The good, the bad and the ugly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?