potted meat? Well, I’m not exactly sure, and I don’t think I want to know, and I don’t really care. It’s meat, and it’s potted, and I like it. ’Nough said.

There are some cousins to potted meat, but I don’t really like those. Vienna sausage are packed in some sort of toe jelly that keeps me away. Starbucks coffee smells like Vienna sausage to me, therefore I don’t drink it. Spam is kind of a dressed-up version of potted meat, but I don’t enjoy it. And deviled ham? Please. Don’t insult me.

My grandmother used to serve fried tripe. I didn’t even like the sound of that, and I liked the taste even less. Apparently it comes from an animal’s stomach. I don’t know why that’s any grosser than eating an animal’s butt, which we do all the time, but somehow it is.

At some point, I decided that potted meat had too much fat (true) and too many calories (true) and too much sodium (true) and no nutritional value (debatable), so I should take it out of my diet. But all the while I continued to eat other unhealthy things, so it didn’t make much difference. Plus it’s a little bitty can, how bad for you can it be?

Since the doctor made me stop drinking beer, I figure popping open a can of potted meat every now and then is not such a bad thing. And you won’t get a ticket for driving after eating too much potted meat, though it might not be a fun ride for the other people in the car.

If you haven’t experienced the joys of potted meat, I suggest you go to your local grocery store, get a couple of cans (make sure it’s Libby’s – the other brands aren’t as good), get some soda crackers, pop the tin top off the can and commence to eating. You’ll thank me, even if your cholesterol doesn’t.

That was a close one!

2009-11-03T15:04:00.003-05:00

A funny story in my family concerns how my mother once went to The Omni in Atlanta for a gospel music concert on New Year’s Eve, featuring The Gaither Family and others, and accidentally wandered into the wrong bathroom.

It was her first trip to The Omni, and quite possibly any major sporting arena, so she wasn’t used to the bathroom setup. She went into the restroom, and she said later that she remembered thinking it was odd that there were so many water fountains against the wall, and so few stalls. As she was sitting in the confines of her stall, she heard male voices and realized that what she had glimpsed were not water fountains at all, but urinals.

She sat there, paralyzed with fear, until finally all the voices died down and she made a mad dash out, embarrassed and horrified. To her knowledge, nobody saw her in there, and later, once all the red went out of her cheeks, she was able to laugh about it.

Well, I wish she was still with us, because boy, do I have a story that she’d enjoy.

I had to go to Emory Hospital this morning for a CT scan, and I wasn’t feeling great. I was having what we’ll call “tummy miseries,” even though I hadn’t eaten anything since 6 o’clock the night before. And these are the kind of tummy miseries from which there are no escape – once they hit, they must be addressed immediately. I will say no more.

I was in the car, heading back to work, and I suddenly knew that I had to stop ASAP. The nearest place was a Whole Foods grocery story, so I pulled in there, asked a guy stacking cantaloupes where the restrooms were, and shuffled off in that direction, doubled over and grimacing.

The men’s bathroom in this place was your standard single-seater, and there was a guy in there with the door locked, and it didn’t seem like he was in any hurry. I could see that the women’s restroom, just across the hall, appeared to be bigger. It had a swinging door that didn’t lock, and it didn’t sound like anybody was in there.

At this point, my stomach informed me that I had a decision to make. I could leave and try to go to another store, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make it. I could bang on the men’s bathroom door, but I could hear the guy turning magazine pages, so that wasn’t going to work. So I sort of gently pushed the women’s bathroom door open, saw there was nobody in there, and there were two stalls, no waiting. My decision was made.

I didn’t plan to stay long. Maybe 30 seconds. I just needed immediate relief, or I was going to die. So I slipped in unnoticed, went to the stall against the wall, and thanked Jesus for the empty bathroom.

I had been there maybe 15 seconds when I heard voices just outside the main bathroom door. It was a man, telling a little girl to go on in, and he’d wait outside. Oh no, I thought. This can’t be happening. But it was. I heard the door open, and I heard him urge her to go on in, because a man can’t come in the girls’ bathroom, he explained, and he would just wait outside.

So she came on in, and now my stomach troubles weren’t a big deal, because I was instead having a heart attack. I could see the little girl’s shoes in the next stall, and she walked in, and she just stopped. Oh Lord, I thought. She’s going to look under here and see me, then she’s going to run outside and say, “Daddy, there’s a man sitting on the potty!”

I considered my options. I looked for a window so I could climb out, but it was too small. If the man came in and confronted me, then I could tell the truth, but who would believe that? I wouldn’t, if it happened to my little girl. I would have figured the guy was a pervert and I would have given him a beatdown.

Well, I thought, if he comes in, I’ll just have to charge him and knock him out of the way, then run for my car as fast as possible and drive straight to Mexico, and maybe come back in six months after getting plastic surgery. But with my luck, he’d probably be a professional wrestler, or an off-duty cop carrying a gun. Every way I looked at it, I was screwed.

After a minute, the little girl went back to the main door and said, “Daddy, I don’t know which potty to use.” Then he stuck his head in the door and directed her to the empty stall, and again assured her that he would be right outside. Finally, the little girl came in, did her business, and I just sat there praying to God and Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and the Dalai Lama and Oprah that I wouldn’t be noticed.

She finished up, went out, and I counted to 15, then slipped out of my stall, peeked out the door, saw the coast was clear, and walked as fast as humanly possible out of that store into my car. I should be in the clear, unless they had some sort of security camera rigged up. So if you see my picture on the evening news with the caption, “Police still searching for bathroom lurker,” I promise you I had no choice, and I’ll never do it again.

They write the (bad) songs

2009-10-27T13:11:00.006-04:00

I am a huge music fan, and I have toyed with the idea of starting a separate blog totally dedicated to it, but I’m too lazy for that. I can barely crank out one entry a week for this one.

Well, you get what you pay for.

I have decided instead to just occasionally post some of my musings about music here. Sometimes I will write about things I really enjoy, and about music that uplifts me and gives me chills and hope for humanity. Today is not one of those times.

I don’t have satellite radio or a CD player in my car, so when I listen to music these days, a lot of the time it’s via some “classic rock” station out of Atlanta, which plays the same Boston and Styx songs five times a day. And it’s made me realize that there are some really bad songwriters out there, so I decide to compile a list of what I consider to be the very worst.

I am aware that a lot of people don’t pay any attention at all to the lyrics in songs. I’m afraid I am a slave to them. My number-one complaint with what they play on country radio stations today is the lyrics are almost 100 percent asinine and stupid.

When I’m talking bad songwriters, I mean bad lyricists. And listen, I understand that not all songs have to be Dylanesque pieces of literature or great poetry. I like “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Rock And Roll All Night” as much as the next guy. But those are just feel-good party songs that touch on the two parts of the trinity – sex and drugs. It’s OK to be silly when writing about those things.

I had a few qualifications in making my list. I am limiting it to what are considered rock-and-roll artists. Trust me there, there are plenty of bad country songwriters (Kenny Chesney, anybody?), and I can’t claim to understand rap and hip-hip to know what’s good or bad.

Also, I am picking from people who have been successful and have thousands of times more money than me. Yes, I am jealous. But that doesn’t make me wrong.

So here is my partial list of what I consider to be the worst songwriters, and some of the worst examples of their crap – er, craft. I am listing them in alphabetical order, which works out, because the one I consider the worst is at the very end. Here we go.

Jon Bon Jovi
Most egregious example:

We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got
It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not
We’ve got each other and that’s a lot
For love, we’ll give it a shot
- Living on a Prayer

This guy has made a living between adopting a wannabe-tough guy stance and breaking out the sensitive, love-has-wounded-me pose that still makes soccer moms across America weak in the khoulats.

His piece de resistance has to be “Dead or Alive,” in which he envisions himself as a cowboy, if cowboys wore eye makeup and teased their hair and rode groupies instead of buses. He sings, “Sometimes you tell the day by the bottle that you drink (If this is Hennessy, it must be Tuesday?), and sometimes when you’re alone, all you do is think.” I find it hard to believe that this song was the product of any actual thinking. Dead or Alive? Well, I think you know which way I’d vote.

Phil Collins
Most egregious example:

We had a life, we had a love, But you don't know what you've got 'til you lose it
Well that was then and this is now, And I want you back
You can run, and you can hide, But I'm not leaving less you come with me
We've had our problems but I'm on your side
You're all I need, please believe in me
- Something Happened On the Way to Heaven

First of all, this guy’s a drummer. Need I say more? He is the all-time king of clichés. I believe the song above sets a modern-day rock-and-roll cliché record.

Phil’s most famous song, and one of his worst (and that’s saying something), is “In The Air Tonight.” It features one of my favorite clichés, “I saw it with my own two eyes.” Really? Who else’s eyes could you possibly see something with?

Apparently an urban legend sprouted up that the song was about some tragic or sinister event Phil witnessed, perhaps even done by or to some unnamed prominent person. If only it was that interesting. Phil said himself, in a BBC interview, “I don't know what this song is about.” I know what it’s about. It’s about four minutes of drivel. (rimshot).

Michael McDonald
Most egregious example:

She had a place in his life
He never made her think twice
As he rises to her apology
Anybody else would surely know
He’s watching her go
- What a Fool Believes

A running joke in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin is that there’s always a Michael McDonald concert playing on the TVs in the appliance store where many of the characters work, and it’s starting to drive them crazy. I feel that way every time I hear one of his Doobie Brothers’ songs.

“What A Fool Believes” sounds like somebody wrote down a bunch a short sentences, put them on strips of paper and put them in a hat, then pulled them out and sang them in that order. It’s easier to follow James Joyce after taking an Ambien than it is to ferret out what he’s talking about. To be fair, he co-wrote that song with Kenny Loggins. Maybe Kenny’s responsible for all the really stupid lines. How do you rise to one’s apology, anyway?

Steve Miller
Most egregious example:

I feel the magic in your caress
I feel magic when I touch your dress
Silk and satin, leather and lace
Black panties with an angel’s face
Abra-abra-cadabra
I want to reach out and grab ya
- Abracadabra

Ok, dude. Please never use the word “panties” in a song. It makes you seem like a pervert and it makes me uncomfortable. And is he saying there’s a face on the panties? Now that really would creep me out.

This guy wrote so many bad songs it’s hard to list them all. How about “Take the Money and Run”, in which he paints a sympathetic picture of Billy Joe and Bobby Sue, whose redeeming qualities are as follows: they get high, they sit around the house, they watch the tube, they rob people, they shot a man. Hey, I know writers have to give their protagonists a flaw or two, but this goes too far.

Steve Perry
Most egregious example:

She loves to laugh, she loves to sing, she does everything
She loves to move, she loves to groove, she loves the lovin things
- Any Way You Want It

The lovin’ things? Please don’t tell me he means, you know, gadgets.

Steve’s powerhouse voice and those ridiculous videos (“Separate Ways”) sometimes obscured how bad his lyrics truly are. I defy you to explain to me what the hell is going on in “Don’t Stop Believin’”. Apparently, the small-town girl and the city boy happen to get on the same train, admit, heading anywhere. But then they wind up in a smoky room (is this on the train? Like a dining car?), smelling wine and cheap perfume, and for a smile, they can share the night. Sounds more like the kind of place where for $50, they can share the night.

Then we have some strangers on the boulevard, and something called “streetlight people” living just to find emotion. I just found an emotion – boredom. Then in the last verse Steve switches from the third-person, omniscient narrator storytelling style to the first person – he’s working hard to get his fill, everybody wants a thrill, paying anything to roll the dice just one more time. I’d pay anything to never hear this song again.

Sting
Most egregious example:

It’s no use, he sees her
He starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabakov

- Don’t Stand so Close to Me

Seriously? You just rhymed “cough” and “Nabakov?”

I don’t know what was worse – the creepy ham-fisted “love songs” like “Every Breath You Take” (Hello, he’s a stalker!) or “Message In A Bottle”, or the pretentious crapola mysticism of songs like “Wrapped Around Your Finger” (Caught between the scylla and charybdis???) or “King of Pain” (There’s a skeleton choking on a crust of bread – I swear that’s the actual lyric). I guess what always bothered me most about Gordon Sumner – er, Sting – was the phony Jamaican accent he used to sing with.

Bernie Taupin
Most egregious examples (he gets two):

Say you don't know me, or recognize my face
Say you don't care who goes to that kind of place
Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight
Too many runaways eating up the night

Marconi plays the Mamba,
Listen to the radio
Don't you remember?
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll!

-We Built This City

Mars ain’t no kind of place to raise your kids
In fact, it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them
If you did.

- Rocket Man

Taupin, of course, was the lyricist for most of Elton John’s biggest hits, and he also penned the single-worst song in the history of rock and roll, “We Built This City” as performed by Jefferson Starship.

What you have in any Taupin song is a jumble of insipid phrases. It kind of goes to show you how talented Elton John was, in that he was able to disguise the banality and scratch-your-head idiocy of Taupin’s words with his singing voice and beautiful melodies. I mean, have you ever read the words of “Your Song” without the music? “But the sun's been quite kind while I wrote this song, It's for people like you that keep it turned on.” Try diagramming that sentence.

And he just made up things that sort of sounded like they maybe were real, but they were just figments of his imagination. There was no Crocodile Rock. There was no band named Benny and the Jets. Levon and his father and Alvin Tostig are all made up. Ridiculous.

There are some others who should make the list – Huey Lewis, Geddy Lee, Chris Martin, Dennis DeYoung - but I’m too lazy to go any further at the moment. Paul McCartney has written more than a few stinkers himself, but he was a Beatle and he wrote “For No One” and “You Never Me Give Me Your Money” so he can pretty much do and write what he wants for the rest of his life.

If anybody actually made it this far in the post and has any additions, I’d love to hear. And I promise I’ll do a “best songwriters” list soon.

Ain't no cure for the wintertime blues

2009-10-25T21:40:00.000-04:00

I took Lucky for a walk the other night and I noticed a chill in the air, a little bit of fall nipping at my nose, with leaves turning beautiful colors and pumpkins on doorsteps and the sky a smogless blue, the way it gets at only this time of year.

It made me want to throw up. Because you know what fall means? It means winter is coming.

The walk itself was okay, other than the foreboding coolness in the air. Lucky was in fine form - she peed on three mailboxes, took a crap in an overgrown yard and got into a fight with a yappy furball that looked like Don King’s hair. All in all, just your average half-hour with Lucky.

Lucky doesn’t mind the impending cold, as she has a natural sweater, and a big new pile of hay out back that she likes to burrow down in. And of course when it gets cold in the evenings, she’ll come inside to snore and fart all night, for our amusement.

People say stupid stuff like, “I like having different seasons.” Well, I do too, and here are the two seasons I like – early summer and late summer. There’s your seasons, right there.

Some folks enjoy seeing the leaves on trees turning brilliant colors in the fall, and that’s great, except that means they’re about to fall off. I have about 15 trees in my yard, so I’m raking and bagging leaves from Halloween to Thanksgiving. I’m thinking of cutting them all down and replacing them with artificial trees. Might look right nice.

And next weekend, of course, we’re going to turn our clocks back, so it will get dark even earlier. This is not a good idea. I say we turn them forward again, and give us an extra hour of daylight, not one less. Let’s keep doing this until it stays daylight until midnight. Who cares that it will be dark until around noon? I’m not a morning person anyway.

This was bad planning, by the way, on God’s part, to give us less daylight when it’s colder. It’s like he thought, well, they won’t be depressed enough by the freezing cold and all the dead trees and the grey skies. Let me turn out the world’s lightswitch at about 5:30.

(In case God is reading this, I didn’t mean it as a criticism. I’m just funnin’, I swear. I would never imply that you didn’t know what you were doing when you were creating everything, and I would not dare to question it. Though I would like an explanation as to why you created a few things, like fire ants and PMS and the University of Florida).

I suppose that since I live in Georgia, I can’t complain about winter too much, since ours is fairly mild. We get about a half-inch of snow every year, at which time we all go crazy, and it rarely gets below freezing for more than a few hours. But still, winter is winter, which means it ain’t summer, which means I don’t like it.

Yet even if I had a Moses experience and got to talk to God, I don’t think I’d complain about the winter. He’d probably just tell me to move somewhere warmer. He helps those who help themselves….

With no particular place to go

2009-10-15T14:23:00.001-04:00

I took my old Ovation guitar down to the Record Heaven music store in Griffin the other day to see if anything could be done to spruce it up. The guitar man there – I didn’t catch his name – shook his head ruefully and said, “Ain’t worth fixing.”

I didn’t expect to hear that. What did that mean?

The guy looked at it and said, “I can fix it, but there ain’t no way I can make it sound worth a toot.” Well, I’ve been playing it for 15 years, and I’ve never been able to make it sound worth a toot, either. But he told me that it would cost $300 to get it into passable playing shape, and even then he made no guarantees, so I decided to pass.

I was a little down after leaving there, so I decided to indulge one of my favorite pastimes – I went riding around.

Riding around is what I spent about 75 percent of my teenage years in Griffin doing. There wasn’t much else to do there besides school, church and work, and I didn’t find any of the three to be fun. So my buddies and I would climb into our cars that got about 20 feet to the gallon and we’d ride around aimlessly, past all the same old places.

The best time of day to ride around is twilight, or in the loaming, as I’ve heard it called. The setting sun casts a softer light on the world, and everything just looks better.

Of course, a key part of riding around is having some good music to listen to. An activity like that needs a good soundtrack. On the day I got the bad news about the guitar, I went with The Allman Brothers’ Eat A Peach album. You can never go wrong with Duane and Dickie. They always sound worth a toot.

I rode past the house I lived in as a small child. I have almost no memory of it, which is just as well, because that whole neighborhood has been taken over by trashy people and the house looks like hell.

Then I just rode around on some country roads, looking at cows and fields and old churches and mobile homes with Rebel flags still flying out front. My reverie was broken when I got a phone call reminding me that I needed to go by Walgreens and the grocery store. Riding around was a lot more fun before cell phones.

When I was a teenager, my mama didn’t like it when I would tell her that I was going to go riding around. Y’all are just going to find trouble out there, running the roads, she said. No, I would think, if we find trouble, then we’ll stop the car. But I never said that to her. She wasn’t the kind of mama you sassed.

In truth, we never got into trouble riding around. We didn’t drink or do drugs, and girls didn’t have much interest in just driving aimlessly. Anyway, if you had a girl in the car, your goal was to park it somewhere, as soon as possible.

Now, I do all of my riding around by myself, and it never lasts as long, but it’s almost always a good time, even with a dying Ovation lying in the back seat.

Flat broke

2009-09-28T15:58:00.001-04:00

I was up at the Emory Clinic this morning and I was getting ready to leave. I knew I’d have to pay for parking, so I opened my wallet for some cash or a debit card, and there was nothing there. It was as bare as a cooch dancer’s midriff, to quote Foghorn Leghorn.

Now, just two days ago, in addition to the debit card, there was $30 in cash in my wallet. I had not spent a red cent in the meantime. So, it should have still been there. But it wasn’t.

There are three other people who live at my house, plus my dog Lucky. All three humans have denied taking the money. Lucky was mum on the subject, but I don’t suspect her. She might steal a biscuit out of a grizzly bear’s mouth, but she has no use for money.

Apparently, the $30 just took wings and flew out of my wallet. I hope it found its way to somebody who needs it. As for the debit card, it somehow was in my wife’s possession. My debit card has my photo on it, so I don’t know what good it would do her. She’s never, to my knowledge, even sported a goatee.

Luckily, the nice people at Emory gave me a token for free parking when I explained my predicament. I’m glad they did, because I was going to have to go to Plan B, which was to say, “Wow, the doctor just told me I have two weeks to live, and now this happens.”

I should be used to money flying out of my wallet by now, as I have two kids in high school, and every day I’m shelling out money for something – senior dues, football dues, parking dues. Cheerleading is the worst – last year my daughter was a cheerleader, and it cost approximately $500,000. You could buy a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader for what I spent on cheerleading (trust me, I looked it up, but figured I didn’t have anywhere to put her).

Earlier this year, I had to buy an ad for my son for the football program, then join the booster club, and all this AFTER shelling about $400 just for him to have the privilege to play football. Maybe he’ll get a lot better and bigger and go somewhere where they’ll actually pay HIM to play, like Florida or Alabama.

Now I am told that I need to purchase an ad for the high school yearbook, since my daughter is a senior. This ad costs roughly the same as a new Buick. And I was made to believe that if I didn’t purchase this ad, I would be the worst father this side of MacKenzie Phillips’ dad.

My daughter informed me the other day that she was going shopping. Interesting, I said. For what?

A new outfit, she said.

Then I asked the most important question – with what? So she gave me that “daddy’s little girl” smile, and once again my wallet parted like the Red Sea.

I guess I’ve learned a valuable lesson. From now on, I’m inspecting my wallet before I leave the house, or maybe I’ll just start hiding money in the freezer, like my mom used to do. I always thought that was crazy, but now, I understand.

Sentimental journey

2009-09-18T13:35:00.000-04:00

I just got back from the beach, and it made me realize that I have reached a few new stages in my life.

One of those is the “should no longer be seen in public without a shirt” stage. I’ve put on a few pounds since my last trip to the beach. Small children were standing under my stomach for shade. I think I heard somebody say, “You don’t often see humpbacks in the Gulf of Mexico.” Not very nice.

I also realized that I’m getting to be a sentimental old cuss. The older I get, the more nostalgia gets to me. I used to only cry when I watched “Old Yeller,” or when something hit me in the groin. Nowadays, I’ll get teary-eyed at the drop of a hat.

Case in point: As we were packing up the leave Orange Beach Wednesday morning, it got to me. And not because I was leaving an environment of crashing surf, sandy beaches and pleasant breezes to head back to one filled with traffic, unpaid doctors’ bills and nasty letters from credit card companies.

What made me emotional was realizing that it may have been one of our last family vacations together, at least of this kind. We’ve done the same thing for many years – when the kids are out of school for their fall break in September, we go down to the beach and spend a few days to a week.

It is always such a great time, in part because I get to spend time with the kids without all of the distractions that bombard us daily. We go for walks on the beach at night looking for crabs, and we ride the waves in the Gulf, and we go to the tacky arcade-amusement park where we try to win cheap prizes and always have a competitive game of putt-putt (I was dethroned this year for the first time ever, but that didn’t make me sad. I’ll get even). We eat every meal together, and for a few days, the kids even act as if they like each other.

But they are growing up, damn them. This time next year, my daughter will be in college somewhere. My son will be a junior in high school and probably won’t want to miss football practice. And as they get older, their interests in other things and other people will grow, and playing putt-putt and looking for crabs with Dad will just seem stupid. I know that, and I accept that, but it doesn’t mean I have to look forward to it.

I hope that the memories of the family vacations will be as special to the kids as they are for their mom and dad. I hope that someday when they take their families to the beach, or to the mountains, or wherever they go, they’ll smile and remember how much fun they used to have, and they’ll realize how much it meant to old Dad.

I’d better end this now, before somebody walks in on me, and I have to try to convince them that I’ve been watching “Old Yeller” on YouTube.

Welcome to Wal-Mart

2009-09-09T16:49:00.002-04:00

You probably read or heard about the story recently concerning the old man here in Georgia who told a woman to make her 2-year-old stop crying or he would, and when she didn’t, he slapped the kid around a little bit.

This happened in a Wal-Mart. Well, of course it did. It is yet another example of why I avoid Wal-Mart like I avoid hard work.

Oh, and here’s another reason.

I refuse to go to Wal-Mart. There are three massive ones within 5 miles of my house. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one. How much cheap stuff can people buy?

I could tell you that my Wal-Mart boycott has to do with how they have ruined small-town America, and they import everything from China and screw American suppliers, and they have questionable employment practices, and their produce tastes like it was grown in the buttcrack of a buffalo.

But I’m not that high-minded. I just can’t stand seeing the people you see in your average Wal-Mart. Most of them look like they came there straight from a meth lab or a Tennessee football game.

Does this make me snotty? Maybe so. But here are a few tips I’d like to give Wal-Mart shoppers before they head to the store:

1. Bathe.
2. Make sure your clothes have been washed within the past month, and don’t have holes you could put a quarter through.
3. Don’t wear your T-shirts with obscene or vulgar words on them. That’s fine for the family reunion at the trailer park, but not for the public.
4. Shoes – wear them. Even your kids. Especially your kids.

I prefer K-Mart to Wal-Mart, but there aren’t many K-Marts left. I used to actually work at K-Mart, and it was fun, because the store was huge and I could hide for almost my entire shift.

I remember once, a guy got busted for crawling up above the ceiling and looking down into the women’s dressing rooms through the security mirror. I thought this was a very sick thing. I mean, at the time, I understood the urge to look at women undressing. But not women who were trying on clothes at K-Mart. It ain’t exactly Victoria’s Secret, is all I’m saying.

K-Mart was cooler, because they had blue-light specials, where they’d put a flashing blue light on somewhere and put something on sale for a limited time. My mother and father both bought a lot of useless junk because they were blue-light specials. Somewhere there’s a 10-pound barrel of cheese popcorn we never ate.

I don’t care if you go to Wal-Mart. If your conscience will let you, and you don’t mind swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool for a while, go right ahead. Just don’t buy me anything.

Rainy days and Fridays always get me down

2009-08-28T11:39:00.001-04:00

I got up at 6:30 this morning and it was as dark as Mordor outside and bucketing rain, and I thought to myself (because who else would you think to?), “It should be against the law to have to go to work on a Friday like this.”

Your hear that, President Obama? Screw the health-care reform. You want my vote in 2012, you’ll make this happen.

I got in my car and began the torturous drive to work. As anybody who has driven to work in Atlanta knows, 99 percent of the other drivers act as if they have a closed head injury. This is magnified exponentially when there’s a drop of rain on the road, and today it was like God had out the hosepipe.

I often drive into a work via a route that includes Moreland Avenue, past quaint cute little neighborhoods with names like “Grant Park” and “Kirkwood” and my favorite, “The Ghetto.” There’s not much drainage in this area, perhaps because there are dead bodies clogging the drains, so when it rains hard Moreland Avenue becomes an aqueduct. I thought at any moment I would be sucked into a swirling eddy like Marshall, Will and Holly in “Land of the Lost.” Waves were breaking over the hood of the Impala. Scary stuff.

This marked two days in a row of a testy commute. The day before, I was driving home down a road cleverly named “Boulevard.” (I guess “Street” was taken.) This is a little bit of a shortcut, but it runs right past the federal penitentiary and some housing projects, so you have to know how to navigate this stretch safely. In other words, keep the doors locked, don’t get too close to the car in front of you in case somebody tries to carjack you and you need to make a quick getaway, and avoid making eye contact with the hookers in the parking lot of the convenience store. Do all of that and you’re perfectly safe.

But Thursday, I found the way blocked. I saw police cars and a school bus and flashing lights, so I had to take a detour. I think the street I turned on was called “Crackhouse Lane,” but I was driving too fast to read the signs. I got home and watched the local news and learned that a naked man had climbed on the school bus and some kids had jumped off and finally the bus had run into an empty field. The naked man was subdued, and nobody was hurt or impregnated.

I am hopeful that these misadventures will soon stop. I joined in with about 30 co-workers and we pooled together to buy a bunch of lottery tickets for tonight’s $325 million drawing. The odds of winning this are about 1 in 175 million. We have 150 chances to win, which increases our odds to about 1 in 174.99999 million.

Let me tell you something, if we win, this department will be a ghost town Monday morning, especially in the area of my cube. I’m never coming back. They can keep all my stuff, though I would like the Elvis magnet, for sentimental reasons. Everything else I can replace, and I will never get out of bed on a rainy Friday ever again.

Feet don't fail me now

2009-08-21T16:32:00.000-04:00

My company brought in a podiatrist on Thursday to give free foot checkups to employees. I take my excitement where I can get it these days.

I have not traditionally paid much attention to my feet. As long as they don’t smell bad and it doesn’t hurt me to walk, I figure they’re ok.

I know a lot of guys these days go get pedicures, and my wife has told me that I should do so, as well. The answer is no. Why don’t you just buy me a poodle and a cardigan and make me watch Dancing With the Stars, while you’re at it.

I remember, as a kid, what my dad’s feet looked like. He didn’t get pedicures. His toenails looked like the trees in the petrified forest. He used a chainsaw to clip them. There were calluses that could stop a bullet. Those were men’s feet.

I subjected my feet to a lot of abuse when I was young, because I didn’t often wear shoes. I learned the art of walking on gravel (step very lightly and slowly), or across hot asphalt (run like somebody is chasing you). I learned it felt good to squish mud between my toes and walk across cool green grass, and it felt bad to step into a pile of fire ants or on a rusty nail.

Going barefoot led to a lot of stubbed toes, or as we called them, stumped toes. Well, whatever you called them, they hurt like crazy, and you always hoped your mama was nowhere near when you did it, because there is no way to stump your toe without immediately screaming a cuss word, or several.

Then there’s that little toe on the end – I believe the technical term is pinky toe, or the last little piggy – and that thing could find the corner of a piece of furniture like a divining rod. I’ve hit that little toe so hard on things before it, it’s a wonder it didn’t just pop right off.

My feet aren’t that bad, but that’s because I lead a cushy life with a soft desk job. And it doesn’t matter anyway. Nobody sees my feet unless I’m at home or at the beach. I don’t wear sandals.

But I needed to go see the podiatrist because I have these two little knots, one on the bottom of each foot, and about half the time it feels like I’m walking on nails. The podiatrist was a very cheerful fellow who told me, between giggles, that I have a corn on one foot, and a plantars wart on the other. He squeezed them, said “I bet this hurts,” and laughed. He needs to work on his stool-side manner.

I asked him if I could just get a pocket knife and cut them off, but he just laughed a little too loud and said, “It won’t do any good, but it will hurt.” While I’ve done many things in my life that fit that description, I think I’ll take his advice and go by the drugstore and see what Dr. Scholl can do for me.

Stop saying that!

2009-08-07T16:45:00.002-04:00

I was in a meeting the other day and several times I heard people say, “I don’t disagree with that.”

I’m going to have to insist that this phrase be stricken from the language. It is pointless and idiotic. Just say, “I agree.” You save two syllables and a bunch of letters and in these tough economic times, I think it’s important to be frugal.

I am going to compile a list of phrases and words that should be stricken from the language, and then I am going to work tirelessly to see these new regulations implemented. The penalty for breaking these regulations will be death. No sense monkeying around.

Also on the list is “teachable moment.” After going 44 years without ever hearing this, I have now heard it 7,569 times in the past month. It was recently used to describe the case of the Harvard professor who got arrested. Well, first, a “moment” can’t be teachable. People can be teachable. Dogs can be teachable, though not mine. But a moment can’t be taught. And here’s what incident taught us: Cops can be jerks, so don’t talk back to them. I learned that the hard way one hot afternoon on the streets of Griffin, Ga.

People are now fond of saying, “It is what it is.” This has to be stopped. Now, while I admire “I yam what I yam” as one of the great quotes of all time, “It is what it is” is nonsense, is what it is.

The word “unbelievable” is used way too much, especially in sports. Sportscasters will deem anything even slightly out of the ordinary as “unbelievable.” I think that word should apply to something that is so extraordinary, we don’t believe it. Therefore, Albert Pujols hitting a grand slam is not “unbelievable.” He does it all the time. Now, Ryan O’Neal hitting on his own daughter at his ex-wife’s funeral – ok, that was pretty close to unbelievable.

Sportscasters also like to say, “You have got to be kidding me!” First, let’s drop the word “got” from all phrases like that. AOL helped popularize the misuse of “got” with its signature “You’ve got mail” sign-on, when it should be, “You have mail.” And second, it’s clear nobody’s kidding them. Now, if I were to walk up to you and say, “I’ve just been asked to play guitar with the E Street Band cause Little Steven is quitting,” you’d say, “You have got to be kidding me!” And then I’d admit that, yes, I was kidding you. But we’d get a good laugh out of it.

Finally, consider the phrase, “He wants to have his cake, and eat it too.” This is a stupid phrase. I guess it’s used to indicate that someone is greedy. But I don’t think it’s really over-reaching to expect to eat cake if you have it. Why else would you have it, anyway? What other purpose can cake possibly serve? Maybe it should be, “He wants to eat his cake, and some ice cream, too.” That would be more appropriate.

There are surely more words and phrases we should eliminate. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know. I’ll remember you and appoint you to my staff when Obama makes me “Unnecessary Words and Phrases” czar.

Alien vs. pancreas

2009-07-28T11:59:00.003-04:00

After 6 months of tests and doctors visits to see why my stomach and back hurt, the doctor narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities – either chronic pancreatitis, or I have an extraterrestrial creature growing inside of me, like in “Alien.”

After the latest test, a most unpleasant thing called an endoscopic ultrasound, it looks like he’s settled on the pancreatitis. That’s disappointing, because it would be really cool to have an alien pop out of my belly. I was hoping to film it and get it on Youtube.

I hope this means the tests are over. I’ve had more things stuffed into my orifices this year than Madonna.

When they’re looking for things in your gastrointestinal system, there are two ways to get there. One is through the mouth and down the throat into the stomach. This was the method of my most recent test, and I guess it went fine, except when I woke up from the anesthesia I couldn’t breathe and my chest hurt. The nurse came in, took some readings and said something you never want to hear a medical professional say, “Well, I’ve never seen this happen before.”

They did an EKG and took an X-Ray and had me drink something that made me feel all warm inside, and after an hour said I was OK and ready to leave. My wife took me to a Folks restaurant, since I hadn’t been able to eat or drink all day, but I was cold and when I sat down to eat I started shivering and shuddering violently, like I was lying on a vibrating bed in a Panama City Beach motel. I opted to take my food with me, since the odds of my turnip greens actually hitting my mouth were pretty low.

The other way they check out your gastrointestinal system is they go through the service entrance, running some sort of device into your hindquarters. This is known as a colonoscopy. (I typed, then erased, several jokes here that were in poor taste).

The day before a colonoscopy is a lot of fun, as you go through a “cleaning out” process. I’ll spare you the details, but you wind up spending more time on the throne than Louis the 14th.

Through this process of probing, prodding and squeezing, I have lost all sense of shame and modesty. After the colonoscopy, I was in some pain, and the nurse told me that it was because they pumped gas inside me during the procedure. All I needed to do was break wind a few times. Hell, I thought, I’m good at that. But it still took about an hour.

Anyway, the colonoscopy was fine. The doctor said everything looked good back there. Well, tell me something I don’t know, doc. They send you home with pictures after these procedures, I guess as souvenirs. I’m thinking about doing a scrapbook.

I’m glad to finally have some of diagnosis, though I haven’t found out yet if anything can be done this, or how to treat it, etc. I’m not even sure what the pancreas does, but apparently you need it, so removing it is not an option. Unlike the alien, I’m stuck with it, for good or bad.

Back to the vet

2009-07-20T22:09:00.000-04:00

I came home from an overnight trip Saturday to find that my dog Lucky looked as if she’d kidnapped by Michael Vick and forced to go three rounds with a Rottweiller.

There was a big sore on the side of her face and it was pretty ugly. There was blood caked in her fur, she seemed kind of droopy and, most telling of all, she hadn’t eaten her food in a couple of days. My mother used to say the way she knew my father was really sick was if he didn’t eat.

I had no idea what had happened. There’s nothing she could have gotten in a fight with in the back yard. She’s too slow to catch the squirrels, and the frogs don’t generally appear too violent. But whatever caused it, she looked terrible.

So I had to take her to see the vet Monday afternoon. As I’ve mentioned before, we didn’t do this when I was a child. You slapped some motor oil on the dog and wished him or her luck. But I’m a modern, sensitive man, and I decide to go flush another $200 down the toilet, i.e., take her to the vet.

She had actually been there a couple of weeks before, to get her annual shots, and apparently she remembered, because when I got her out of the car she dug her claws into the asphalt and bowed up. I told her to stop being such a baby, but she didn’t move, so I half-carried, half-pushed her into the office past a startled woman holding a trembling poodle.

We don’t really fit in at that vet’s office. For one, Lucky is a yard dog, and she’s a mutt, and quite frankly, she smells a little bit. In addition, the sore on her face had become a huge, bloody, oozing mess.

Sitting around us were a few people, holding their little polite pedigreed dogs in their laps. They took one look at Lucky and recoiled in horror, clutching their dogs to their chests in abject fear.

Meanwhile, Lucky plopped down on the floor, bloody-side down, so every time she moved there was a little red smear on the linoleum. She must have felt bad about that, because a couple of times she helpfully began to lick it up, until I stopped her. A woman holding a terrier nearly had a heart attack when she saw that.

Somebody walked through with a white dog and one of my kids said, “Hey, that’s the color Lucky used to be.” Ok, so she’s a little bit dirty. She’s the canine equivalent of Pig Pen from the Charlie Brown cartoons.

They finally called her back, and the doctor said that she had contracted a bad staph infection. Nothing to worry about, but she was going to need to stay overnight, because apparently the initial attempts to shave the hair around the affected area had not gone well, and they were going to need to sedate her in order to do it. Do you see now why I don’t attempt to groom her?

I asked the vet what could have caused the staph infection, and she said to me, with a straight face, “Well, their immune systems can get compromised when they’re experiencing stress.” Stress? This dog does three things – eat, crap, sleep. All in voluminous fashion. What could cause it stress?

I’m the one who’s stressed. I’ve spent more on that dog in the past two weeks than I paid for my first car. It’s a good thing she’s so lovable and sweet and licks my toes, or she might be walking around right now with a face covered in motor oil.

Sleepless nights

2009-07-16T14:35:00.002-04:00

The song “Sleepless Nights,” penned by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, is one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

However, there is nothing at all beautiful about actual sleepless nights.

I have gone through a lifetime of sleepless nights, or nearly sleepless ones, anyway. Lying there unable to sleep hour after hour is one of the most miserable feelings you can experience, just between stubbing your toe and losing to Florida on the misery scale.

The first sleepless night I can recall is when I was a young boy, and I watched an episode of “The Night Gallery” in which this old couple who had been murdered crawled out of their graves in the night and then attacked their killer with pitchforks. I slept with the windows locked for a few nights after that, even though it was hot and we didn’t run the air conditioning after dark.

It was a big thrill when I was a boy to see if I could stay up all night. My friend Greg and I would camp out in a tent in his back yard and talk big talk about things we knew nothing about, like jumping motorcycles over cars or kissing girls. One night he snuck out one of his daddy’s cigars and a Playboy magazine, but we were afraid to light the cigar. I’m not saying whether or not we looked at the magazine.

One night we were out there in a little camper-trailer his parents owned, trying to stay awake until the day broke. We were lying in our sleeping bags and we had the radio playing, and the song “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers came on. It was one of those songs that radio deejays would play in the ’70s because it was 11minutes long, which gave them time to go in the studio bathroom and do something illegal before they had to come out and change the record. Why else do you think “Free Bird” and “Stairway to Heaven” were so popular?

Anyway, when it got to the part where the song slows down and they just chant the word “time” over and over, the record got stuck. I guess the deejay figured he’d caught a break because he just let it play, and for about 10 minutes all we heard was an echoing beat of the drum, then the singer saying “time” over and over and over. It freaked me out more than the old couple with the pitchforks, and we didn’t try to stay up all night again for quite some time.

Even when I do sleep, it’s not very restful because I have a lot of vivid and long and involved dreams. Some people say they don’t remember theirs, but I usually do. I have a bunch of recurrent dreams – dreams about tornadoes, and being chased, and going to school or work in my underwear, and going in for a final exam I haven’t studied for, and going in to a big office to do a mindless job every day. Wait, that last one might be real.

I don’t really think dreams mean anything. At least I hope they don’t. I don’t think they really reflect what you want in your subconscious. For example, I never dream that I’m winning the Masters, or being interviewed about my Pulitzer-prize winning book, or being called onstage by Bruce Springsteen to take the second verse on “Born to Run.” Instead, I dreamed the other night that I was plunging down a steep bank toward a river in my minivan. I assure you, this is not what I want.

Often times, I realize in the middle of the dream that I am indeed dreaming, and I try to do something to wake myself up. Just last night I dreamed I was on top of a building with people shooting at me, so I made a conscious decision to jump off, and sure enough, I woke up before I landed. I hope I don’t do this one day and realize about halfway down that I wasn’t actually dreaming.

When I can’t sleep, I usually just get up for a while and try not to fight it. I’ll read a book or watch TV until I think I can go to sleep again, or maybe just some put on my iPod and listen to music until I drift off. You can believe I don’t have any songs by The Chambers Brothers on there.

Me and my big mouth

2009-07-05T19:47:00.001-04:00

My family and I go to a relatively small Methodist Church, and I have learned a valuable lesson in the three years since we joined. And here it is – don’t ever let anybody there know that you have any skill at doing anything, because if they find out, they will ask you to do it for the church.

I learned this the hard way recently, when I accidentally let it slip that I once played drums in a band. Within the week I was being approached by people who had never spoken to me before, saying, “What’s this I hear about you being able to play drums?”

Our church has one of those new-fangled “praise bands” that plays at the early service every Sunday, with guitars and drums and bass and keyboards and all sorts of things that aren’t even mentioned in the Bible. The regular drummer is in the military reserves and often gets called away, so when word got out that there was another potential drummer in the house, they were on me like fire ants at a picnic.

Calling me a drummer, however, is a stretch. It reminds me of an old Henny Youngman joke: An orchestra is playing, and after the violinist does a solo, somebody stands up and says, “Tell that sonofabitch to stop playing.” The conductor turns around angrily and says, “Who called the violinist a sonofabitch?” And the guy answered back, “Who called the sonofabitch a violinist?”

Understand, I last played the drums in 1986, in a band in college in Athens, Ga. I played a very basic style, because I didn’t know how to do anything else. There were no fancy Keith Moon-like sonic explosions emanating from my drum kit. It was just “boom-boom-boom-bam, boom-boom-boom-bam,” over and over and over.

I remember once Michael Stipe came to one of our shows, and he was talking to us outside after we finished, and he looked at me and mumbled, “I really like the minimalist thing you’re doing with the drums.” And I said, well, Mike, you know, my philosophy is to not let the drums overpower the music, but to play a more subtle, supportive role, underpinning the lyrics and the melody. He mumbled something else and walked off. True story.

Anyway, after only one practice, I took the stage this morning, playing a set of electronic drums through six songs, all of them “contemporary Christian”, except for the Jackie Wilson song, “Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher.” This was really quite a leap for me to do this, because it involved a number of things I am against, including electronic drum kits, contemporary Christian music, and getting up early on a Sunday morning.

I guess I did OK. Nobody laughed or covered their ears, I didn’t drop the drum sticks, and they’ve asked me to fill in again next week. And truth be told, I actually had a pretty good time doing it and wouldn’t mind playing some more. Just don’t let anybody at the church know.

A break in tradition

2009-07-04T14:09:00.003-04:00

For 12 of the past 13 years, I’ve celebrated the Fourth of July by getting out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and going into Atlanta to run 6.2 miles in the Peachtree Road Race with 55,000 other idiots.

I varied that routine slightly this year by instead sleeping to 9, then taking the kids to Waffle House, where I ate a nutritious breakfast of bacon, grits, eggs, toast, and a biscuit smothered in white gravy. In my defense, I only ate half the biscuit.

Our waitress was a little younger than your normal Waffle House beauty. My daughter whispered to me after the girl took our order, “She was in P.E. class with me my freshman year in high school.” See, I said. She’s gone out and gotten herself a job. Maybe you could do the same.

My daughter got the same disgusted look she always gets whenever I say something inappropriate (you know, words like “work” or “job” or “no”), and said, “She dropped out of school because she was pregnant, dad!” Well, I said, that just shows you that she’s doubly ambitious – she’s working AND raising a family, and I can’t get you to feed the dog, except at gunpoint.

The drive over to Waffle House was a lot of fun, as I let my son take the wheel. Armed with a learner’s permit and an ego that far outstrips reality, he confidently drove us the one mile to the Waffle House while only giving me three minor heart attacks.

I am learning some things about my son as he learns to drive. For one, apparently he suffers some form of dyslexia I never knew about before. For example, he sees the word “Stop” on a sign, he reads it as “Slow down a little bit.” And to him, “Yield” translates to “Accelerate.” This disability also apparently causes him to add 10 miles per her to every speed limit sign.

Seriously, it should be against the law to have two teenagers at one time. The Chinese know how to handle this sort of thing.

After the Waffle House trip, I continued celebrating my country’s independence by plopping down on the couch to watch a little TV. I watched a few minutes of "Shatner’s Raw Nerve," and William’s guest this morning was Jenna Jameson, whom he described as a “modern renaissance woman.” Thankfully he didn’t go on to list her talents.

My better angels took over and I changed to channels to watch a few episodes of “The Revolution” on The History Channel. It’s interesting to contrast the courage and character and determination of the leaders and politicians of that time with the morons and preening lightweights we have in office today. Nobody ever had to listen to George Washington whine about his Argentinean “soul mate.” If you even said the words “soul mate” to him, he would shoot you between the eyes with a musket.

The Fourth of July is probably my favorite holiday. Later on I’ll grill some burgers, then we’ll drive over to a local elementary school, from where you can see three fireworks displays at once. Then I’ll come home and spend the rest of the night reassuring Lucky, as she freaks out when all the neighbors start setting off their own fireworks in the street. She’s not a fan.

And next year, I swear, I’m skipping Waffle House and running in the Peachtree.

Rest in peace

2009-06-25T11:23:00.000-04:00

I put on my Navy blue suit yesterday and went to a funeral for my Aunt Peggy, my father’s sister, who died in her sleep a few days ago.

I didn’t expect it to be a real emotional experience, since I had hardly seen her in the past 10 years, and she’s been in failing health for a while. But there were still a couple of moments that got to me.

They used all pre-recorded music at the funeral, which was a first for me. The first song was some over-produced “contemporary Christian” song that went on longer than Stairway to Heaven, but wasn’t nearly as good. I bet Aunt Peggy wouldn’t have chosen that one.

But then they played George Jones’ version of Amazing Grace, in which he sings the first verse a cappella. I looked over next to me and saw some tears in my daddy’s eyes, so naturally I lost it for a minute. If you can sit in a funeral chapel and listen to George Jones sing Amazing Grace and see your daddy crying and not tear up yourself, then I don’t want to know you.

The whole experience was sad, but more in a nostalgic way than a mournful one. It reminded me how little I see anybody in my extended family – aunts, uncles, cousins. These are people who were once a big part of my life, and now there are some of them I hardly even recognize.

I remember as a kid, I would see my family a lot, not just once a year at Christmas. They weren’t just names and faces, they were central figures in my universe. We’d go over to an aunt or uncle’s house to eat, or just visit, or we’d see each other at one of my grandmother’s houses. I’d hear my mama and daddy talk about them, so I knew about their problems, their joys, their triumphs and their failures.

On my father’s side of the family, my uncle died about 20 years ago, and my grandmother died a few years later, and we all just stopped getting together. People moved away, and I’d go years without seeing some of them. It’s a shame.

One thing that struck me at the funeral is how much older everybody is getting. My poor Uncle Joe, married to Peggy for 60 years, was just a shell of himself. The years and a case of Parkinson’s Disease have taken their toll. My memory of him is that of a hard-working, down-to-earth man with a firm handshake and a quick laugh. The man I saw at the funeral was not my Uncle Joe.

And Aunt Peggy was quite a character, a Dolly Parton-type who was partial to wigs, jewelry, makeup and flea markets. Her house was always loaded with things she picked up at flea markets. My mama never could understand why somebody wanted “all that mess” in their house.

I got together with my mother’s side of the family not long ago, to celebrate my grandmother’s 97th birthday. That was nice, but we probably won’t see each other again until Christmas, unless something bad happens, God forbid.

But, what to do? It’s a problem without a solution. I could say I’m going to make more of an effort to see everybody, but I know that’s not going to happen. Everyone is too scattered with too many things going on in their lives. Sometimes, memories just have to suffice.

Father Knows Best

2009-06-21T17:48:00.000-04:00

I was watching TV today and a commercial came on, and it featured the president of the United States telling us that we needed to do something with our kids and be good fathers.

Now, that made me wonder. Is there really someone out there today who saw that commercial and suddenly realized, “Hey! The president is telling me go spend time with my kids. I think I’ll take them bowling.”

Probably not. Either you know how to be a good father, or you don’t. A president can’t tell you how, and you can’t learn from a Web site or a TV commercial or a public service announcement on the radio. If you’re counting on that to guide you in fatherhood, you’re probably a lost cause.

But there is someone who can show you how to be a good father – and that’s your own father. A father is the most important influence on a child’s life. If you don’t believe me, go to any prison or strip club and ask the men and women there about their fathers.

My father taught me how to be a father mostly by example – you work, you provide, you don’t complain, you be there when they need you, you do whatever it takes to make sure the family is taken care of. The rewards are you get to see your children grow into good human beings, and you get control of the TV.

My dad never really sat me down for those Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best kind of father-son talks. He usually kept his instructions pretty simple and unambiguous. If I were going out of town or somewhere with friends, he would simply look at me and say, “Don’t act the fool.” And I knew exactly what he meant. I didn’t have to take time before I did anything to ponder whether, if I took that action, I would or would not be “acting the fool.” I just knew. And 99 percent of the time, I chose not to act the fool.

About two weeks before my college graduation, when I was home on the weekend, he walked into my room and said, “Do you have a job lined up yet?” I said no. He said, “Get one.” And he walked out. That was pretty clear. So, I got one.

When it was time to cut the grass, he didn’t come ask me to cut the grass. He didn’t negotiate with me, or offer me money, or tell me that it might be nice if I cut the grass. No, he’d walk into my room, and say “Go cut the grass.” And that’s what I did. There was no point in putting up an argument. I was going to lose, because he had God, the law and the power to withhold food on his side.

Of course, when you become a teenager, you tend to discount your father’s advice, because you’re smarter than he is, or so you believe. But sooner or later, and it may take years, you are going to realize that he was right.

I remember once I got lazy and didn’t want to change my own oil, so I went to one of those oil-change places. My dad told me that I needed to be careful when I did that, and I should always crawl under the car myself and make sure they put the oil filter back on tightly. I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard, and took my car to these places for years to get my oil changed without incident.

Then one day, about three years ago, I went to such a place just before I drove to Savannah on a business trip. I should have been suspicious, because the guys working there looked like they’d smoked more dope than Bob Marley, but as usual I did not check to see if they tightened the filter.

Sure enough, two days later, I’m driving out of Savannah on I-16, and I hear a “thump,” like I’d run over something. In a matter of moments, my engine overheated, smoke began to come out of the engine, and by the time I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, the engine had locked up. I looked under the car, and sure enough, no oil filter. Only a few oil splatters and a smoking engine. That explained the thump. They hadn’t tightened it and it fell off.

I wound up riding back from Savannah in the back seat of a pickup truck with a family of rednecks who smoked, argued and listened to modern country music very loudly for 4 hours, singing along to every Toby Keith and Tim McGraw song. Yep, I was thinking the whole time, I should have listened to my daddy.

So I hope you had a chance today to call up your daddy and tell him that you love him, and you appreciate everything he’s done, and you promise that even when you weren’t listening to him, he was making an impact on you. Happy Father’s Day.

Back in time

2009-06-15T15:08:00.003-04:00

I sojourned back up to Athens Friday night to watch The Dashboard Saviors play a show at the Caledonia Lounge.

You have perhaps not heard of this band. They were big in Athens, and other places, in the late ’80s and early-to-mid ’90s before they gave up chasing the dream, but they still get together every now and then to run all the redlights on memory lane.

They are a fantastic rock and roll band. I may be accused of being a little biased, since the founder, songwriter and lead singer, Todd McBride, has been my friend since kindergarten. But you don’t have to just take my word for it. In 1992 they were featured in Rolling Stone magazines “New Faces” section with an enthusiastic writeup. R.E.M. guitarist Pete Buck liked them so much that he produced and played on their first album.

The band toured the United States and even Europe, mostly Germany, I believe. In their heyday they were a hard-driving, tight band playing intelligent rock music, driven by John Crist’s propulsive drumming and Mike Gibson’s Southern-fried shredding on the guitar. (Sorry about that attempt to be a music writer).

But, they never “made it.” They couldn’t get on MTV or on the radio or ever seem to get that one big break that would put them over the top, or at least get them to the point where they could make a living playing music.

Why didn’t they make it? Who knows. Maybe they weren’t pretty enough, or cheesy enough, or just couldn’t get lucky. Instead, other questionable rock and roll bands got big during the period, like Blind Melon and the Goo-Goo Dolls and Hootie and the Blowfish.

Freakin’ Hootie and the freakin’ Blow-freakin’-fish.

I used to go see the Saviors play a lot, mostly in Athens or Atlanta. I hopped on stage with them one night in Greenville, S.C. and delivered a blistering lead vocal on Johnny 99. Too bad that’s not on YouTube somewhere.

Whenever I watched them play, I always wished that I had the guts to get up there and do what they were doing. They did inspire me to teach myself guitar and learn how to write a few songs. They even played one of my songs one night at an Athens club, which was a big thrill.

Their show the other night was good. You couldn’t tell it was the first time they had played together in a couple of years. While they were onstage, I imagine that the boys were transported back to the days when they thought it was going to work, when playing in a band was all they could imagine. When you’re 25, you can’t see yourself at 45.

I felt a little sad when the show was over. I wondered how they felt. Did it make them remember how things used to be? Did it tempt them, ever so briefly, to try and give it another shot? Did they feel like they gave up too soon, or maybe not soon enough?

But when they were onstage, it didn’t matter. In that hot, crowded little Athens nightclub the other night it was 1991 again, everybody was having fun, and I was wishing once more that I was one of the ones up onstage.

Out of place

2009-06-12T11:10:00.002-04:00

One thing I don’t like much about my job is occasionally I have to go to meetings, where I am definitely a square peg in a room full of round holes.

I had to drive up to Athens this week to sit in a room with a bunch of politicians and business leaders and chamber of commerce people. I wore a suit and tie, just like every other guy there, but I suspect that’s about all I had in common with them.

I just really don’t know what to talk about to these people. They will usually come up and introduce themselves to me, and after reading my nametag, they realize they don’t know who I am. So then they ask me what I do, on the off-chance that I might be somebody important enough for them to be nice to. Inevitably they are disappointed by my answer, and soon find a way to excuse themselves.

I was listening to a “classic rock” radio station on the drive up to Athens, so as a result, I had a lot of things on my mind when I walked into lunch. For one, I’ve always wondered how, as a teen-aged boy, I didn’t seem to notice that Freddie Mercury was gay. You have to understand that, for a boy of that age growing up in the South in the ’70s, the idea of a man being gay was not something we could really grasp, let alone accept. Yet I’d see pictures of Freddie prancing around in tight pants with his porno moustache, and all I thought was, “These guys rock!”

Also, I heard a song by the band Boston, and that reminded me of my theory that Boston was not actually a group of musicians, but rather some sort of computer program created by Tom Scholtz, founder of the “band” and holder of a Master’s degree from MIT. Really, does their stuff sound human? Go listen to Long Time and tell me you can find one ounce of human emotion in there. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I wondered some other things, too. Like, in AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long, Brian Johnson sings in the verses of a certain “she” – “she” was a fast machine, “she” kept her motor clean, etc., etc. But in the chorus, he’s singing to someone directly – “you” shook me all night long. So, was it two different women? And would he be telling the woman who shook him all night long about this other woman, who knocked him out with her American thighs? I don’t think that would be very smart.

Anyway, these are the things I wanted to talk about to my lunch companions, but I never really found a way to work it into the conversation. The woman sitting to my right is the director of some hospital and she was wearing an outfit the same color as an orange Creamsickle. I made a couple of attempts to talk to her, but we weren’t clicking. She struck me as more of a Celine Dion fan than a classic rock fan, so I didn’t bring up my theories.

Part of the buffet was some fruit salad, and I had some on my plate, but I was having trouble eating the grapes with a utensil. Grapes are really not suited for a fork, because it’s hard to stab them, or a spoon, because they tend to roll out. I couldn’t eat them with my hands, because I was in such high-tone surroundings.

So I looked over at Creamsicle woman and said, “You know, you would have thought we would have invented some new utensils by now. How long have we been using the fork and spoon? Hundreds of years? Why did we decide to just stop utensil development there? And please don’t bring up the ‘spork,’ because it’s not good for anything.”

She just sat there quietly, looked again at my nametag, and found a reason to excuse herself.

Eventually the lunch meeting ended, and I slipped out a side door, climbed into my car, put in a Louvin Brothers CD and took the long way home because I like riding through the country. At least the day wasn’t a total waste.

I need a vacation

2009-06-05T09:56:00.003-04:00

So far this year, I have experienced the following:

- an overflowing toilet that led to a 4-week home repair.

- a mysterious medical issue that has resulted in visits to eight different doctors, an operation, a plethora of unpleasant tests and medical bills piled to the ceiling.

- uncertainty at work brought about a couple of weeks ago when we learned that upper management was bringing in consultants who were looking at “cost containment issues” by discussing ways to “maximize efficiencies” resulting in a more streamlined “target organization.” In other words, don’t buy any green bananas.

On top of that, my house needs a new roof, the dryer is squeaking, the upstairs shower isn’t working and I’ve been letting my 15-year-old son drive the car. If anybody has a Valium stockpile they’d like to unload, call me. And you thought Jon and Kate had problems!

In other words, I am ready for a vacation. How’s this for irony – this week my daughter went to Disney World with a friend, and next week my son is going to the beach with one of his friends. Meanwhile, mom and dad – the ones who actually have jobs and make money - are stuck at home. We need better friends.

In some ways, I like to follow my father’s lead when it comes to being on vacation. He would get into the hotel room, park himself in front of the TV, strip down to a T-shirt and boxer shorts and eat like a feral hog.

This is why I’m generally against the idea of taking non-family members with us on vacation. If they do go, they need to understand that they will see me in my boxer shorts, covered in Doritos dust and belching like a volcano. Perhaps I should have them sign a waiver.

My dad also always took a pair of binoculars to the beach. I thought this was odd, but he would tell me that he liked to sit on the hotel balcony and look at the ships as they passed by. He seemed to always have them trained on the beach, though. Finally I hit puberty and understood why he brought them. Way to go, dad!

We took a yearly vacation to Panama City Beach in Florida. My dad didn’t believe in making reservations before we went, so we would ride up and down the strip looking for vacancy signs. Then the hotel and the hotel room had to pass my mom’s inspection, so it could be a harrowing few hours before we finally found a place to stay. Bless their souls for saving the money and taking me on vacation, but I do not recommend their methods.

These days, we like to go down to the Gulf Coast of Florida or Alabama, to places like Perdido Key or Orange Beach. The beaches are nice and not nearly as crowded as Panama City, though you do have fewer options if you decide to go get a tattoo or an air-brushed T-shirt. And you don’t see as many big girls in tiny rebel-flag bikinis.

I don’t know if I’ll get to go anywhere this year or not. We are planning to go to Disney World in November, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, but that’s not a very restful trip. I need a good week of sleeping late, eating doughnuts and looking for ships through my binoculars.

And if anybody wants to invite me along, I’ll even buy some new boxer shorts.

And the award goes to....

2009-05-27T17:15:00.001-04:00

A big part of being a parent is trudging to endless events to watch your kids play sports or lead cheers or sing songs or do other assorted cute things.

The events, I generally don’t mind. But almost every activity has an accompanying year-end awards ceremony or banquet, and those can be pure torture.

For one thing, at a ball game, I can concentrate on watching my son play, or my daughter cheer, and ignore everybody else. But at these banquets and ceremonies, I have to watch this parade of kids I don’t care about going to receive awards as I sit there and clap listlessly for three hours and hope none of the other parents make eye contact and want to talk to me.

Just last week, there was a year-end awards ceremony at my kids’ high school, and it was every bit of the thrill-fest I thought it would be. I haven’t had that much fun since my last MRI.

In the “everybody’s a winner” climate that exists today in schools, they seem to be determined to see that every student gets some sort of award. They honor the student with the highest grade-point average in every subject – and I do mean every subject. My favorite was the kid who won the weightlifting award. That’s going to look good on a college resume.

They also gave out “perfect attendance” awards. I like to point out to my kids that I had perfect attendance in school from kindergarten through the 11th grade. Not because I was some nerd who loved school, but because I knew if I had any illness this side of the Ebola virus, my mother was going to make me go to school.

It wasn’t because she was mean, but there was really nothing else she could do with me when I was sick. She couldn’t miss work, and my dad was at work, and nobody had heard of “day care” in those days. So she’d slap some Vick’s Vapor Rub on my chest, tell me to suck it up and shoo me toward the school bus. So I never considered perfect attendance an accomplishment – it was a mandate.

I am, of course, proud of my kids, and they both were honored for having an A average throughout the school year, which seems impossible since they do homework or study about as often as Haley’s Comet passes the Earth. But I may just have to find a reason to be out of town when next year’s awards banquet comes around. If that makes me a bad parent, I’ll live with the fallout.

Since my kids are also involved in athletics, there are “sports banquets” to attend. This year they combined the football and cheerleading banquets into one, which meant it lasted longer than the Yalta Conference. And just this week I attended a baseball banquet, which wasn’t that bad, except that the food would have been disallowed by the Geneva Convention, and people my age aren’t meant to sit for two hours at a school cafeteria table. Those seats were designed for smaller butts than mine.

They like to thank people a lot at sports banquets. Anybody who makes any minor contribution to the team or the program gets a plaque. This is preceded by a speech that usually goes something like, “There’s a special person here who I want to thank. She was responsible for bringing the napkins for the concession stand, and let me tell you, without her, I don’t know what we would have done. Every game I could count on her being there with the napkins, without me even having to ask her. We played a lot of games, so that’s a lot of napkins, and people don’t realize how much effort that takes.”

This goes on for about 5 more minutes, and then they bring up the person who brought the ketchup, and two hours later you begin praying for the Ebola virus to strike you, at last.

In the end, I suppose it’s worth it. My son was named his team’s Most Valuable Player and was given a large wooden plaque, which he wanted to put on the front of the refrigerator. Most valuable, but perhaps not most clear-thinking.

I reckon there’ll come a day soon when I’ll miss going to these sorts of events, but right now I can’t picture it. I’m just glad summer is here and eight weeks of blissful nothing-filled evenings await me.

Question authority

2009-05-19T15:24:00.000-04:00

There’s nothing worse than dealing with somebody who has just a little bit of authority.

You know what I mean – parking lot attendants, store security guards, school secretaries, etc. You give these people a little bit of authority, and they go on a power trip that would make Stalin seem meek.

If you’ve ever worked in an office environment, you know what I’m talking about. These secretaries – now often known as administrative professionals – can make your life easier if they’re competent, but can make you miserable if they’re incompetent. I’m stuck with the latter.

I turned in an expense report the other day from a trip. She brings my Holiday Inn invoice over and says, “What were the restaurant charges for?”

I said, “Food.”

She said, “Well, was it breakfast, lunch, dinner?”

I said, “Yes.”

I mean, what else could you buy at a hotel restaurant? Food is the only option. Hopefully the little account-Nazi got it all figured out without any further elaboration from me.

I admit, I do sort of bristle when I’m questioned by certain people, and perhaps I don’t handle things as diplomatically as possible. I generally hold my tongue when I’m dealing with a real policeman, except for the one time I got arrested, and we don’t want to talk about that right now, do we?

I remember once, when I was a younger man, and I went out with my friend Sam and a couple of others to celebrate Sam’s upcoming nuptials. Well, it was late in the evening, and we were at a hotel, and a member of our party decided he wanted to go out and visit a house of entertainment, so he called a cab. But the poor guy was really tired from all the bobbing for apples and hide-and-seek and Bible studying we had done at the bachelor party, so he fell asleep before the cabbie got there.

The cabbie was not happy when he arrived and learned there was not to be a passenger, so he demanded we pay him for his inconvenience. We said no. So he showed up later at our door with an officer of the law, who demanded to know what was going on. This guy was in uniform, and acting really official as he tried to ascertain the facts of the matter.

Then I noticed my friend Sam staring at the officer intently, and he asked him, “Excuse me, are you a real police officer?” The guy sort of bowed up and said, “I’m a Cobb County Park Ranger. You got a problem with that?” No, we allowed, we didn’t have a problem with that, but since we weren’t illegally using a picnic table or shooting turkeys out of season, we figured we were out of his jurisdiction, and we went back inside the hotel room and shut the door and had a good laugh.

The good times ended a few minutes later when another knock came on the door. This time we were greeted by the jilted cabbie, the hotel manager, Ranger Smith and one annoyed-looking Marietta policeman, who worked out a compromise: we gave the cabbie $5, and we didn’t get arrested.

I believe the popular phrase in the ’60s was “Question Authority”, which is fine, unless that authority has the power to arrest you or kick you out of their house (in case my kids are reading this). In that case, just keep it to yourself.

See no evil, hear no evil

2009-05-12T13:22:00.002-04:00

I went and met three of my old friends from high school the other night. We basically just sat around and talked for hours and behaved impeccably, in large part because we’re all too old now to misbehave without pulling a muscle.

The next day my wife asked me a number of questions about my friends – you know, is this one still married, is that one dating anybody, is this one going to have any more kids, where does that one work now, etc. etc.

I gave her an honest answer: “I don’t know.”

How in the world, she wanted to know, did you spend five hours with these people and not find anything out?

“Well,” I said, “It just didn’t come up.”

She wanted to know, in that case, what we did talk about. I said, you know, important things, like how the Bulldogs are going to do this year, and how goofy some of our old classmates look in their Facebook pictures, and the time somebody’s hair caught on fire when we were riding around in a Volkswagen bus, and how I work with a woman who got married and hyphenated her last name, so her name is now Jones-Jones. You know, stuff like that.

I hated to disappoint her by not knowing all of the details of their personal lives, but men aren’t like that. Unlike what you see in movies, men don’t sit around with each other and say stuff like, “You know, Carol and I are growing apart, and we’re having a lot of problems in our relationship. We just don’t communicate on the same level we used to, and I fear we may be headed for divorce.”

What’s more likely to happen is one day you run into him, and he’s not with Carol, he’s now with Brandy, and you just assume that he and Carol got divorced, or she’s dead, or she’s out of town and he’s just feeling really brave. In any case, you don’t ask, you just say hi to Brandy and move on.

My wife, on the other hand, will come home and say, “Did I tell you about Jenny? Well, she and her husband have been trying to conceive, and they’re having some trust issues because she found another woman’s underwear in his suitcase, but they got past that, but now they’re having trouble because his sperm count is low, and she’s considering in-vitro fertilization, but she’s not sure she should even get pregnant because she has a sister who is bi-polar and once attacked her mother with a pickaxe, and she’s afraid it might run in the family…”

And I’ll say, “Who is Jenny?” And she’ll say, “Oh, I just met her.”

I don’t know that it’s so much that we don’t care about our friends’ personal lives, we just don’t want to be involved, and we don’t want to have to answer questions. For example, let’s say your friend confides in you that he’s getting a divorce because he realized he made a mistake marrying his wife, and he doesn’t love her, and you relay this information to your wife. Here’s how that’s going to go:

Wife: “So, that’s it. He’s just going to dump her for some hot young thing? What a pig.”
You: “No, that’s not it. He just realized he shouldn’t have married her.”
Wife: “Oh, really? And is that what you’re going to do? Realize you made a mistake marrying me?”
You: “What? No. Of course not. But he doesn’t love her.”
Wife: “So I guess one day you’re just going to walk in and tell me you don’t love me and leave me here to raise the kids by myself while you go flitting across the country with some trashy Hooters waitress. Is that what you’re telling me?”

At this point, you spend about 12 straight hours trying to convince her that you are nothing like your friend, or you pretend you’re late for a meeting and rush out the door, or you double over in pain and fake appendicitis. Either way, it’s going to cost you some jewelry.

So I say, when it comes to the personal lives of your friends, follow the Sgt. Schultz model from Hogan’s Heroes – I see nothing. I know nothing. Trust me, it’s the best way.

Honor thy mother

2009-05-10T20:28:00.002-04:00

When my mother was alive, she would always say that she didn’t want her kids to make a big deal out of Mother’s Day. She said it meant more to her that we were good to her the other 364 days of the year. She had seen plenty of people who didn’t treat their mother right most of the time, but made a big show of it on Mother’s Day, and that really bothered her.

It’s good that she felt that way, because I gave her some pretty bad Mother’s Day gifts. I remember one year, I made her an ashtray in school. This was a great gift, when you consider that nobody in our house smoked. But she displayed it proudly for years.

When you get married and have kids, it comes as a shock to most guys to learn they are also expected to buy their wife a Mother’s Day gift. It is never wise to say to your wife in that situation, “But you’re not my mother.” Just buy her something and be done with it.

I took my wife shopping the day before Mother’s Day this year, which is a gift in its own right. I learned early on the trick of making her so miserable when we went shopping that she would never ask me to go again. I’d rather run nekkid through a briar patch than go shopping at a crowded mall or shopping center.

A young woman at work, who is still something of a newlywed, was telling me the other day that she and her husband go shopping on the weekends, and he “loves it.” She said they had gone for about four hours the previous weekend, and he had a great time, going with her from store to store, watching her try on clothes, giving his opinion.

I didn’t want to tell her that unless they were at Frederick’s of Hollywood, he was almost certainly not having a great time watching her try on clothes. But why burst her bubble?

I figured it was wise to just let my wife pick out her own Mother’s Day gift from me, because that way she wouldn’t have to take it back to the store. Of course, one of the things she got was a rug for the bathroom, and we hadn’t been home 10 minutes when she said, “I don’t like this. I have to take it back.” At least it wasn’t my fault.

At one point in the store, she said she might want some new cookware. I pointed out that this might be the same as buying our dog a car. You know, because the dog doesn’t drive.

She didn’t think it was funny, either.

I thought that when my mother died, Mother’s Day would be really tough for me. But I guess because of her attitude towards it, it doesn’t bother me any more than any other day. It’s really just an artificial holiday. You should honor your mother and be good to her every single day of your life. If you don’t, I’m pretty sure you’re going to hell.

I tend to miss her more at other times, like when I’m sick. I don’t care how old you are, when you are sick, or something is going wrong, you want to be able to tell your mother about it. I have been going through a medical nightmare for three months, and I just know that if she was around I would feel better about it.

My mother had dreams of being a nurse, but it didn’t work out. But she had all sorts of medical books and insight and any time I had a problem, I’d call her first, and she usually had the right answer. Like most men, I can be stubborn about going to the doctor and getting things taken care of. But if my mother told me I needed to go, I went, no questions asked.

I have to do an MRI tomorrow and I’m being a wimp and am totally freaked out about it, because I have claustrophobia and just the thought of it makes my skin crawl and my pulse pound. A lot of people have tried to reassure me, but I still wish I could call her and talk to her about it. She’d probably tell me to suck it up and don’t be a baby and I need to go in there and get it over with, and as always, she’d be right.

When I was a newspaper columnist, she would clip out every column I wrote, and she kept it in a scrapbook. She’d probably do the same thing with this blog, though she’d scold me every time I wrote something that “wasn’t nice.”

I don’t get that sad anymore about her being gone. I had her for 42 years, and that’s more than some people can say. Everybody deserves a mama who keeps their columns in a scrapbook, even when they’re a grown man. So if your mother is still alive, make sure that every day is Mother’s Day. You don’t want to go to hell.

Facebooking

2009-04-30T13:59:00.002-04:00

Have you joined the Facebook craze? I gave in a few months ago, and while I have found it at times interesting and at times fun, sometimes it’s just plain weird.

I’ve wound up being “friends” with people I never liked in the first place, mostly from high school. I’m pretty sure they never liked me, either, which is why I found it odd that they want me to know what’s going on with their lives these days.

People on Facebook let you know what they’re up to through something called “status updates”, in which they post things like, “I just went to the grocery store.” or “I think my goiter has gotten infected.” There may be a handful people in whom I have that level of interest, but not the annoying kid who I used to throw spitballs at in biology class.

One status update I came across the other day was a guy I (barely) knew in high school thanking everyone for their recent prayers, and saying “We miss our little boy so very much. When he left us he took our happiness with him. He was a part of me, and that part of me is gone, and it hurts so much.” This was a truly horrible thing to read, so I went into his profile to see if I could find out more information.

Well, it turns out he was talking about his dog. Don’t get me wrong – I know the loss of a pet can be a terribly sad thing. I’m sure I’ll be quite upset when Lucky moves on to the big backyard in the sky, which may be sooner than later if she doesn’t stop barking in the mornings.

But I can’t help but feel a little misled by this guy, who was VERY distraught over that dog. So I got over my misgivings and did the decent thing – I de-friended him.

* * * * * *

Speaking of Lucky, she is limping around the backyard now. I think she twisted her leg when she stepped in one of the holes she’s dug all over the place. I would say that serves her right, but I don’t like to see her in pain.

I don’t think it’s too bad. She can put some weight on it, and she doesn’t have that look that dogs get on their faces when they’re hurting. She pretty much has the same happy-go-lucky, vacant, “do-you-have-food?” look as always. It seemed better yesterday, which is good news, because I didn’t want to be faced with a choice of spending thousands of dollars at the vet, or having to post a very sad status update on my Facebook page.

She doesn’t do a lot of running these days, anyway. She’s part retriever, but the retrieving part of her personality has gone dormant. When I throw the tennis ball now, she looks at it like it’s a hand grenade. She has no interest in chasing anything. She might chase a cat, if it had a pork chop tied to its back.

People seem to think it’s OK when they see her to say, “Oh my god, she’s so fat.” I don’t think that’s very nice. I don’t go to their house and tell them that their kids are ugly.

I try to tell people that her behavior has improved, but I may just be fooling myself. A while back a terrible storm came up, with lots of lightning and thunder and wind, and I let her in the house until it ended. Later I thought I heard hail, so I opened up the front door to see, and next thing I know this white furry blur goes rushing past me and into the front yard, and down the sidewalk. In a hailstorm.

A close-by lightning strike apparently convinced her that she had not made the best decision, so within a few minutes she trundled back to the house, soaking wet, and expecting to just stroll back in the house as if nothing had happened. I intercepted her with a towel and some unkind words.

Well, here’s hoping she’ll be back up to speed in no time, so she can continue to drive me crazy. I can live with a few more holes in the backyard if she can.

Grow a pair

2009-04-21T13:58:00.001-04:00

If you want to read something that will make you sick, I suggest you check out this article in Newsweek.

Some testes-deficient putz named Joel Schwartzberg has written a book called “Slouching Toward Fatherhood,” about how hard it was on him to be a father. I heard him being interviewed on the radio last night on the way home, and I almost pulled over and puked on the shoulder of I-75.

After his son was born, he was sad and angry and weepy. He claims he later found out he was going through something called “male postpartum depression.” Dude. Seriously. Come on.

He writes, “I couldn't mask my sadness when my work colleagues asked excitedly about fatherhood. ‘It's good … well, it's OK,’ I said. ‘Actually, it's very, very hard.’ By then, I was close to tears. We were all happy when the conversation ended. Later on, they told me I'd scared the crap out of them. I'm sure at least a few went back on contraception.”

Here’s who should have used contraception – Joel Schwartzberg’s parents. This guy needs General Patton to come by and slap him in the face with his glove. He needs Don Corleone to grab him by the collar and scream, “You can act like a man!”

Yes, Joel, having children is work. But the last thing a kid needs is a wimpy, weepy father who walks around gazing at his loafers and feeling sorry for himself. This guy says, “I took on every parental responsibility with sucked-up reluctance on the outside and contempt on the inside.” Really, changing a diaper or giving a baby a bath was that hard on you?

Maybe I’m being too hard on Mr. Schwartzberg – he claims he later came around to be a good parent – but I just don’t understand why so many men seem to be crappy fathers. Look at professional athletes like Travis Henry or Shawn Kemp or Evander Holyfield, who fertilize women all over creation like romantic Johnny Appleseeds with no thoughts of being there to raise them. Or slimeballs like Larry Bird or Julius Erving who had children, then denied their existence for many years because it would have been bad for their careers or their images.

Being a father is really not that complicated. Women do all of the hard work early on. We don’t carry the babies in our stomachs and see our whole bodies change and then have to eject something the size of a bowling ball from an orifice. All we have to do is endure a couple of Lamaze classes and find a reason to leave the house when we’re the target of a hormone-induced tirade during pregnancy.

Is it easy getting up at 3 a.m. when it’s your turn to calm down a screaming baby? No, but it’s not exactly parachuting into Normandy, either. Buck up and ride it out. When you get a woman pregnant, it’s part of the deal – you are now responsible for the care and well-being of another person, and your selfish desires have to take a backseat. Assuming you survive their teenage years – not a sure thing – you can resume living your precious life when they’re out on their own.

And if you can’t handle it, keep it in your pants and do the world a favor.

The death of country music

2009-04-18T21:37:00.003-04:00

I was reading an interview with some yahoo named Jason Aldean, who is
apparently a rising star in the world of country music, which is a dumb
thing to say, because these guys aren't playing country music.

Anyway, he was asked about his musical influences growing up, and he
said “Guns N' Roses -- the '80s rock stuff. Then I was into John
Mellencamp, and Bob Seger and a lot of the Southern rock stuff. I listened
to a lot of different kinds of music.”

Well, there you go. How can a guy with a musical spectrum so broad that
he listened to both John Mellencamp AND Bob Seger grow up to be anything
but a great country artist?

Country music is dead. Well, it's not dead - there are plenty of people
out there still writing and performing actual country music. It just doesn’t get on the radio or on CMT.

“Country music” is nothing but a marketing tool now. I'm not sure who
exactly killed country music, but I suspect you'd find Garth Brooks' and Shania
Twain's fingerprints on the gun.

Have you watched a country music awards show lately? You could fire a shotgun at the stage and never hit anybody who’s actually playing country music. We live in a nation where people complain about terrorists being mistreated in jail, and yet Rascal Flatts is allowed to run free. That ain't right.

If you turn on a “country” radio station now, you’ll basically hear one of four songs:

• I’m from a small town where we all love Jesus.
• I’m a good old boy/gal and I like to have a good time and don’t care if you call me a redneck.
• I love my girl/guy and she/he loves me even though I don’t deserve it.
• I’m a redneck from a small town and I love my girl and she loves Jesus.

Look at all the artists out there now masquerading as country musicians. Kenney Chesney does a bad Jimmy Buffett impression and wins award after award. Keith Urban is basically Dan Fogelberg with a steel guitar player. I got subjected to a Keith Urban CD once and I almost went into a diabetic coma by the time it was finished.

I guess the main reason it sucks now is because it’s not sincere. Country music was always about pain and heartache and hard times, and it was sung and written by people who grew up poor and fought their demons and produced something beautiful out of misery. When George Jones sang “If Drinking Don’t Kill Me, Her Memory Will,” he meant it. Merle Haggard could sing about prison because he’d been there. Johnny Cash knew pain because his beloved brother died when he was young. Buck Owens grew up like the Joad family, moving from one California produce farm to the next.

How is popular “country” music made these days? Well, the songs are written by the same group of songwriters who actually go to work in an office and work on them. This results in songs that are calculated and soulless and full of phony emotion. The best country songs are scribbled on the back of a bar napkin with half the words blurred by spilt whiskey or tears.

Then the songs of today are recorded by a group of session musicians who play on everybody’s CD, and produced by a handful of producers who want everything to sound the same. And they succeed – it all sounds like crap.

My favorite scene in “The Blues Brothers” is when they stumble into a backwoods bar and they ask the waitress what kind of music is usually played there, and she says “We like both kinds – country AND western.” Sadly, I fear they’re both now just a memory.

Playing catch

2009-04-14T16:15:00.002-04:00

My son is 15 years old and he asks me to go outside and throw the baseball with him almost every day.

I’m afraid to say no because if I do, next thing I know I’ll turn around and I’ll be living out Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle, and he won’t even feel obligated to come visit me in the nursing home.

So I trudge out there, glove in hand, with my aching right shoulder and gallstones (that nursing home isn’t as far off as I once thought) and I throw with him. He’s about as tall as I am now and he tries to burn one in every now and then, but I just catch it nonchalantly and throw it back, pretending it doesn’t hurt. You can’t show weakness.

He’s a pitcher on his high school junior varsity team. I’m trying to teach him to throw a curveball, which would be easier if I could throw one that broke more than the length of my pinky finger. Well, that’s why I was always an outfielder.

We started throwing the ball in the front yard when he was very little. That’s really the main reason men want to have sons, is to have somebody to play ball with. In the old days, you had sons because you wanted somebody to help you plow the fields, or to carry on the family name. Now you just hope they don’t wreck your car or make you a grandpa at an early age.

I’ve thrown the ball a few times with my daughter, but that stopped once she discovered it messed up her fingernail polish. Plus, it’s different with a girl. They get offended if you call them “moron” or “lazy-ass” or “idiot.” Sons understand that comes with the territory.

With daughters, you play other games, like “Let’s see how much money we can make disappear from dad’s wallet,”, and “Guess how much these shoes cost?”

I don’t know that any of us with children has parenting figured out. You can do everything right, or at least what you think is right, and they still turn out wrong. But it’s gotta help your percentages if you’re there for them and do things with them.

A large part of parenting is just being there. You don’t have to give them everything they want, or keep them from ever being disappointed, or shield them from any failure. Just let them know you’re there if they need you – but never let them know where your bank accounts are. You know, just in case.

On the road to recovery

2009-04-05T19:49:00.001-04:00

Right after I learned I was going to have to get my gall bladder removed, it seemed everybody I ran into had already had that procedure done. Don’t worry, they all said. It’s not a big deal, and you’ll be back to normal within a day. They made it sound like it was no more serious than getting a filling or a pedicure.

Well, it turns out they are all evil lying liars who tell lies.

I was supposed to go see a surgeon for a consult tomorrow, which is Monday. But Thursday night I felt like the guy in Full Metal Jacket after his fellow recruits put bars of soap in pillowcases and beat him half to death. Then Friday morning on the way to work I noticed my fingers were turning yellow, and that seemed like a bad sign, so I turned the car around and headed back to the doctor.

He didn’t think that the yellow fingers were anything to worry about, but he did say the gallbladder needed to come out pronto, so he sent me to the hospital. I have always liked to brag that I’ve never had surgery and never had to spend a night in the hospital, but both of those streaks were about to end.

I was hopeful that I could make the best of it, since this little procedure was apparently not a big deal. At worst, I’d get a good-looking nurse to take care of me, give me a nice warm sponge bath or two, and I’d get a couple of nice meals and I could lounge around for a couple of days and do nothing without feeling guilty.

Not long after I got checked into my room, my nurse entered. Instead of Nurse Goodbody, I got a guy named Ronnie with a diamond stud earring in each ear and a Kid’N’ Play haircut. I made a mental note to hang a “No Sponge Baths!” sign on the door.

Ronnie picked up a chart and said, “OK, Mr. Williams, I see you’re here for a total left hip replacement.” I may have a couple of body parts I need to upgrade, but my hips are just fine. He saw the stricken look on my face, then looked down at the chart and said, “Whoops. Wrong chart,” and left the room. I got a magic marker and drew a circle on my abdomen and wrote “Cut here,” just so they’d be sure.

They wouldn’t let me eat, because they were going to do another ultrasound, so I got more miserable and cranky as the day went on. I got a lot of conflicting information – I wasn’t going to be allowed any food, I was going to get clear liquids, I could have a regular meal. Finally I got my family to sneak me in a chicken sandwich.

Saturday morning they came and got me and wheeled me into the operating room. That’s a daunting experience, no matter how “minor” the operation. You realize that your life is in the hands of people you know nothing about. How did I know the anesthesiologist didn’t stay up all night, snorting coke and drinking whiskey, before coming to work? What if my doctor was one of those fakes who made up everything on their resume’ and learned how to do surgery by watching reruns of M*A*S*H?

I didn’t have much time to worry about such things, because next thing I knew I was coming to in the recovery room. My belly felt as if someone was pressing a hot fireplace poker into it, but I was still too groggy to speak, so I just moaned really loud until a nurse came over and shot me up with something.

I got to go home later that afternoon. The doctor came by to see me but didn’t tell me much. I’m not implying that he was in a hurry because he had somewhere else to go, but I did find it strange that he was wearing a golf glove.

After I got home, I can describe my experience quite succinctly – pure agony. It hurts to blink. I’ve taken so many Percocets that Keith Richards called me and said, “Hey, take it easy, mate.” And for about the past 15 minutes, I’ve had a severe case of hiccups, which are a real treat just after abdominal surgery.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll begin to turn the corner and start getting back to normal. I have vowed that I will also start taking better care of myself, by eating healthier and losing weight and resuming exercise – as soon as I can get out of a chair in less than 10 minutes.

Health care inferno

2009-04-01T16:08:00.002-04:00

Every president we’ve had since Andrew Johnson or thereabouts has promised to reform our health-care system, but I think the only way to have a positive health-care experience is just to never get sick.

Sadly, I couldn’t follow my own advice, which has plunged me into about an 8-week journey that Dante should have accompanied me on.

First, I went to a doctor’s office and saw a 12-year-old physician’s assistant who drew some blood and told me I have pancreatitis. She made it sound like no big deal, told me to watch what I eat for a while and not drink alcohol, and I’d be OK.

A couple of weeks later I was not OK, so I went to see an actual doctor, one I’ve seen before. He got a little snippy with me when he found out I’d been to see somebody else.

“So,” he said, with a hurt look, “You just go see whoever you want to when you’re sick?” I felt like I’d been cheating on him. Wow, a guy gives you one prostate exam and he acts like he owns you.

He had a different view of pancreatitis than the physician’s assistant. “You know this can kill you, right?” Well, no, I didn’t know that. So he sent me off immediately to get a sonogram, which was actually kind of pleasant, as far as medical tests go. It’s not every day you get something warm rubbed over your belly.

The doctor, happy that we were together again, told me that the sonogram didn’t reveal anything, and he said my problems were caused by high triglycerides, and it should all clear up in a couple of weeks. As I left, I’m pretty sure he mouthed the words “Call me” when the nurse wasn’t looking.

Well, a couple of weeks passed, and I wasn’t feeling better – as a matter of fact, I felt about 5 times worse, and I decided I should see another doctor. I thought about calling the first doctor and telling him I still wanted to be friends, but I knew he’d see right through me.

My new doctor is a woman, and she ordered a bunch of tests, and now she believes I have gallstones. These apparently showed up on the ultrasound I had – you know, the one my first doctor had pronounced “normal.” Maybe he was so mad at my betrayal that he withheld that from me on purpose! Hell hath no fury like a general practitioner scorned. Or, maybe he’s just a quack.

I like this new doctor just fine, except that the woman who schedules appointments has one minor issue - she barely speaks English. That’s really what you want when you’re feeling like crap, to have to repeat everything you say five times to the person making your next appointment.

The doctor asked her to set up an appointment for me with a surgeon, who will give me an opinion as to whether they’ll snatch my gallbladder out. She asked me, I think, when I wanted the appointment, and I said, between gasps of pain, “As soon as possible.” She said ok, she’d call me when she had it done. So she calls in a couple of hours and says, “I have you appointment on 28th.”

I said, “But today’s the 30th.” She said “Yes, appointment on 28th, 9 a.m.” I said, “Wait, do you mean APRIL 28th? She said, “Yes, you want early, that’s first early morning they have.” I said, “No, I didn’t mean as soon as possible in the day, I meant, like, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.” She then, I believed, cursed me out in Cantonese, and I hung up the phone and called the surgeon myself, and got an appointment in just a few days.

It’s not over yet. Tomorrow morning at 6:45 a.m. I go to the hospital for another scan, where they inject you with dye and you get a warm feeling all over. Then I have to have more bloodwork done. This will be about the fifth time I’ve had that done in the past few weeks. My arm looks like that of a heroin addict.

But hopefully they will, before long, decide what is wrong, and take care of it. Then the medical bills will come in, and I’ll likely have a new health problem - a heart attack.

Get the picture?

2009-03-30T16:54:00.003-04:00

I have satellite TV at my house. We subscribe to the “most expensive possible” package, which means we have about 1,789 channels to choose from.

I sat there on Saturday, flipped through all of them, and declared with disgust, “There’s nothing on TV.”

My children look at me as if I were a space alien when I tell them what watching TV was like when I was a kid – how there were only three channels, unless you lived close enough to Atlanta to pick up Channel 17; how children doubled as remote controls (Mark, go change the channel); how we had to go outside and adjust the antenna so it wouldn’t look like we were watching All In the Family through a snowstorm.

One of the greatest inventions my dad brought home was a device that remotely rotated the antenna, which was normally found on the roof. It was a boxy contraption and had a big dial in the middle, and when you turned the dial, the antenna would also turn. It seemed like magic, at the time, like something from The Jetsons!

This device was necessary because in those pre-cable, pre-satellite days, TV reception could be an iffy thing, and it required a lot of antenna adjustment.

We lived about 40 miles from Atlanta, so most days the reception was fine, but sometimes the picture could get a little snowy. This was especially true on windy days. So somebody – me – would have to go outside and turn the antenna around, while somebody else – my dad - stayed in the house and yelled to indicate when the antenna was in the right place. This could be very frustrating, because sometimes I’d think I had it just right, and I’d sit down and try to watch Sanford and Son, and Lamont’s face would get wavy, and out I would go again.

If you watched TV during the’70s, then you know what rabbit ears are. These were the tiny antennas that you hooked up to a smaller TV that wasn’t worthy of being connected to the giant rooftop antenna. There were all sorts of tricks to make rabbit ears work better, and they were all necessary, because they generally weren’t worth a crap.

You could get a coat hanger and attach it to the rabbit ears to make them longer. You could wrap aluminum foil around them to improve reception. Sometimes, the reception even depended on where you were in the room. I remember thinking that we could put a man on the moon, but I had to stand on my head to watch Welcome Back Kotter.

The main channels – 2, 5, and 11 – were VHF channels. Then you had the UHF channels, and we could only pick up one of those, Channel 17. I loved Channel 17 because it televised Braves’ and Hawks’ games, and reruns of Leave It To Beaver and Gilligan’s Island (man, I loved that Mary Ann). But getting a clear picture on Channel 17 really was in God’s hands. You never knew if you were going to see Mary Ann in a halter top or the visual equivalent of an LSD trip when you turned to that channel.

So, I never had to walk three miles to school barefoot in the snow, and I didn’t get just an orange and a new pair of overalls for Christmas, but I had my share of hardships as a kid. Of course, someday my kids will probably tell their kids, “Can you believe we only had 1,789 TV channels when we were young? You have it too easy!”

Out like a light

2009-03-25T12:51:00.002-04:00

I had a little “procedure” done yesterday that required me being put to sleep, which everyone assured me was no big deal, which was easy to say since they weren’t the ones being put to sleep.

I really don’t even like the term “put to sleep,” cause it reminds me of a couple of dogs I’ve had in my day who have had that done. Most recently it was a Chow named B.J. who had been hit by a car. When it happens to dogs, they generally don’t wake back up.

This is the third time I’ve been put to sleep. The first time was when I was 12 and they were checking me for a kidney problem, and I woke up with a tube inserted in the last place a man would EVER want anything inserted.

The second time was when I had my wisdom teeth taken out when I was around 20 or 21. I woke up in the recovery room and asked the nurse to marry me. She declined.

This time, they had to run some sort of contraption down my throat and into my stomach, so I was more than happy to sleep through that. Before knocking me out, they rolled me into a freezing cold room, hooked me up to a few tubes, and left me there for about half-an-hour.

This was a bad thing, because that gave me time to think. I’ve heard of instances where all sorts of things go wrong when people are undergoing medical procedures.

For one thing, there was a movie a while back about people who undergo anesthesia, only it doesn’t have the desired effect, it just paralyzes them. So they can see and feel everything that is going on during the operation. I wasn’t having open-heart surgery, but still, the thought of seeing and feeling this long tube go down my throat filled me with a little panic.

Then I got to thinking, what if something goes wrong and I end up in a coma? I watch House, this can happen. Maybe I won’t wake up until the year 2018, I thought, and I’ll find out that some crazy things have taken place – like the country has been taken over by robots, or the Falcons won the Super Bowl, or my daughter has married a guy named Slash with tattoos from his ankles to his ears. I was about five seconds away from ripping out all those tubes and wires and running down the hall like a crazy man with my hospital gown flapping open.

Then the nurse and doctor came in, put some big contraption in my mouth and told me not to talk. I started to ask them to promise I wouldn’t end up in a coma, but they must have zapped me with the anesthesia, because the next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery room. It was not 2018, it was only 20 minutes after they put me under. So either everything went well, or that was the world’s shortest coma.

The doctor came in, spent an informative 15 seconds or so with me, handed me some nice color photographs of my innards, and walked out. This guy had the bedside manner of Gen. Patton. I changed out of my hospital gown, and stumbled down the hall like Amy Winehouse, not really knowing any more than I did before I went in.

I hope it’s a long time before I get put to sleep again. I don’t want to end up like B.J.

Drama at the auto shop

2009-03-18T18:38:00.001-04:00

I had to go get an emissions test on my car today, which is a racket. I had to get the test before I could get my annual car tag from the state, which is another racket. But while I was there, I had an interesting experience.

The name of the place is Junior’s Automotive. It used to be called Shorty’s, but apparently Shorty sold it to Junior. I know, it sounds like a Hee-Haw sketch, but I’m not making this up.

It took me a while to get the attention of the girl behind the counter, because she was engrossed in what appeared to be a fairly serious conversation. The girl, who I later learned is named Brandy, was wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m just a cowgirl.” She finally paused long enough to attend to me, and then resumed her phone conversation while I waited.

In the waiting room, there’s a small sign asking customers to please go outside if they are going to talk on their cell phones. Now there’s a policy I agree with. As I’ve stated before, it makes me insane to be held captive listening to the inane details of somebody else’s life.

But they don’t practice what they preach there at Junior’s, cause Brandy went on and on loudly with her call, and I heard every word. I was the only person in the waiting room, and the magazine selection was terrible, so I had no choice but to listen. And I’ll tell you what, I’m glad I did, because it was pretty entertaining.

Let me see if I can sum it up for you, based on what I gleaned from my five minutes of listening. Brandy knows a man – I’m not sure if it’s a brother, or old boyfriend, or just a friend – who is dating a woman that Brandy, well, just flat-out doesn’t trust.

This woman apparently will “run off” and disappear for a few days, then show back up, declare that she loves the man, wants him back, and ask him if can she have a few hundred dollars. He gives her the money, and sure enough, she takes off again, repeating the cycle.

So Brandy, being very concerned for her male friend (and rightly so, based on what I’d heard), decided to investigate this floozy. Through a background check, she learned that the woman has at least five ex-husbands, and has some convictions for bank fraud, and has some sort of a “pill problem.” I hate to jump to conclusions, but I’m guessing that’s why she needs the frequent stimulus packages from the boyfriend.

The phone call I overheard was between Brandy and one of the ex-husbands. She was calling them to see if her suspicions about the woman were right, and to try and get some ammo to use to convince her male friend he’s making a mistake. When she hung up, though, she was a little disappointed, because that particular ex-husband apparently wanted no part of it.

I’m thinking that if this guy hasn’t seen the problem with this woman yet, nothing is going to get through to him. Did I mention that the woman is 48, and her boyfriend is only 28? She’s currently “on the run,” according to Brandy, but she’s sure she’ll come back, and she just knows her friend will take her back when she does. She’s tried to talk some sense into him, but she said he’s “blindsided.”

Here’s what I was thinking – this gal is 48, has 5 ex-husbands, a drug problem, a criminal history, and a guy 20 years her junior keeps taking her back after she runs off with his money. What in the world is her secret? Is she the best-looking woman who ever lived? Does she cook like Martha Stewart, clean like Hazel and dress like one of the Girls Next Door? Can she rebuild the engine of a ’65 Mustang while wearing a French maid outfit and singing a Lynyrd Skynyrd song? I’m intrigued, to say the least.

I started to ask Brandy if she wanted to talk about it, as I’m pretty good at giving advice, but I decided against it. You don’t want to get sucked into trailer-park drama, anyway. It’s like a swirling eddy that draws you in, and there’s no escaping.

I hope Brandy gets her friend out of this mess. I need to take my daughter’s car in soon for an emissions test, so maybe when I’m there I’ll get an update. I can get out my cellphone, violating Junior’s policy, and have a fake conversation about a woman I know who’s had a bunch of husbands and is addicted to Oxycontin, and that might prompt her to tell me what’s going on. Misery loves company, you know.

Growing up

2009-03-17T14:47:00.003-04:00

There’s not much doubt that kids are growing up too fast these days.

I have seen and read about this new phenomenon amongst the younger people in society known as “sexting.” Apparently, teenagers use their phones and computers now to arrange “hookups,” and girls are sending pictures of themselves in their birthday suits to boys.

You know, when I was a kid and I thought about the future, I thought there would be flying cars and robots and people living on the moon by the year 2009. It never occurred me that, instead, we’d have girls freely showing off their naughty bits electronically.

When I was in high school, if a girl’s bra strap was showing it nearly caused a riot. The thought of actually seeing a girl naked was more than I could even consider. And I was a little scared of it, to be honest with you. I went to church and I knew the Adam and Eve story. I was aware that nekkidness led to wickedness.

I suppose I was a pretty sheltered and innocent kid. I remember thinking how awesome it was going to be to grow up. I longingly dreamed of the days when I’d have freedom – a job so I could make money to spend on whatever I pleased; a cool car to take me wherever I wanted to go; my own house, where I could do what I want and watch anything I wanted on TV and stay up as late as I wanted to; and I could eat whatever my heart desired, with nobody to tell me “that will make you sick.”

Well, let’s take a case-by-case look at how that all turned out.

Job and money - I do have a job, and I make a decent amount of money, but I do NOT spend it wherever I please. Pretty much every dime is accounted for before it even hits my bank account. And as far as the job goes, the woman in the cube next to me has gotten a new adding machine that sounds like a machine gun, and she uses that thing all day long. Either she gets rid of it, or I’m going to have to take an anger-management class.

Cool car – Well, for the longest time, I drove a 1999 Plymouth minivan, until the engine gasket sprung a leak. Now I’ve switched to a sporty brown 2000 Chevy Impala. I’m not saying these cars are mostly driven by old people, but they come standard with a handicapped parking sticker and a tube of Polident. And as far as going wherever I want to go, approximately 99 percent of my driving is to and from work, or dropping off/picking up teenagers. The other 1 percent of the time, I’m going to Home Depot.

My own house – Thanks to a recent toilet overflow disaster, the entire downstairs of my house is undergoing major renovation. That means all of the furniture has been moved out, the ceilings and carpets are being removed, and there are huge holes in the drywall. It’s like I live in Beirut in the 80s. The value of my house has dropped faster than Britney Spears’ britches in the past year, and three of my neighbors were burglarized a year ago. Yes, owning a home is the American dream.

Eating what I want – Sure, I can eat anything I want. As long as it doesn’t have fat, grease, sugar, or flavor. My triglycerides are higher than The Grateful Dead, which has led to pancreatitis. Nobody warns you as a kid that these sorts of things are lurking.

I shudder to think what the future holds in store for my kids (who, by the way, have been warned explicitly they’ll be beaten severely about the head and shoulders if they’re ever caught “sexting.”). I just give them the standard advice – do well in school, work hard, treat people right, and life should turn out just fine for you.

Oh, and watch those triglycerides. Whatever they are.

You're fired!

2009-03-10T13:33:00.000-04:00

I was in a meeting with a guy the other day and he said somebody had been “outplaced.” I asked him what the hell that meant, and he said, “Well, there was a re-organization, and she was impacted.”

I said, “Are you saying she was fired?” He looked at me for a moment, then said with some discomfort, “Yes. She’s no longer with us.”

Whoa, wait a second. She’s dead? No, no, he said. She has moved on to another opportunity. Oh, I said, so she quit. Well, he said, not voluntarily. How can you quit if it’s not voluntarily?

Bottom line, she was fired. A lot of people are getting fired these days. I’ve been fired a few times in life, and it’s not a pleasant thing.

Why is it so hard for people to say, “You’re fired”? In sports, when a coach is fired, they always say, “We decided to go in a different direction.” In business, it’s often “Your services are no longer needed.” At least they don’t add, “But I’d still like to be friends.”

People can fire you in different ways. When I got fired from this great big bank with a red-white-and-blue logo, my boss came into my office, sat down and said, “Mark, there is no longer a place for you in public relations.”

Well, OK, I said, that’s cool. So where do I work now? Can I be one of the people who counts the money? Can I be a security guard? I always wanted to have a job where I could carry a gun and shoot people.

It turns out, she wasn’t really there to tell me that I was getting a cool new job, because she just sat there and repeated impassively that there was no place for me and refused to make eye contact. Then we had the following conversation:

Me: So what does this mean?
Soulless Corporate Idiot: You know what it means.
Me: No, I don’t.
Soulless Corporate Idiot: I believe you do.
Me (feigning shock): Are you saying that I’ve been fired?
Soulless Corporate Idiot: There’s no place for you in the organization.
Me: Come on, I’m getting fired. You can say it.
Soulless Corporate Idiot: I have to go.

It felt more like being dumped by a girlfriend than being fired. You know, how they tell you that it’s just not working out, and it’s not you, it’s them, and they think you’re a great guy, when what they really mean is, “I’ve started seeing a guy who drives a nicer car than you do.” Not that this ever happened to me.

Anyway, that particular bank has gone in the crapper ever since they fired me, so there’s a lesson learned. I was also fired by a grocery store chain once, and it’s since gone out of business. I was also let go by a PR agency that is also no longer in operation. I hope my current employer thinks long and hard about this if they ever decide I need to be outplaced.

An inconvenient store

2009-03-02T15:34:00.002-05:00

I walked into a questionable-looking convenience store the other day because I had to get gas, and since I was dying of thirst, I decided to go inside and get something to drink.

I don’t like these places because they always smell like a cheap car air-freshener, and I don’t enjoy dealing with people through bulletproof glass who barely speak English and call me “boss.”

But sometimes, even if I’m in a sketchy part of town, the lure of a canned soft drink and delicious Little Debbie snack cake is impossible to ignore, so I pull into the parking lot, tell the urban campers that I don’t have any change, and step inside.

This particular convenience store was especially seedy. Right by the cash register there was a magazine rack, carrying some interesting titles. The one that caught my eye was “Big Black Butts.” I have to tell you, I had no idea there was such a publication before this.

I began to wonder what you found inside such a magazine. Pictures of big black butts, I suppose. But what else? Are there articles, advice columns, workout routines? Is there a “Big White Butts” magazine? I have a lot of questions about this.

But I wasn’t curious enough to actually buy a copy. I’m surprised, in this era of DVDs and the Internet, that there is actually still a market for dirty magazines. Who exactly would buy “Big Black Butts,” other than maybe Sir Mix-a-Lot?

There’s a Kangaroo store near my house, but I try not to go in there if I can help it. A clerk got shot and killed there one night a few years ago by two sub-humans from a neighboring county. There’s a woman who works there now who is at least 60 years old, and both of her arms are covered with tattoos. Think about this, young people, when you decide to go get yourself all tatted up. You’re going to get old one day, and nobody wants to see a grandma who looks like she just got out of prison.

Don’t you hate getting stuck in line at the convenience store behind a degenerate buying a fistful of lottery tickets? Listen, Cletus. You’re not going to win. And even if you do, within two years you’ll be broke again and asking me for money in the parking lot so you can go buy a dirty magazine. Do us all a favor and spend that $10 on a toothbrush and some floss.

I guess I have a love-hate relationship with convenience stores. As unpleasant as it can be, I am right now feeling the urge to pull over somewhere on the way home and go spend $5 unnecessarily, just because I can. I like Little Debbies, and I cannot lie....

The doctor is not in

2009-02-25T11:55:00.002-05:00

If you ever watched Hee-Haw, you probably remember the skit where the old guys would sing the sad-sack song, “Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me,” which featured the line, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”

Well, I’m in one of those streaks. In the past 10 days, an overflowing toilet destroyed my house, a computer virus wrecked my home computer, and a mechanic told me he thinks my beloved chick-magnet Plymouth mini-van needs a new engine. Just call me Job. It’s a miracle my dog hasn’t died yet.

I have gone through all this while dealing with incessant abdominal and back pain, so last week I put aside my stubbornness and reluctantly went to see a doctor. Did you know that there are a lot of “judge” shows on TV in the afternoon? I didn’t either, but I endured four of them back-to-back-to-back-to-back in the waiting room. I tried to ignore it, but they had the volume cranked up to just below the level of an Iron Maiden concert.

What a lovely time I had in the waiting room. I spent two-and-a-half hours of thumbing through an old Golf Digest and the latest copy of some Jehovah’s Witness magazine. I now know how to handle short putts, and I understand how dinosaurs existed even though they’re not mentioned in the Bible. Finally I was called back to see the doctor – or so I thought.

First of all, when you go back they weigh you, which is patently unfair. I stepped on the scale wearing work clothes, heavy shoes, a sports coat, and I had keys, a cell-phone and a blackberry in my pockets. So I dispute the findings of that scale. I told the nurse, “You know, I usually weigh myself naked.” She threatened to call security and led me into the examining room.

I sat in the cold, windowless examining room for a while, feeling like a criminal suspect awaiting interrogation and amusing myself with a tongue depressor. Finally, the door opened, and in walked not a doctor, but a “physician’s assistant.” This is a trend I don’t care for. What is a physician’s assistant, anyway? Is it somebody who goes to WebMD a lot, or watches “House”? Why aren’t they actual doctors?

When this physician’s assistant walked in, I realized why I had been forced to wait so long for her. Apparently she had to wait until algebra class was over, and then catch the school bus over to the doctor’s office. Seriously, she looked like she was maybe 15 years old. The “Hannah Montana” stethoscope gave me pause. I feared that if she asked me to drop my pants, Chris Hansen and a “Dateline NBC’ camera crew would burst into the room.

I suppose you could say I’m mildly sexist in a couple of ways. OK, in a lot of ways, but I prefer male doctors, and I want them to be older than me. How could this child diagnose me? I have bunions older than her.

Well, I’ll give her credit. She had some blood drawn, ran some tests, and when I went back the next week she said that she believes I have pancreatitis. She gave me some medicine and told me what to do, and so far I feel a little better. I had actually diagnosed myself before going to see her, and her opinion agreed with mine, but since I’m not allowed to write prescriptions (wouldn’t that be awesome?), it was necessary to go to the doctor’s office for confirmation.

The female Doogie Howser also told me that my cholesterol was bad, so she has me taking something for that, too. I’m taking more pills than Judy Garland now, so in a couple of weeks I should either be much better or checking myself into rehab. That might not be such a bad idea – maybe when I get out, my house, car and computer will all be fixed.

Flushed away

2009-02-20T14:27:00.001-05:00

Our current president, and the most recent one, have both gone on the record promoting the idea that as many Americans as possible should be homeowners.

To which I say, are we sure about that? Because I’m not so sure that home ownership is everything it’s cracked up to be.

Do you know what home ownership is about? Well, I can sum it up in two words: toilet repair.

About 50 percent of your time as a homeowner is spent repairing or unstopping toilets. They are the most poorly engineered, badly constructed parts of any house.

The basic toilet design has gone basically unchanged for, what, a hundred years? In that time, great strides have been made in computers, televisions, space travel, and even blankets you cover up with on the couch (I desperately want a Snuggie). But there apparently has been very little research done on toilets, which are used by every one of us.

Apparently my builder got hold of some toilets that couldn’t pass inspection in Uganda, bought them at a bargain-basement price and installed them in my house. I have replaced every moving part of every toilet in my home at least 5 times. I’ve spent more time on my knees in the bathroom than George Michael.

An old favorite is the “running toilet,” in which the water continues to flow even after the flushing process. There’s a very scientific method to fixing a running toilet, known in the trade as “jiggling the handle.” Then you have the leaks, the broken handles, the bad seals, the busted seats, and the occasional overflow, which is never pretty.

I know this because I just had an upstairs toilet overflow. The kids were at home, and apparently neither of them noticed until my son thought he heard the shower running, only to discover the water he heard rushing was not from the shower, but from the CEILING FAN downstairs. The bright side is, we’re getting new ceilings, carpet, walls and paint for nothing but the deductible on the homeowners’ insurance.

The down side is, our house looks like Hitler’s bunker in the final days of the war. For three days there were giant wind machines running throughout the house trying to dry out the walls. Every time I walked downstairs and the fan hit me, I looked like I was in an Aerosmith video.

All of this has made me wish for simpler times, when the bathroom was out in a separate building in the back yard, and a man never had to worry about replacing a flapper, or a valve, or a ballcock (don’t go there). Those, my friends, were the good old days.

Worlds colliding

2009-02-16T11:04:00.004-05:00

I read with interest an article this morning that makes the case that, with a new presidential administration in place that’s very different from the last one, music will be impacted.

The writer’s view is that, without an evil president to protest, we’re headed for an era of bland pop music, similar to the early ’60s.

It became quite fashionable during the past 8 years for artists to write and record their obligatory “Bush sucks” songs. Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, various rappers, Madonna – it seems like everybody spoke out except Britney Spears, who said, “Who’s George Bush?”

Apparently even Pink has a Bush is bad song. Well, that had to be devastating news for the former president. When you’ve lost Pink, you’ve lost the country.

I saw Joan Jett on the “Henry Rollins Show” one night, and learned that she has an anti-Bush, war-is-bad song. That was the second-most shocking thing I learned watching that show, the first being that Joan Jett is still alive. She had been feeling this way for some time, she said, and she felt like she had to get it out. I’m sure that was very influential on the people who are still buying Joan Jett CDs – both of them.

I am of the opinion that music and politics don’t make good bedfellows. Yes, there were some political songs in the ’60s and ’70s that have a lasting impact, and were actually good songs, but those were different times. And I suspect that for every Blowin’ In the Wind, there were 50 more like Eve of Destruction.

Quick, what’s your favorite Dylan song? I’m betting you didn’t say Masters of War or Just a Pawn in Their Game. Just a hunch.

Has anybody ever gone to a Springsteen concert and shouted out, “Play 41 Shots!” I doubt it. And I much prefer Steve Earle’s beautiful elegy for Townes Van Zandt (Ft. Worth Blues) than that song he wrote about Condi Rice. I suspect I’m not alone here.

And my dislike of political songs extends to both ends of the spectrum. Listen, I love America as much as the next guy, but if I go another 10,000 years without hearing Lee Greenwood’s God Bless The U.S.A., it still won’t be long enough. I’m right there with you on the sentiment, Lee. But the song sucks.

I remember not too long after 9-11 and some country singer released a song with the lyrics, “And you say we should forget about Bin Laden, but have you forgotten.” I really don’t think anybody was saying that. I think pretty much every Democrat, Republican, Libertarian and everything in between in America still wants that bastard dead.

Of course, everybody has a right to write and sing about whatever they want to. That’s the beauty of America. But, like George Costanza, I don’t like it when my worlds collide, and that’s what happens when I hear political songs. I like songs about drinking, and women, and loving, and loving women who drink – you know, the important stuff in life.

Bad timing

2009-02-12T15:58:00.000-05:00

So I walk into the bathroom this morning, nod a curt hello at a guy who was exiting a stall, approached the urinal and got ready to do my bidness.

Then, in mid-stream, I realize the guy has not left the bathroom, but is standing behind me. I didn’t turn around, but I could sense his presence. Guys know these things.

Plus, I’ve been a little bit on-edge in that bathroom since there was an “incident” some months back. A maintenance worker claimed that he “surprised” a couple of fellows sharing a stall very early one morning. I have no more details, and we’ve been assured that neither fellow works on our floor, but I think it goes without saying that the situation calls for a heightened state of alertness.

Anyway, I realized that the guy – I don’t know him well, but I recognized him as somebody who works on our floor, but in a different department – is speaking to me. I think I’ve made my position clear on talking in the bathroom – I’m agin it. Perhaps a casual “How you doin’?” or “How about those Braves?” comment is OK, but nothing serious, and certainly no work talk is allowed.

So this guy says, “I may have heard wrong, but I was told that you were against us leveraging third-party resources to get our message out.” I swear, I’m not making this up.

I wondered how to respond to this fellow. First of all, not only am I not against what he said, I don’t even know what it means. He must have had me mistaken for somebody else. So I said, “That doesn’t sound familiar. Are you sure it was me you heard that about?”

He said, “I’m pretty sure it was you.” Well, there’s no chance in hell that anybody ever heard me say such a thing. But I was wearing my badge, and I caught him looking down at it, so it must have been my name that he was associating with this position on the third-party resources. Perhaps he misheard it, or maybe it was something close, like “Marty Wilson.” I wasn’t sure.

I decided the best thing to do was to play along. “Well,” I said, “I generally don’t have a problem with us leveraging third-party resources, as long as they stay on point. We don’t want them getting off the reservation, you know.”

He laughed and gave me a knowing look, and nodded in assent with my sage assessment. “Exactly,” he said. “Maybe I heard wrong, because I was surprised you would have a problem with that. It really helps our business case to have them out there, as long as we take care of the legality of it.”

“Absolutely,” I said, and by now I had convinced myself that I knew what we were talking about, even though I still didn’t. “Listen, there’s a time and a place for everything, but on this one, I say we go full-steam ahead. Strike while the iron’s hot, you know? We can’t afford to stay on the sidelines on this one.”

He smiled again, patted my shoulder, and said, “Without a doubt.” Then he turned and walked back down to his office to continue doing whatever it is he does for a living, and I went back to my desk, glad I could help out. With, you know, whatever it was.

It's gotta be the shoes

2009-02-11T11:33:00.002-05:00

A friend told me the other day that she believes that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their shoes.

I told her that was nonsense, but then I did a little research (i.e., typed “what do your shoes say about you” into Google), and I found out that it is an actual phenomenon – there are people out there who form their first impression of others based on the shoes they’re wearing.

I’m not sure what my shoes say about me, other than “This guy shops at Famous Footwear during 'buy one, get one free' sales.” I don’t wear cheap shoes, but I don’t wear expensive ones either, and I probably wear them a little longer than I should. And I do wear black shoes with brown pants, but I’m partially color-blind, so you can’t hold that against me.

Shoe talk seems to be almost entirely confined to women. One day, the office hens were fluttering about because they said one of the women on our floor was wearing stripper shoes. I had no idea what they were talking about. Ask most men what stripper shoes are, and they’ll say, “Strippers wear shoes?”

Most of us don’t care, and we can’t understand why women walk around in those high-heeled torture devices they call shoes. I have heard it said that women tend to dress to impress each other, not men, and I tend to believe that’s true, especially when it comes to their feet. It’s not the part of women’s bodies that men tend to notice.

I mean, that’s what I hear.

I suspect that I am like many men who, quite frankly, only want shoes that won’t hurt their feet. I’d wear bedroom slippers to work if I could get away with it. And I think the idea that you can judge people by their shoes is preposterous. Who cares what people put on their feet?

During my exhaustive five minutes of research into this, I came across one “shoe expert” who said, “If his shoes consistently are unraveled, frayed or distressed, you might want to ask yourself the question, 'Where is he is unraveling, fraying or distressed?” Wow, I guess I’m coming apart at the seams and didn’t even know it.

The expert also said men who wear nice shoes care more about things and themselves and what people think about them. You know who was real particular about his shoes? O.J. Simpson. You know who didn’t care a whit about his shoes? Jesus.

I rest my case.

You know all of these Wall Street titans and bankers who were collecting huge bonuses while running our economy into the ditch? I bet you they all wear expensive, shiny, designer-brand shoes. And Imelda Marcos – way into shoes. Are these the people you want to be associated with?

So please, if you meet me, please don’t look at my feet and try to form an opinion about me. As a famous guy who didn’t care about shoes once said, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

Here and there

2009-02-06T15:56:00.000-05:00

I went down to the little snack shop on the bottom floor of my building had no regular Cheez-its today, only the “hot and spicy” and “white cheddar” varieties. What the hell? Why would they even make such things? Cheez-its are the absolute perfect snack food, designed by God. Why would someone alter or mess with such a thing? It’s like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, or making Salma Hayek wear sweatpants. It’s not necessary.

* * *

Springsteen tickets went on sale, and for the first time in a few years, I did not buy any. I’m a little put out with him right now – the Super Bowl show with that stupid “referee” running out, the Wal-Mart deal, and it’s hard to drop a couple hundred bucks on a concert with the way things are going. But he’s still my hero and I’ll probably be on Craigslist just before the show trying to find a ticket.

* * *

I read a story today where Cher said that 8 years of Republican rule “almost” killed her. Great – yet another failure by W.

* * *

I see a lot of people are going to get money from the government if this “stimulus package” is passed. Well, here’s a group that’s being left out that needs a few billion dollars – parents of teen-agers. The public school system is sucking money out of me like a Shop-Vac.

* * *

It looks like another winter with no snow here in Georgia. I remember as a kid, the few times it snowed, being so excited to run outside and play in it. But we weren’t equipped with the proper clothing, so it got old in about 15 minutes. Putting loaf-bread wrappers around your shoes was no substitute for galoshes, and those little thin wool gloves were worthless.

Sometimes in the winter, my mother would look up at the sky on a cloudy day and say, “Those are snow clouds.” She was born in Hawkinsville, Ga., and grew up in Cochran, Ga., and never lived north of Griffin, Ga. a day in her life. How would she know what “snow clouds” looked like? But I never disputed her. She wasn’t a big fan of being disputed.

* * *

I like that Tennessee’s new pretty-boy football coach called Florida’s Urban Meyer a cheater. Even though what Meyer did – calling a recruit while the kid was on his visit to Tennessee – wasn’t cheating, it was the sort of classless thing you would expect from a humorless jackass who writes about himself in the third person. But I didn’t like Lane Kiffin’s lame apology – “If I offended anyone, I’m sorry, that wasn’t my intent.” Of course it was his intent.

But this is a man who moved to Knoxville and named his child “Knox,” so I don’t expect him to be super-smart. It’s hard to take sides when Tennessee and Florida are fighting, anyway. It’s kind of like the Iran-Iraq war. I want them both to lose.

This and that

2009-02-03T17:30:00.003-05:00

I was standing at the checkout line at Walgreens last night, buying some milk, AAA batteries and sugarless gum, and I saw something that caught my attention.

There was a black woman in front of me, probably around my age, and she was buying a couple of CDs from the $2 bargain bin. I noticed that she bought one entitled “Motown Favorites”, and then she plopped down “The Best of the Moody Blues.”

Well, that surprised me. Even white people think The Moody Blues are kind of square. I thought that maybe she didn’t know what she was getting. Maybe she likes the blues, and she thought it was a CD full of sultry blues tunes that would set the mood.

Perhaps she went home, lit some candles, and told her husband she had some special music for them and popped it in the CD player. But then they were unable to truly get in the mood because by the time they got to the spoken part at the end of “Knights in White Satin,” he had taken the CD out of the player and stomped on it until it shattered.

But who knows? Maybe she’s a big Moody Blues fan. Maybe she met the man of her dreams at party while “Tuesday Afternoon” played on the radio. Maybe she hears “In Your Wildest Dreams” and gets the urge to rip off her smock and dance in the rain. As they said in Raising Arizona, it’s a crazy world. Somebody ought to sell tickets.

Sure, I’d buy one.

* * * * *
Here are a few random snapshots from a day at the office:

I overheard this conversation on the elevator:
Guy 1: They need to get their ducks in a row.
Guy 2: They don’t know anything about ducks. They are ducks.
Guy 1: Ducks that don’t have any feathers.
Guy 2: We need to teach them some things about ducks.

Honestly, I don’t think they were actually talking about ducks.

--

I’m not really one for talking on the cell phone while in the bathroom. Today, a guy walked in the bathroom while in the middle of his conversation, sidled up to the urinal next to me, stared peeing, and never missed a beat. And I could tell that he was talking to his wife. Then he didn’t even bother to try and disguise the flush. That’s a big bowl of wrong, is what that is.

--

I’m going to buy the woman in the cube next to me a new CD. She listens to the same one every day, loudly, and it apparently only has a few songs on it. I swear I heard “Dancing in the Street” six times in one day last week. I wonder if she’d like The Moody Blues?

--

I was on a conference call where somebody used the word “apple-carting.” He said, “We are apple-carting our communications approach.” Other terms used during the call included “50,000-foot view,” “organizational agnostic” and “economies of scale.” Then the guy said, “We’re going to try to limit these meetings to two hours, because after two hours people begin to lose focus.” Two hours? I was surfing the Web after two minutes. Thank God for the mute button.

Facts are stubborn things

2009-02-01T23:08:00.003-05:00

Boy, that was some amazing story a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it, when that plane crash-landed in the Hudson River and nobody got hurt.

It reminded me of a story about my family, one I’ve told many times. It seems my dad was supposed to fly out of New York one time, way back before I was born, but he gave up his seat on the plane and decided to take a later flight.

Then that plane – the one he was supposed to be on – crashed shortly after takeoff into the East River, and everybody died. Had he been on the plane, I would have never been born.

(Anybody who just said to themselves “Too bad he didn’t get on” will have to answer to God for that!)

I’ve relayed this story many times. My daughter once told her Girl Scout Troup about it. It comforts me in times of trouble, when I’m feeling worthless, and makes me think that maybe I’m here for a reason. Fate had intervened long ago to make sure that I would come into the world.

So I went to see my dad Saturday, and I brought that story up – and he just looked at me. I said, don’t you remember, you were supposed to get on a plane that crashed?

Oh yes, he said. He told me the plane took off and got up in the air, but soon after one of the engines caught fire, and the pilot had to make an emergency landing and they all got off the plane, including him.

“Got off the plane?” I said. “No, no, you never got on. It crashed into the East River.”

He said, “It didn’t crash. And it was in Hawaii. I was coming back home after World War II.”

This stunned me. Wait, I said, are you sure? After all, he is 81, and maybe the memory is starting to fade. He said, “I’ve been to New York twice in my life, and both times I drove back.”

Ok, this didn’t make any sense. That story was part of my autobiography. And now I’m hearing that it isn’t true?

So I asked my dad if he knew somebody who had supposed to have been on a plane that crashed into the East River. He said nope, had never heard of it. Later on that day, I asked my brother if he recalled anything about that story. He said he hadn’t.

Well, where in the world did it come from? Did I dream it? I did some research, and sure enough, in 1959, a plane DID crash into the East River, killing almost all of the passengers on board. But it was flying into New York, not out. My dad did admit that he flew INTO New York once, to help his brother move back to Georgia. But he couldn’t remember the year, and he has no recollection of almost getting on a plane that crashed. Surely that would stick in your memory.

And it’s not like my dad’s mind is going. On that same visit he told me of his father taking off a dog (that’s what they did in the country back then) when he was a boy, dropping it off almost 15 miles from home, and three days later the dog trotted back up into the yard. My grandfather apparently decided that since the dog had gone through so much to get back home, this time he’d let him stay.

But that story happened more than 70 years ago. If my dad recalled that, he’d recall a near-death experience. And yet, somehow that story got in my brain, and has lived there all these years, and now I feel like a little bit of a fraud. Maybe fate didn’t intervene to save me.

Although, there was one time when I was a teenager, and I was riding in a car with a friend, and we were behind a truck from an electric utility company. Suddenly, one of those gigantic wooden spools that they wrap wire around broke free from the truck, and came bouncing down the road, headed straight toward us. At the last minute, it took a big hop and went right over the top of his car, sparing our lives. Fate or God or something had again intervened to save me, or so it seems.

If I ever find out THAT didn’t really happen, then I just give up.

Winning isn't everything

2009-01-27T15:14:00.000-05:00

You perhaps have read about the girls’ basketball team in Texas that beat another team recently 100-0.

It didn’t surprise me to hear of something like that. When I was a sportswriter I had to watch a lot of girls’ basketball games, and let me tell you, it could be tough. I liked girls, and I liked basketball, but I didn’t like girls’ basketball.

Now, this was 20 years ago, and I’m sure that the female side of the game has improved greatly, but I still can’t bring myself to watch. They even have a professional league for women, which I also haven’t watched. I assume the players aren’t as heavily tattooed as they are in the NBA.

I covered one high school game where the final score was 70-4, and believe me, it wasn’t that close. I saw a girl travel, double dribble, pass the ball to herself, commit an offensive foul and throw the ball over the backboard, all on the same play. The poor referee just looked over to the sideline and shrugged.

The coach of the team that won the 100-0 game got fired after he wouldn’t apologize for running up the score. He said he wasn’t trying to embarrass the other team, but he probably was. I’ve seen jackass coaches like that all my life. I questioned a girls’ softball coach once about running up the score, and he told that his girls were racehorses and they couldn’t be held back.

Did I mention they were 10 years old?

When my son was 7, he played on a Pee Wee league football team, and you would not believe how those redneck coaches behaved – yelling, screaming, throwing things, acting like complete fools on the sidelines. Picture Steve Spurrier with much smaller players, and you get the picture.

I remember the last time I coached baseball. It was when my son was 11, and I didn’t plan to coach, but I got guilted into it because apparently they didn’t have enough coaches, and some boys weren’t going to get to play. So they gave me a team of all the leftovers who didn’t get drafted, and it was quite an experience.

There were a few boys on the team who didn’t know a baseball from a canteloupe. My son was a good player, and so were two or three others, but for the most part we were the Bad News Bears without the drinking and cursing.

I assessed this bunch early on and realized we would not be playing for a title, so I decided, what the heck. Every kid gets to play. Every kid gets a chance to pitch or bat leadoff or play shortstop.

I had a parent come offer to help me coach, and it wasn’t long before he was giving me a talking to about what to do, and how I needed to establish a consistent batting order for us to have a chance. I said, are you kidding? There are boys on this team who couldn’t hit a beach ball with a boat paddle. Bobby Cox could fill out the lineup card and it wouldn’t make a difference.

We lost all but one or two games, so I feel for those girls who lost by 100 points, and their parents. It’s just a game. But when a coach feels it’s necessary to beat a team that badly, it’s easy to see who the real loser was.

An unfortunate inheritance

2009-01-23T14:19:00.002-05:00

When I finally graduated college, got a job and moved out on my own, my parents went sort of crazy.

These two very frugal – some would say cheap – people suddenly started spending money like they were Congressmen. Every time I’d come home to see them there’d be something new – a car, a truck, a TV set, a motor home. They would just laugh and say they were spending my inheritance.

I was the youngest child, so when I was out of their hair, their financial obligations to their children were over. I figured that I had been given enough by them over the years, and I’ve never really planned on inheriting anything, at least monetarily. But they both left me with me something.

What I got from my dad, who is 81 and still going strong, was mostly things to help me get through life, things I learned just from watching him and paying attention. My dad didn’t give me a lot of lectures. We didn’t have Ward Cleaver moments where he would sit me down and say, “Son, I hope you learned a valuable lesson today.”

No, I just observed him and figured out that there were certain things a man needed to know – that you should work hard, and provide for your family, and don’t go around whining and complaining all the time. I also learned that a man should always cut the grass, drive the car and control the TV. And I picked up some key manly skills from him, like how to blow your nose when you’re outside and don’t have a Kleenex (you just close one nostril and blow hard through the other one. And make sure you’re not against the wind when you do it.)

But while I learned a lot from my dad, most of the things I inherited came from my late mother. I have her sense of humor, her love of reading, and her sharp wit, also known as a “smart mouth.” I also inherited many of her ailments, the worst of which is a propensity for headaches.

I don’t mean those little nagging headaches that make it hard to concentrate. I mean the ones that make you feel like your head is being jackhammered from the minute you wake up. Ones that feel like you are being stabbed in the head from the inside. Ones that make it impossible for you to see straight, walk straight or think straight.

My mother called them “those old sick headaches.” She had them most of her life, though they stopped when she had a brain tumor removed in her ’70s. That’s comforting.

I went to a doctor who had me try some “preventive” drugs for a while. The first was some sort of anti-seizure drug that had shown some success preventing migraines. It made me insane. My mind raced 100 miles per hour, my hands and feet tingled, I slept about 4 hours a night and food tasted different. On the bright side, I dropped about 10 pounds in a month. But it didn’t stop the headaches.

Then, he put me on an older anti-depressant. It also didn’t stop headaches, but it made me hungry and sleepy. I would eat breakfast, and then eat something in the car on the way to work, then hit the vending machine as soon as I got in. I put back on the 10 pounds I’d lost, plus about 10 more, in a month. The silver lining was, I wasn’t depressed. I was truly fat and happy.

Recently, he had me try some medicine that they give to people with high blood pressure. I don’t have high blood pressure, but he swore that this drug has been an effective headache preventer. I’m starting to suspect that he just has some drugs stockpiled and he’s trying to get rid of them, because all this stuff did was sap what little energy I had left.

Oh, well. There are worse things to have to live with. I need to just buck up and stop complaining. I’m giving myself a headache.

A wonderful day in the neighborhood

2009-01-21T11:13:00.003-05:00

I realized the other day that I don’t know much about my neighbors.

I know some superficial things about them. I know, for example, that the people on the corner still think it’s Christmas-time, as all of their decorations are up. I know that the people next to them must have mental problems, because they own six Great Danes, and keep them in their house.

But I hardly know anybody’s name. I confine my interactions with most of my neighbors to a friendly wave, an occasional “How you doing?” and a dirty look when I suspect it was their dog who crapped in my yard.

When I was growing up, I knew everybody in my neighborhood. I knew to stay out of the crazy lady’s yard three houses up, because she would come out front and cuss at you. I knew never to eat anything prepared in the house across the street, because my mama said “those people are nasty.” I knew which dogs were friendly and which ones would bite.

There was a family across the street and one house up, and the man and woman would get into unbelievable screaming matches. You could hear them from 100 yards away. Then the next time you’d see them, they’d be all lovey-dovey, laughing and playing with each other. It’s a fine line, I reckon.

There was the redneck family up the road with the slutty teen-aged daughter who wore denim cut-offs that were so short she could have gotten a colonoscopy without ever taking them off. I found a lot of excuses to walk by their house when she was outside.

My next-door neighbor’s name was Mike, and his dad was very strict. He wouldn’t even let his kids listen to rock-and-roll in his house. One day, Mike snuck me into his dad’s bedroom and showed me a stack of Playboy magazines about 5 feet high, dating back to the 1950’s. I looked at some pictures of Miss September 1976 and thought, man, this beats the hell out of Ted Nugent any day.

Now, I don’t know much at all about my neighbors. The guy who lives on one side of me is named Tommy. That’s all I know. He and I have talked quite a bit, but almost exclusively about our lawns. If I ever go on a multi-state crime spree, the TV newspeople will come interview Tommy about me and he’ll say, “Well, he was quiet, kind of kept to himself. He knew a lot about weeds. I never saw this coming.”

I don’t know the name of the guy who lives on the other side of me, or even what he looks like. I couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup, even though he’s lived there at least two years with his wife and small child. I think he has some form of agoraphobia, as he comes outside in the daytime less often than Barnabas Collins.

There’s a guy across the street that I’m pretty close with. We talk all the time about all sorts of things – football, baseball, golf, weeds. He’s lived there for about eight years, and up until the past two years, I called him by the wrong name, and he never corrected me.

For the life of me, I thought his name was Clay. And that’s what I called him. One day my wife ran into his wife in the grocery store, and his wife kept referring to someone named “Thad.” She finally asked her if Thad is her husband’s name, and the woman (I don’t know her name, either) said yes, it is.

I have no idea why I started calling him Clay. It doesn’t even sound like Thad. At least it has the same number of letters.

Maybe I’ll make an effort to be a better neighbor. I can go around and introduce myself, exchange phone numbers, invite them over some time, and offer to help dismantle the manger display.

Lucky and me

2009-01-16T14:19:00.003-05:00

There’s a big hit movie out now called “Marley and Me,” which is about a man and his relationship with his misbehaving, unruly dog. First the guy wrote a best-selling book about it, then they’ve made it into a movie, with Jennifer Anniston in it. She is not a dog.

The commercials for the movie show scenes with the dog doing all sorts of funny and cute and destructive things. My guess is somehow the people in the movie will, through their relationships with this lovable scamp, learn some things about themselves, and then, as in all good dog movies, the poor mutt will die.

I looked down at Lucky sprawled out on the floor at my feet the other night, lying on her back, all four legs in the air like she had died and rigor mortis had set in, and I said, “That could have been us.”

She grunted, broke wind, closed her eyes and rolled over. I guess the “dying” part didn’t interest her.

I don’t know that a movie about Lucky would be a success, because many of the things she does would not be believable on the big screen.

Take this morning, for instance. It was 13 degrees outside. I let her out of her crate in the kitchen, where she sleeps every night, and she scooted out into the backyard, where she spends most of her time. But since it was so cold, I decided to let her back in this morning after she did her business.

I opened the back door to call her in, and I didn’t see her. She has a doghouse, which is lined with hay so she can burrow down inside it and keep warm, but do you think that’s where she was? No. She was sitting in the middle of the yard.

So I called her. “Lucky, come here.” She just looked at me. I said, “Come back in the house, it’s cold.” She turned her head and pretended she didn’t hear me. I suspect my wife or kids taught her this trick.

Meanwhile, just standing there calling her made my face freeze worse than Kenny Rogers’, so I gave up. Never argue with a dog or a woman.

After a few minutes, I decided to try again. This time, she was up on the patio, so I thought maybe she had come to her senses. I opened the door and said, “Get in this house.” She wagged her tail, bobbed her head a couple of times, let loose a stream of drool, and didn’t move. She just sat there, happily defiant. So I decided to use the only truly effective way of persuading her, which is to grab her collar and drag her in.

But as soon as I made a move toward her, she put a Knowshon Moreno move on me and sprinted back out into the yard. I realized now it was hopeless. I gave it one last futile attempt, yelling “It’s 13 degrees out here!” But dogs have no concept of temperature, so it left her unmoved.

I’m not too worried about her. She has a thick coat, and a place to get out of the wind, and I’ve never heard of a dog freezing to death in Georgia.

And just like in the movie, through my relationship with Lucky, I have learned something about myself: that I have an insane dog.

Temper, temper

2009-01-13T15:14:00.001-05:00

I decided to sit out this year’s old men’s basketball league, despite having played the previous two seasons.

I had a number of valid reasons, including a balky shoulder and a lack of talent, but the bottom line was, I just didn’t want to play. I finally settled on the reason why: I don’t like referees.

Perhaps I have some sort of a problem with authority. But I cannot get through a single game without getting angry at one or both of the referees. Here’s my problem with them:
A. You cannot win an argument with them. They get final say.
B. They are often wrong.

I try to obey my better angels on the court, but the devil in me always comes out. I end up saying something like, “Is this your first basketball game?” or “I didn’t know waterheads knew how to blow a whistle,” or something like that.

Did I mention this is a church league? Well, I can’t help it. I know I ought to act right.

Sometimes I think in these situations, What would Jesus do? But as far as I know, Jesus never got called for a charging foul when the defender WAS CLEARLY MOVING!

I actually got kicked out of a church-league softball game last year. It’s a coed league. My daughter played on the team with me. As did the preacher. But let me explain.

There was a close call in the first inning, and the umpire got it wrong, which is OK, except when I innocently asked him why he called the guy safe when Stevie Wonder could see that he was clearly out, he got a little huffy with me.

Not wanting to cause trouble, but seeking clarification, I said, “Am I not allowed to ask you a question?” He looked at me and he said, “Shut it.” I didn’t think that was very nice, but to my credit, I did indeed “shut it.” For the time being.

Next time I came up to bat, I was still a little steamed, and I bombed one over the left-center field fence. Your classic church coed-league softball no-doubter.

I began to circle the bases, and the grumpy umpire was standing near second base, and as I jogged near him, we made eye contact, and, well, I might have said something.

To this day, doubt lingers over what happened. It’s possible that I said, “It’s gone!”, meaning the home run that I hit, a natural celebratory reaction by me. It’s also possible that I looked at him and said, “Did you like that?” And then winked. The mystery may never be solved.

Either way, I think he overreacted by charging toward home plate, ostentatiously throwing me out of the game as I crossed, with the veins throbbing in his little neck and sweat running down his face and into his cheesy 70’s porn-star moustache.

I have this wonderful effect on people, it’s really hard to explain.

Regardless of my guilt or innocence, I felt bad about the incident, so I resolved to keep my mouth shut the rest of the season, and I did. At the umpires, anyway. I might have yelled at players on the other team a time or two. All in good fun, of course.

So I think it was wise for me to sit out basketball season, and I promise to approach the upcoming softball season in a positive, conciliatory, turn-the-other-cheek frame of mind. I might have to wear a muzzle, but I can do it.

For the love of money

2009-01-10T10:45:00.004-05:00

I think that I’m about to get a divorce from the first love of my life.

I’m talking about baseball. Specifically, professional baseball.

I just don’t know if I can take it anymore. Sure, there have been times I have come close to walking away before. When the players went on strike in 1981, I was pretty upset. When they did it again in 1994, I was livid. And when all of the steroid news came to light a few years ago, I was disgusted.

But every time, I came back. Even though major league baseball never told me it was sorry. No players ever sent roses to me or bought me jewelry. They didn’t ask for my forgiveness. But I gave it anyway.

I started loving baseball as a kid, when I would throw a ball against the house for hours, pretending I was Nolan Ryan striking out Reggie Jackson; or throwing a Whiffle ball up in the air and hitting it over the roof, then circling the imaginary bases slowly, like I was Hank Aaron or Willie Stargell.

What do kids do now? Make imaginary calls to their agents, demanding they negotiate with their parents for more allowance? Do they emulate a hero like Manny Ramirez and pretend to be hurt until they can get traded? Do they imitate Gary Sheffield and spout off their mouths to the media, talking nonsense, then get praised for being “candid”?

Here in Atlanta, there’s been a lot of talk about John Smoltz leaving the Braves for the Boston Red Sox. Many people seem to be mad at the Braves for not offering him more money, even though he has been injured a lot lately, is 41, and is coming off of major shoulder surgery. I’ve heard people on the radio almost crying about the shabby treatment of this great Atlanta icon.

There’s no guarantee he’ll pitch an inning this year. Last year, the Braves paid him $10 million, and he was only able to pitch in a handful games. As far as I know, he didn’t return any of that money.

And yet, the Braves offered him $3 million this year to play baseball. Do you realize how much money that is? Odds are, you don’t, because you don’t make anywhere close to that. Unemployment in the country has hit a 16-year high, companies are cutting back, people are losing their retirement, and there’s more angst about the economy than we’ve felt in a long time.

Oh, and if you want to go to a baseball game and take your kids to see Smoltz or others play? You’d better get a second mortgage on your house first, or rob a bank.

And against this backdrop, a man is offered $3 million to play a children’s game. Not work for a living, but play. Throw a ball, catch it, run around in tight pants. And he decides, you know what? That’s not enough. Somebody else offered me $5 million. I’m going to take that.

Actually, I have no problem with that. It’s a free country. He has a right to earn as much money as he can. More power to him.

My problem is with the reaction to all of this. Fans and sportswriters are angry at the Braves for the way they “treated” Smoltz. Smoltz said it made him sad. Chipper Jones – who’ll get paid about $11 million this year to play a child’s game – is “very upset” and said the Braves disrespected Smoltz.

Are you kidding me? Are you freakin’ kidding me?

I like Smoltz a lot, always have. One of the greatest Braves ever. But don’t kid yourself, he is motivated by what motivates nearly every professional baseball player – greed. Show me the money.

The amount of money professional baseball players are paid is shameful. Remember Mark Teixiera? He was just signed to an 8-year contract by the New York Yankees for $180 million.

I did some crack research – I Googled it – and learned that the average salary for a registered nurse in the U.S. is $42,000 per year. Nurses are pretty important, wouldn’t you say? Society would suffer if there were no nurses. Society would survive if there were no more baseball players.

Do you know how many years a nurse would have to work to make as much money as Teixiera? 4,285 years. That’s well past retirement age.

By the way, here’s how many championships Teixiera’s teams have won – zero. Same as me.

How about firemen? Remember after 9-11, when firemen became national heroes? How they rushed into those burning buildings, how they risk their lives, and how they help save our houses, our property, even our lives? They’re pretty important, right?

But are they as important as the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez? See, he does things like hit a ball over a fence, walk around Central Park without his shirt on and hang out with Madonna. And while a fireman’s average salary is $55,000 a year, Rodriguez’ last contract was for $275 million for 10 years.

In other words, it would take a fireman 5,000 years to earn as much as Rodriguez got in his last contract. A 5,000-year-old fireman can’t run into burning buildings.

And Rodriguez is also in a tie with me and Teixiera for number of championships won. Goose egg.

So when I hear baseball players, or any professional athletes, start talking about fairness, or being disrespected, or getting paid what they’re worth, my head explodes like in the movie “Scanners.”

If somebody offers you $3 million to play – not work, play – baseball for a year, you shouldn’t feel sad or upset or offended or disrespected. You should fall to your knees, thank God, and realize how lucky you are, and then shut the hell up.

Rise and shine

2009-01-08T11:51:00.003-05:00

I woke up at 6 today, put on my exercise clothes, and drove to the gym for an early-morning workout.

I get it in my head every year that I should work out in the mornings, and then I try it, and then I go another year before I try it again, because it always reaffirms two things for me:

1. Exercise is stupid.
2. I am not a morning person.

I do not enjoy, nor have I ever enjoyed, mornings. I don’t like to talk in the mornings. I don’t like to interact socially in the mornings. I don’t like to think in the mornings. I gotta have three cups of coffee in me before I’ll even grunt at anybody.

I got this from my mother. She was also not a morning person. When I was going to school and she was working, we had a simple routine. She would come to my room and say, “Get up.” I would drag myself up in a few minutes, stumble into the kitchen, and we would have a wordless breakfast. We didn’t even look at each other. It was the way things should be.

My father had a very endearing way of waking me in the morning. First, he would come in my room and turn on the light and start shouting, “Come on, wake up!” If I didn’t immediately respond, he would come and snatch all the covers off of me, then pull the pillow from under my head.

If this didn’t work, he would grab me, shake me, roll me over and tickle me until I screamed bloody murder and I had no choice but to get up, usually swinging my fists at him blindly. Then he’d laugh and walk out of the room. He found of all of this funny. Looking back on it, I sort of understand the Menendez brothers a little more.

This morning wasn’t bad because I was bolstered by a rare good night of sleep on our new mattress, which is a very exciting new addition to my life. (When you reach your 40s, you take excitement where you can get it). We realized the other day that we had gotten the old mattress when our daughter was a baby, and since she’s now 17, it might be a good time to get another one. That, and its shape resembled the surface of the moon.

I didn’t realize how much thicker the new mattress was until the delivery man put it on the bed. It hits me about chest high. I feel like the girl from “The Princess and the Pea” up on that thing. My poor wife is going to need a mini-trampoline to get up on it.

I hope she doesn’t roll out of the bed during the night. She did that once early in the marriage, and she’s never forgotten my reaction. She got back in the bed, woke me up to tell me that she had fallen off the bed, and I looked at her and said, with a little irritation, “Well, you’re back in it now.” She was about six months pregnant at the time. I lost my chance at “Husband of the Year” at that moment.

So now I’m looking forward to another restful night on my mile-high mattress. Then I’ll wake up in the morning, sans backache, drink my coffee in silence, and wonder what the hell I was thinking about the previous day when I went to the gym before sunrise.

A weighty matter

2009-01-04T10:29:00.001-05:00

I tipped the scales this morning at a robust 203 pounds.

In my defense, my hair was still a little bit wet from the shower, and I haven’t clipped my toenails in a while, so my actual weight is probably somewhat lower than that. But still, that’s too much.

As I looked down at the numbers on the scale – leaning forward so I could see over my protruding belly – I made my annual vow to do something about it. Starting tomorrow.

For me, it’s not a physical appearance issue. I’m not vain and don’t much care what I look like, though I am a little frightened by the man-boobs. My underwear-modeling days are behind me now. Instead, it’s a quality-of-life issue.

For example, a while back I went to the basketball court with my 15-year-old son to play a little one-on-one. This is getting to be a bigger challenge, as he is now as tall as me, and he plays basketball about four hours a day. But other than one fluke occurrence last year, I still maintained the upper hand.

We played two games and I lost them both. By the time the score was 3-2, I felt like I had just completed the Iron Man triathlon with a refrigerator strapped to my back. It was only through sheer determination, meanness and a willingness to cheat that I was able to keep both games fairly close.

Afterward he was beaming with pride, and I suppose there’s a part of a father that feels good when he sees his son grow more mature and accomplish a goal. So with that in mind I looked him in the eye, shook his hand firmly and said, “Congratulations. Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while.”

He, of course, handled the win with grace and humility. Every day for a week, he greeted every person he met by saying “I beat my dad in basketball.” If he had enough money, he’d have hired a skywriter to fly over our neighborhood spelling it out.

The other day we had a rematch, and I won both games, so a bit of my pride was restored. I sank the last winning shot, held my hand in the air after the follow-through, and said, “Get some!” Then I went home and took 17 Advil tablets. He complained later that the court was wet, and that took away his quickness, so I asked him if he’d like a little cheese with that whine. Sportsmanship is not big at my house.

It’s clear that I won’t be able to maintain my sports dominance at home for much longer, though I plan to hold on to my mini-golf crown. I’ve never been beaten in a Williams family match, and I hope to retire undefeated.

Anyway, a new year has begun, and before I begin to get mistaken for the pregnant man, I am renewing my efforts to be less of a man. I’m eyeing 190 pounds as a goal and I hope I can get there by the beginning of summer, which is bathing suit season. I’m wondering if they make any “relaxed fit” Speedos?

Where the wild things are

2008-12-31T11:12:00.003-05:00

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....

2008-12-26T11:39:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-21T21:22:00.001-05:00

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

2008-12-20T14:22:00.000-05:00

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

2008-12-17T16:59:00.002-05:00

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?