Open wide

I went to the dentist today. It’s shaping up to be a pretty good week. Monday I had a “performance review” at work, and tomorrow I have to go through driver training, even though I’ve been driving every day for 28 years.

To cap off the week, I plan to be waterboarded on Thursday, and spend all day Friday watching re-runs of “The View.”

I am paying the price now of not taking care of my teeth when I was younger. I drank too many Cokes and ate too many Kit-Kats and sucked on too many lemons (who knew this was a bad thing?).

My teeth aren’t really all that bad. I mean, I don’t look like I should be sitting on a river bridge playing a banjo. But they could definitely be better.

I have spent way too much time and money in that dentist’s office the past few years. I’ve had fillings, crowns, root canals, caps, and a bridge. My teeth have had more work done than Dolly Parton.

I’m like a celebrity in my dentist’s office now, I go so much. They take me to a VIP waiting room and comp all of my floss, toothpaste and toothbrushes. The dental assistants show me pictures of their kids and call me on my birthday. The dentist’s Mercedes has a vanity tag that reads, “Thanks Mark.”

I went in this time for a cleaning, which sounded pretty innocuous, until the hygienist pulled out a torture device that looked like a grappling hook and began to scrape my teeth, going “tsk-tsk” the whole time. It made me feel bad that I disappointed her.

After that she polished my teeth, then took out a piece of floss as wide as a shoelace and forced it down to my gums, then pulled it back and forth like she was sawing down a Redwood. I’m going to ask to be put to sleep before my next cleaning.

The dentist came in, and he asked her if I’ve been flossing properly. She gave me a disapproving look, and then said to him, “well, he’s doing ok, but I told him there are a couple of areas where he needs to be more diligent.” She damns me with faint praise! I felt like a failure.

Then my dentist took a look in my mouth and I heard him say, “Oh, boy.” He always talks to himself when he’s working on me. I’ve heard him say things like “Ooops!” and “Damn, that’s not good.” This does not make for a reassuring experience.

I didn’t have any serious problems this time, though I do have to get yet another filling replaced. Basically, every filling I got when I was younger has had to be replaced. It makes me wonder if my old dentist knew what he was doing. What was he filling my teeth with, Play-Doh?

But, hey, it’s nobody’s fault but mine. Maybe someday I’ll have a radiant smile and I’ll be flashing my gleaming pearly whites all over the place. Or maybe I’ll be like my dad, and wind up keeping my teeth in a jar by the sink (a cause of many childhood horrors, by the way).

It could go either way.

Making a fashion statement

I was dragged by my wife Saturday to a grocery store on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta called Whole Foods, or as I like to call it, “Hell on Earth.”

The store is great. It’s always crowded, the aisles are small, and you get the opportunity to pay double the ordinary price for produce because it’s “organic.” I guess that means the farmers don’t use pesticides. I don’t really have a problem with pesticides. They call them “pests” for a reason, don’t they? So let’s get rid of them.

To get to Whole Foods, you take a lovely drive down a street called Ponce de Leon, which I believe is Spanish for “Where the crack whores walk.”

I remember when I was a boy, on some weekends we would get in the car and drive 40 miles to Atlanta, where we would visit fun places like the K-mart on Cleveland Avenue, which was the closest one to us. Then we’d ride over to Stewart Avenue and go to Zayre’s, and the Sears liquidation store, which I hated because it didn’t have a toy department.

Stewart Avenue has since been renamed Metropolitan Parkway, which sounds nice, but doesn’t mask the fact that parts of it make Fallujah seem like a nice vacation spot.

On these trips I would beg my dad to take us somewhere fun, like the zoo, but instead he would do what he considered the next best thing. We’d ride over to Hippietown and look at the hippies.

I don’t recall exactly where Hippietown was, but it was somewhere near downtown Atlanta. We found the hippies very amusing, with their long unwashed manes and their scraggly facial hair and their dirty, tattered clothes. And that was just the women.

Hippies aren’t as popular as they used to be, but I saw one in Whole Foods. He had long stringy hair, and a beard that I’m pretty sure was hiding some nesting bluebirds. His eyes were as red as a candied apple and he smelled like roadkill.

But none of that bothered me. As my mom used to say, it takes all kinds. But I was a little disturbed by his fashion choice, as he was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Charles Manson on the front.

Now, wouldn’t that make a mother proud? I suppose the young man was trying to make a statement, and he succeeded. The statement is, “I’m pretty freaking stupid.”

There’s nothing redeeming about Charles Manson. I have the same reaction when I see people wearing T-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara or Chairman Mao, or wearing an O.J. Simpson football jersey.

I’m not one for wearing clothes with other people’s pictures on them, anyway. The last time I did that is when I was 14 and I had a Farrah Fawcett T-shirt, the famous one where she’s wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Trust me, it was a big thing back in the day. And at least Farrah never killed anybody.

To each his own, though. I’m a believer in free speech and if somebody wants to do something ignorant, I say let them. Only in America!

Guitar hero

Have you ever been driving and seen one of those idiots in a car next to you singing along at the top of their lungs to the radio or CD player, beating the steering wheel like it was drums or pretending to be playing guitar?

I’m one of those idiots.

The other morning I drew some stares in the parking deck here at work, because I was listening to Dazed and Confused off of Led Zeppelin I, and just as I pulled into the parking space the song was at the breakdown in the middle, where Jimmy Page starts going off with his solo and it melds into Bonzo’s manic drums and – well, you had to be there.

But clearly, I couldn’t get out of the car until the song was over. Several people walked by and looked over at me funny, though I toned down the performance a bit. The minivan is equipped with a rocking stereo, even though one of the front speakers doesn’t work, and I had that baby cranked up to 11. If this van’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’.

I have always been a frustrated musician. I was one of those goofy kids who would crank up the stereo and get a tennis racket and pretend it was a guitar. I’m not sure my dad has ever recovered from walking in on me during a particularly animated rendition of Cat Scratch Fever.

I took up playing guitar at the University of Georgia, when I was given an old Yamaha acoustic by my friend Vic Chesnutt. My favorite chord was E-minor, because it only required two fingers to play. So I mastered that baby pretty quickly.

Then I moved on to learn whole songs, sticking to ones that began with E-minor. There aren’t that many – Eleanor Rigby, Knights in White Satin, Horse With No Name. Not the kind of stuff you can woo college girls with.

I have continued to play through the years, though never very well. I have dreamed at times of buying a real nice expensive guitar, like a Gibson or a Martin, but I’m not sure it would make much sense, given my playing ability. It would be like buying a monkey a Mercedes.

I now play an Ovation, which is a perfectly nice guitar, especially if you’re one of those guys who plays earnest songs in a coffee or a wine bar. It’s the kind of guitar John Belushi would smash on the frat house stairs.

I suppose that if I found a genie and a lamp, one of my wishes would be to be able to play a note-perfect version of Romeo and Juliet. I’m referring to the original version or Mark Knopfler’s live performance from the CD with Emmylou Harris, not the abomination by the Indigo Girls, in which they suck the life out of the song (insert your own joke here).

So if you see me in the car sometime acting the fool, have some courtesy, have some sympathy and some taste. I’m not insane, even though I may be making a “guitar face” and arching my back while simultaneously merging a 1999 Plymouth Voyager into Atlanta rush-hour traffic. Let’s see Eddie Van Halen do THAT!

I read the news today, oh boy

It is with some sadness that I read about the newspaper business dying, but it doesn’t shock me, because newspapers generally treat their employees like crap, pay them like cabbage pickers and provide a work environment just this side of an Indonesian T-shirt factory.

Other than that, it’s a pretty swell job.

I worked at newspapers for about 10 years, and though I often loved what I was doing, it was rarely worth it. The robber barons who owned the newspaper companies were making money hand over fist, while the writers and editors and photographers generally had a standard of living just higher than dumpster divers.

I remember when I graduated from college and I began to call around to see what sort of bountiful opportunities awaited a bright, ambitious young graduate just itching to make his mark on the world. My first offer was from a weekly newspaper in north Georgia, which offered me a whopping salary of $10,000, which doesn’t sound like a lot of money now. It didn’t sound like a lot of money in 1986, either. Cause it wasn’t.

I took a job at my hometown paper for (slightly) more money than that, and commenced to newspapering. The glamour of the job didn’t last long. I think it went away my second week, when I had to cover a Rotary Club meeting. The speaker was a guy showing us slides from his recent trip to Amish country (they don’t drive cars!). We opened the meeting by singing God Bless America and The Old Grey Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be, led by a woman who looked like Lillian Carter on an out-of-tune piano. I had arrived.

Later I became sports editor. That was a special day. The editor of the paper came to my desk one Monday morning and said “Don’t you like sports?” I said yes. He said, “You’re the new sports editor.” It was the only conversation we ever had. He bumped my salary up $15 bucks a week, which, if you divided it by the number of hours I actually worked, came to about .00004 more cents per hour.

I moved on to another paper as sports editor after that and stayed there for four years, during which time I covered a LOT of exciting events. I once reported on a girls’ basketball game with a final score of 70-4, and the game wasn’t as close as the score indicated. I like girls, and I like basketball, but I really didn’t like girls’ basketball.

I left that job for a news editing job back in my hometown, which was the worst career decision I ever made. The place was an absolute madhouse, overseen by this little bantam rooster of a publisher who liked to tell you that he had done, during his career, every job at that newspaper. To which I would always say under my breath, “And none of them well.”

I inherited a group of reporters working for me there who shouldn’t have been hired to write grocery lists, let alone newspaper stories. They had the collective vocabulary of an Atlanta cab driver and the ambition of a mollusk.

Once during a story meeting with them I said, “You know, you guys aren’t exactly Woodward and Bernstein.” There was not a glimmer of recognition on any of their faces. So I said, “Do you know who I’m talking about?” Nothing. “Anybody heard of Watergate?” They had not. I fired them all on the spot. Then somebody reminded me that I didn’t have the authority to fire anybody. So I asked if I could shoot them, and was again turned down. They are probably all still out there today, infecting the world with stupidity.

Small papers have been hit the hardest and are going under, and quite frankly, for the most part they deserve it. I still have some friends in the business, and God bless them, but I could never go back. I have a recurring nightmare where I’m working again at a newspaper, and I’m sitting at the same shabby desk, looking at the same moldy walls, and the bantam rooster is strutting around barking out orders. It’s worse than the “going to work in my underwear” dream.

It’s a shame, because at a newspaper I could write things people might actually be interested in. I used to write a regular column and enjoyed it when I would get a reaction. Now I write this blog, and I’m not sure anybody even reads it, most of the time. But at least I don’t have to deal with the rooster.

Blessing or a curse?

I’ve been getting blessed a lot lately, and it’s confusing me.

Not blessed out – that happens, too, usually after I pull away from the window at a fast food drive-through. I mean blessed, as in people keep telling me to “Have a blessed day.”

What do they mean by this? Blessed by whom? Blessed in what way? (By the way, I discovered recently that some churches have services in which they bless people’s pets. I think Lucky would like this. Assuming she doesn’t eat the altar.)

I suppose “Have a blessed day” is some variant of “Have a nice day,” only with a religious connotation. But do they really care if I have a blessed day? Nobody ever tries to confirm that I did.

The cashier at Kroger who wished – no, commanded – me to have a blessed day last Friday didn’t call me later that night to find out if I did. I could have died in a fiery accident, but his conscience is clear, because he urged me to have a blessed day. It’s not his fault if I didn’t.

People are always telling us to do things we can’t control. Like, “Have a safe flight.” Number one, it’s really not up to me whether the plane crashes or not. And number two, is that a necessary thing to say? Is there anybody, besides maybe an ex-wife, who hopes you don’t have a safe flight? It seems to me that it could remain unspoken. Same with “Get well soon.” I would if I could, buddy.

I know, these folks mean well, but they can’t resist the urge to say something when they really don’t have to. This happens a lot on elevators. I have no problem with looking at my feet the entire time, or pretending to be checking an important message on my Blackberry. Awkward silences don’t bother me. I embrace them.

But sure as shooting, on every elevator ride I take at work, somebody will mention what day it is (Is it Friday yet? You doing OK for a Monday?), or say something about the weather (Whew, it’s hot/cold/windy/rainy out there today), or ask me if I’m staying busy, which is really just an opening for them to tell me how busy THEY are, completely oblivious to the fact that I couldn’t possibly care less.

Another problem at work is you feel like you have to say hello every time you walk past somebody, even though it might be the 10th time you have passed them that day, because neither of you likes to work and is constantly getting up to go to the bathroom or the Coke machine. At what point is it OK to stop saying hello? How about this – the first time of the day you walk past a person, say hello. The second time, just nod. After that, you are free to pretend the other doesn’t exist.

This will spare me from having to endure comments such as, “Wow, we must be on the same bathroom schedule,” or “Do you just walk around the office all day?” Well, maybe I do, but there’s no need to point it out.

Does all this make me a curmudgeon, a grumpy old man? Perhaps so. Maybe if I get blessed enough times, one day I’ll start being nicer.

An honest day's work

Every time I get the urge to complain about my job, which is more often than it should be, all I have to do is get in my car and ride around my hometown of Griffin, Ga. to remind myself that I really don't have it too bad.

Griffin is littered with the ghostly remnants of textile mills, which have sat empty for years since most of those jobs moved to Mexico and China, where people are willing to work for a few dollars a day.

The mill sites now consist mostly of dilapidated, falling-down buildings, abandoned railroad tracks and overgrown parking lots. One of them used to have a sign on the outside that said "future lofts", but I can't imagine anybody wanting to live in such a place.

There was a time when cotton was king in Griffin. Everyone in my family, but me, worked at a textile mill, or cotton mill, as we called them, at some point. My father did, before he moved on to an assembly line job with General Motors; my mother did, both my brothers did, my grandmother did. If you lived in Griffin, odds were high that somebody in your
family worked at a mill.

And it was hard, nasty, unforgiving work. When the whistle blew, you could see the workers walking out of the mill slowly, fatigue riding on their shoulders, lint clinging to their clothes and their hair. The word "linthead" was used to refer to these workers in a derogatory way, but anybody who ever said that should be ashamed. Including me.

I can remember on a few occasions going into the mill with my mom, and being overwhelmed by the roar of the machinery, and all the dust and lint flying through the air. My mom would tell me stories of people getting hurt at work, losing a finger in one of the machines or burning themselves on a hot piece of equipment. It makes the times when somebody heats up smelly food in the microwave in the breakroom seem like not such a big deal.

I’m not saying I haven’t had a couple of crappy jobs along the way. I worked at one newspaper with the biggest collection of miscreants and single-helixed morons you’re likely to see this side of a traveling carnival. I’ve worked long hours for low pay before, but nothing like the backbreaking factory work everybody else in family knew at one time. The closest I came to that was a summertime job picking apples, and at least I got to be outside.

I didn't know what I was going to be when I was growing up, but I knew one thing for sure - I was not going to work in a cotton mill. It just didn't look like much fun. I looked down on it then, but now I greatly respect the people who climbed out of bed every morning, trudged into those dusty, noisy sweatshops and put in an honest day's work, day afterday.

And I know my parents hoped that I never would have to work there, and that's part of the reason why they did - to make a better life for their kids. And for that, I will always be thankful.

Car wars

Now mister the day the lottery I win,

I ain't ever gonna ride in no used car again - Bruce Springsteen, Used Cars

I bought my daughter a used car recently, and I made it through the process without assaulting a used car salesman, which surprised me. I rank used car salesmen somewhere between University of Tennessee fans and Chairman Mao on the humanity scale.

I get tense when a used car salesman even walks up to me. No other purchasing experience in America is as painful. When I go to the grocery store, the clerk doesn’t have to go consult his manager before he can tell me how much a loaf of bread costs. When I go to the sporting goods store, the cashier doesn’t say “make me an offer” when I pick up a box of golf balls. If I go to a restaurant and I tell the waiter I don’t like shrimp, he doesn’t try to convince me to taste it first.

I try not to make eye contact with car salesmen, because it’s like feeding a stray dog. Once you do that, you can never get rid of them. They lie to you, they try to trick you, they insult your intelligence, and then they expect you to do something that helps them out. They’re like presidential candidates.

Luckily, I found the right car for Allie after only going to a few places, and I lucked into a salesman (saleswoman, actually) who wasn’t pushy, and didn’t make me want to punch a wall after talking to her for five minutes. So I bought the car.

I fondly remember my first car, a metallic blue 1968 Mustang with a white top. It had white vinyl seats, to which bare legs would stick on a hot summer day. If I ever got in there on an August day wearing shorts, I’d need skin grafts after I tried to stand up.

It had the 2-by-55 air conditioning system – you know, roll down both windows and go 55 miles per hour. It didn’t have power steering, so after driving it for a few months I had Popeye forearms. It only had an AM radio, so I listened to a lot of Paul Harvey and “golden country oldies.” It got about a mile to the gallon and it handled like a Sherman tank, but I was very proud of that car.

Then I had a 1978 Honda Accord, which had a manual transmission with five speeds, all of them slow. It was so small you couldn’t cuss a cat inside it without getting fur in your mouth. If I drove it on the interstate, I may as well have put a ramp on the back of it for all of the other cars to jump over me.

I had some other cars that weren’t great during the years, most notably a 1987 Dodge Shadow, or as I call it, the “American Yugo.” What a piece of crap that car was. It had more defects than Michael Jackson.

Now I drive a beige 1999 Plymouth Voyager mini-van, or as I like to call it, “The Chick Magnet.” That baby will go from 0-60 in a week. It is impossible to look, feel, or be cool driving a vehicle like that. The interior is awash in dog hair, since nobody will ride in it with me except Lucky. And even she ducks her head in embarrassment when we pass other dogs.

I don’t see me getting a cool car for quite some time. What I really want is a great, big Cadillac, as big as a boat, with a dashboard that lights up like a Christmas tree at night, with plush leather seats and a ride smoother than a baby’s butt. Basically, a pimpmobile.

I just hope I don’t have to buy it used.