No rest for the weary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.