Rock - Paper - Schisms

Happy Thanksgiving, Weather Or Not...

2009-11-25T21:56:00.000-08:00

It's cold and wet outside.

Somehow, this seems to have become the norm here in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm not sure how or why, I just know it seems normal and natural to walk around with a damp chill these days. It's like we went to a swap meet and traded climates with Philadelphia. (Which would be a lousy deal, unless we got them to throw something else in, like the cheese-steak sandwich.)

The thing is, I hear more and more people talking about what a "lousy day" it is, when all I see is a day that happens to be cold and wet and grey. No, I'm not a particularly huge fan of cold, wet, or grey, but I wonder whether--for some people--the weather literally defines what kind of day they can have. Of course, it's probably just a matter of semantics. These people probably don't mean to suggest that the day will be bad simply because the weather is not to their liking, but I'm inclined to think that the things we say matter. When we call it a "lousy day," don't we set our expectations for it to be one? Don't we put ourselves on the lousy path?

Am I overthinking this? Of course. That's what I do. I take the stuff that "normal" folks take in stride and I snatch those minutiae up in a net, pin their wings down on a suitably flat surface, haul out my rusty set of mental tools and set to work disecting them. There is nothing too mundane, too run-of-the-mill, too average or everyday to stop me from wondering "why do we do that," "what does that really mean," or "are those real?"

Okay, I may be exagerating a bit. (I don't really care whether they are real.) The point is that I over-think things. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so, though I really need to over-think it a bit more before I can be sure. And you can be sure I will. For me, over-thinking life is a certain and constant as the weather; which--as I mentioned--has been lousy of late, though my days have not. My days (and nights) have been good... I have a loving family and a home filled with laughter and hugs that steal my breath away. I have friends both old and new who tolerate my presence so well that I sometimes... almost... think they enjoy having me around. I have useful work to fill my days and creative pursuits to keep me challenged and I have wonderful people with whom to share it all. When the sun is shining we soak it up together, and when it's cold and grey none of us needs bear it alone.

So, as we enjoy our collective Thanksgiving's Day this year, I'll be wishing that each and every one of you, my friends and family, have the very best day possible, no matter what the weather may bring. I thank each one of you for being a blessing in my life, and hope that in some small way I may have been a blessing in yours.

A muddy stream trickles through it...

2007-10-07T23:23:00.000-07:00

“They're growing houses in the fields between the towns
And the Starlight drive-in movie's closing down
The road is gone to the way it was before
And the spaces won't be spaces anymore.” (“Houses In The Fields” – John Gorka)

If you were ever a kid, and I’m guessing most of you were, you probably remember what it was like to get dirty on a fairly regular basis. And I’m not talking about adult dirty. Adults get dirty as a function of working; mowing the yard, cleaning the house, or maybe hastily digging a shallow grave. Kids, on the other hand, get dirty playing. Their dirt is play dirt, and it is the best thing a human being can wear.

I’ve been looking back over my metaphorical shoulder of late, tracking my footprints back through the ever-deepening dust of time, only to discover the landmarks by which my memory navigates harder to find with each passing year. And it isn’t just my memory that’s fading; the landscape of my past is changing with time. More and more of the places that were home to my memories exist now only in those memories; the real places are either gone, or so significantly changed as to bear no resemblance to the places I once knew.

When I was in elementary school, there was a creek that ran through an expanse of woods adjacent to the school grounds. We kids called this creek and the woods through which it ran the Mini-Brook. Too many years have come and gone since then for me to give an accurate accounting as to how much time I spent playing in and along the banks of that creek, or how many miles I logged riding my banana-seat bike (with playing cards clothes-pinned to flap against the spokes so they made engine noises as I rode) along the myriad trails carved through those woods by the kids who rode before me. Of course, to me back then those paths simply were; like the trees, the burbling waters, and the sky. They always had been and always would, and I would play forever there, because—while I was there—there was everything.

When I think back on it today, it feels as though there was a magic bubble through which only young boys on banana-seat bikes could pass, and within which the Mini-Brook ran. Time meant nothing there. I spent countless millennia digging clay from those muddy red banks in a single day. It felt as though the sun paused in the sky to watch as I raced between its green and gold rays along the paths cut through those woods, a one-eyed Jack chasing a tattered queen as I rode. Scrapes acquired there healed more quickly, soggy sneakers dried faster, as did any tears that made it across the threshold from the outside world.

I manage to get back home a couple of times a year these days, and I made time to take a walk behind my old elementary school this past summer. The Mini-Brook is still there, but where once it ran wild through vibrant woods, today it slips quietly unnoticed past the backyards of neighborhoods that grew up where once only those timeless trees stood. Fences block the breezes that once stirred the long grass along banks now overgrown with thickets and thorns. The fabled creek of my memory has been ripped out of the world and replaced by a drainage ditch.

As I stood there that day, I felt as though I’d stopped by an old friend’s home after many years away, only to find that he had died. It felt wrong to be touched by sadness in that place, even when I knew that that place no longer existed. This is silly, I thought. I’m mourning the passing of a stream. I laughed at the thought, which in and of itself felt more appropriate to the memories I’d made there. Yes, the Mini-Brook would have wanted me to smile, I thought, and laughed at myself even more.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a small, blonde head appear briefly over the fence and disappear. I turned to face the spot where it had appeared, and it immediately appeared and disappeared again. And then again. And again. Each time the head broke a little higher over the horizon of dog-eared boards. By about the fifth bounce (the fifth of which I was aware) I could see the broad smile on the face of the child on the trampoline in the yard where those magic woods once stood. I recognized that smile; I knew that magic. And I realized that trees can be felled, and the land can be parceled up into tidy boxes by adults and their fences, but that magic—the magic of a child at play in the world—is forever.

It might be cheaper in the long run to just change my name...

2007-10-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks I've been enjoying delving into my distant past for subject matter for my ramblings. It's been fun to really think about specific times in my past and try to wring the fun out of them in the here and now, and it's been nice knowing that I can do so safely. Those days were long ago and far away from where I stand today. Part of the reason I can laugh at the mistakes of my past is that the person I was then is so different from the man I am today. The younger me paid the price for his errors; that bill was paid long ago.

Or so I thought until I tried to renew my North Carolina driver's license the other day.

You see, last Saturday was my birthday, and it happened to be on this particular birthday that my driver's license expired. So, first thing Monday afternoon, I drove over to the DMV, stood in line, took a number, and took a seat to await my turn with one of the fine, courteous, and capable* people staffing that location.

To pass the time, I amused myself by watching the other would-be drivers. I genuinely enjoy people-watching, and think everyone should spend at least a few hours a week at it. (I figure, if you've got to share the planet with other people, it's probably a good idea to have some sense of who those people are.) People-watching is easy, free, and there are only a couple of rules you need to keep in mind. First, people-watching is a lot like admiring animals at a zoo. As with the animals at the zoo, it's best if you avoid any actual contact with those whom you observe. Second, it's critical that you do your people-watching in different locations from time to time. The cross section of humanity you'll observe dining at a five-star restaurant is likely to be quite different from the sample you'll get at the farmer's market or, well... the DMV. Be careful not to draw broad-reaching conclusions based on small samples. (Based on the data I gathered while waiting for my number to be called, the average American is in his late seventies, speaks little or no English, and is roughly five months pregnant.)

The wonderful, courteous DMV staff finally called my number, and I got up, went over to the cubical to which I'd been directed, and sat back down. I handed the gentleman sitting across from me my expired driver's license, and recited my social security number for him when asked. He told me to sign my name on a small slip of paper, which I did, and then he looked at his computer screen, and asked me for my social security number again. I recited it. Again.

Houston, we have a problem...

"Have you ever been to Illinois?" I knew immediately that he wasn't asking me to go away with him for the weekend, but aside from the fleeting sense of relief that knowledge brought me, I knew this wasn't going to be good.

Houston, we have a problem in Illinois...

I paused before answering. He probably thought I had to think about whether I'd been there or when, but the only thing I needed to think about was how to ensure that the next words that came out of my mouth weren't expletives. "Yeah, like twenty-five years ago. Why?"

Of course I knew why.

Houston, we had a whole slew of problems in Illinois about twenty-five years ago...

I mean, I didn't know exactly, specifically why. I couldn't have told you right then exactly which specific stupid thing I'd done twenty-five years earlier had come back to bite me in the ass this time, but after you spend enough time being your own history's chew toy, you get a sense about these things.

The nice DMV guy explained that the state of Illinois had placed a block on my license, and gave me a phone number to call so that I could find out why, and hopefully get the issue resolved. When I called, a nice woman in Illinois explained that the block was due to my failure to pay a fee to reinstate my Illinois drivers license, after Illinois suspended it in 1982, subsequent to a DUI I got while back home in New York. I politely pointed to twenty-five years of proof that I had never needed to reinstate the license in question, and asked how I could be responsible for paying a "fee" for an activity that had never occurred. I could certainly understand if they claimed I'd failed to pay a fine for having my license suspended, but a fee for a reinstatement that never occurred?

Despite being thoroughly impressed with the flawless logic inherent in my own argument, I'm fairly pragmatic these days, and I knew my argument would never, ever win. I could rant and rave if I wanted, but in the end, I was going to have to pay whatever they demanded, because at the end of the day, Illinois can probably get by without my seventy-five bucks, but I really need that license. I did manage to get the nice woman from Illinois to acknowledge that there was no rational argument for claiming to need to reinstate a license I had not needed for twenty-five years, and that (without actually saying it, of course) this was really just a way for Illinois to get some money from me by holding my license hostage. I thanked her for her candor, and gave her my credit card information so she could charge me the "fee." She told me that I should be cleared to renew my North Carolina driver's license by next Monday, at the latest.

Of course, this means that until then I either have to stay home, or drive illegally. Driving with a suspended license for a few days is no big deal, so long as you don't get pulled over for anything. Right? Well, it should come as no surprise to anyone that it only took me until the very next morning to attract the attention of Raleigh's finest. While rushing to drop the kids off at school, I apparently rolled through a stop sign. (In my defense, I need to point out that I did not roll over it, just past it.) The cop was nice enough, as was the neatly printed citation he gave me for failing to stop and for driving with an expired license.

So, on the downside, I get to go to court at the end of the month, and pay a nice little fine. On the upside, it looks like I'm going to have another excellent opportunity for people-watching.

Sealed with a court order...

2007-09-28T10:44:00.003-07:00

I remember learning in my early teens that—in the state of New York, at least—juvenile records are "sealed" once you hit 18. (Having revealed when I learned this, I'll wait a bit before explaining how and why so as to build suspense.) I remember this little factoid for a number of reasons, most of which will become clear in due course. One thing I remember quite clearly was how emphatically I was assured that the records were "sealed," and that having been "sealed," no one, up to and including God himself, could ever "unseal" them. At the time it seemed kind of silly to me that they would even bother to keep a record that nobody was ever again allowed to view, but at the time I wasn't really in a position to question the way things worked. (I mostly just nodded and tried to look contrite.)

At 19, I decided to join the US Navy. This decision involved a couple of key factors. First, I'd just finished my freshman year of college, after which said college and I had mutually agreed that it wasn't working for either of us. The stated position of Potsdam State University of Arts and Snowdrifts was that I probably had some growing up to do. Personally, I think they had commitment issues. So, college didn't work out and I needed to try something new, but I decided to try something old instead, and moved back in with my parents for a while so I could soak up their disappointment at point blank range while I "figure out what I wanted to do with my life."

Apparently, what I wanted to do with my life was work at dead-end minimum wage jobs and stay out late drinking too much and getting far too stoned. Before long, I found that this goal was incompatible with my mother's primary goal at that time; to be able to stop crying from shame every time she saw me. Since I was pretty sure my behavior wasn't going to change any time soon, I figured I needed to at least do her the courtesy of removing myself from her sight so she could maybe get some sleep again or at least have some time to fuss over the problems her other 5 children were having with life.

Which is why I one day found myself walking into this huge black borg-cube of a government building in downtown Syracuse, where I filled out reams of forms, took a fairly easy test, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And... (you get the idea.)

Finally, some guy in a nice, crisp uniform came over and asked me to come with him. We went and sat down on opposite sides of his nice, efficient borg-cube desk, where we had a nice chat. Some time during this chat, he surprised me with a question I had not anticipated...

"You indicated on your dee-dee-one-eight-two-four-echo that you've never been convicted of a violent crime. What can you tell me about this incident?" At which point he slid a file folder to me across the desk.

(Resistance is futile.)

There, unsealed and laid bare for anyone—up to and including God—to see, were the records of certain exploits, undertaken by me, as well as the details of my apprehension, prosecution, and subsequent conviction. As it turns out, there is an authority beyond God, (at least where sealed records are concerned) and that authority had asked to have those records unsealed. What really messes with my mind to this day is that, in order to ask to unseal the records, the military first had to be aware that they existed. I suppose it's just as well that they could unseal them, because, in the final analysis, it is probably better to have the records unsealed and my sins known, than to simply have them know that I'd done something nefarious, the details of which were perhaps too horrendous to reveal.

Okay, so that's the background. As to the specific why and how of my learning about the sealing of juvenile records, I'm going to leave that for my next installment. I don't know about the rest of you, but I think this one's gone on long enough.

The scene of the crime... (Sealed with a court order, Pt. II)

2007-09-28T10:44:00.001-07:00

The other day I started to share a story about how I learned that juvenile records are sealed and can't be gone into ever. In setting up that story I got as far as revealing that, upon attempting to enlist in the military I discovered that the government telling a naïve teenager, "we promise we'll never tell anyone about this," is akin to a football team telling a naïve cheerleader the same thing. In both cases the secret is good only so long as there's no upside to sharing it.

So it was bound to happen that one day the United States Navy was going to ask the City of Oneida if it had any good dirt on me, and the City of Oneida was going to blab. Fortunately for naïve cheerleaders everywhere, football teams keep lousy records. Unfortunately for me, cities keep pretty good ones.

There I sat, across the desk from Chief Warrant Officer I-Caught-You-In-A-Lie, staring at the folder he'd just shoved across the desk. It was a bit like one of those TV interrogation room moments, only without the cool soundtrack to help you know how to feel about what's happening. Fortunately, I knew exactly how to feel about it, with or without music.

"What can you tell me about this incident?"

(Bum-dum-DA-dummmmm!)

The folder contained various legal-looking documents, including police reports, court documents, and some rather impressive looking crime scene photos. I will ruin some of the suspense at this point and disclose that they were far more impressive than the actual crime warranted. No, I didn't eat my high school track coach. No, I didn't make a patchwork quilt of the local ladies sewing circle. My brief foray into violent crime was more of a creative outlet, than a way to vent any pent up rage or a desire to do any real harm.

You know how you always hear people whining about how kids are influenced by the violence they see on TV? Well, it turns out that, according to my admittedly limited personal research at least, there's some validity to their complaint. Given the opportunity and a sufficient level of boredom, I think kids will act on just about anything you put in their brains, up to a limit set by their personal moral compass. (In my defense, I believe someone had parked a rather large magnet next to mine that day.) Had my step-brother, Jim, and I spent the evening before watching The Sound of Music, we probably would have spent the afternoon skipping around the hillsides, singing, and dodging natzis. As luck would have it, the feature presentation the night before was "Helter Skelter."

Faced with a boring afternoon alone, we somehow decided it would be cool to see what we could mix up in the kitchen. We hit upon the idea of making fake blood, and after a few false starts, came up with a nice viscous, dark red liquid which we loaded into a few sandwich baggies and an empty dish soap squirt bottle.

Well, once you've made fake blood, you can't just sit there and look at it, you know? So, we needed to find something to do with it. We headed out into the neighborhood, and made our way into the open field across the street. There we yanked up dead corn stalks and had fun swinging them around and launching them—heavy dirt and root ball first—into the air; sort of a poor man's hammer toss. At some point this too became boring, and we still needed to find something fun to do with our fake blood.

It was about then that one or both of us noticed a particularly white garage which backed up to the field. We launched a few corn stalks at it, and the dirt balls exploded against the side like dusty black fireworks. Then one went through a window. (I'm still not sure to this day whether that first window was broken by accident or intent.) We hit the ground, hearts pounding for fear of the repercussions, but no one came running to see what had been broken.

Sociologists have written at length about the "broken window effect," which states that if you go into any neighborhood, break a window, and leave it broken, crime will rise. I am at this very moment, writing at length to tell you that this effect can also be instantaneous, because for some reason the fact that nobody responded when we broke that first window suddenly made it seem like a good idea to break some more. All of them, in fact. We threw corn stalks through every window of that nice tidy white garage. And then we remembered the fake blood. We threw the baggies at the walls so they splattered like the downwind view of a shotgun blast to the head. I used the squirt bottle to scrawl the words, "Helter Skelter," across the siding, and admired my horror-show handiwork as the letters ran and dripped.

Then we ran home and had a snack. (Mayhem makes kids hungry.)

So there you have the details of what was in that sealed folder. Of course, I still haven't described the actual time at which I learned about sealed juvenile records. I guess that'll just have to wait for part three.

Twelve angry teens... (Sealed with a court order, Pt. III)

2007-09-28T10:43:00.001-07:00

I grew up in a small town in Madison County in Upstate New York. Some people actually recognize the name, "Oneida," because of the silverware of the same name. Those taking notes will want to know that Oneida silver was never actually made in Oneida. The Oneida Community and the silversmithing operation they ran was actually located in the nearby town of Sherrill. (Go figure.) History is hazy as to the reasoning behind this, but my guess is that they thought "The Sherrill Community" sounded like a lesbian conclave. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.)

So, I come from a small, obscure town in New York, whose only claim to fame is a product that isn't made there. If you searched the Internet for other trivial facts about Oneida, you might stumble across something about their youth court system. Or you might not. I don't know about today, but back when I was a kid, the only way I found out it existed was when I was ordered to appear before it. I was told at the time that Oneida was one of the first places in the country to set up a court where kids tried kids, but then small towns are always claiming to be first at this or that. Nearby Canastota, NY bills itself as "Titletown USA" on signs beside the one major road into town. I doubt most people know what "Titletown" means, and I'm sure pretty much nobody cares. They could probably win an award for the nation's most undisputed claim to fame, but then they'd need a new sign.

Oneida's Youth Court served two purposes. First, it gave kids an opportunity to learn how the criminal justice system worked by actually taking part in "real" trials. (I use scare quotes around "real," because these trials were "real" trials in much the same way that a pet rock is a "real" pet.) Second, it gave local authorities a way to handle juvenile offenders who were too young or whose crimes were too silly to warrant throwing them into the actual juvenile justice system.

We were hauled into an actual courtroom, and seated at the little table where the guilty guy always squirms and looks evil on TV. After a few minutes, a chubby boy who was maybe sixteen squeaked, "All rise," which command his voice seemed more than happy to obey. We rose. Some kid who was probably taking time off from his hall monitor duties strode in wearing black robes safety-pinned at the hem so he wouldn't trip over them, and stood behind the judge's desk. Chubby squeaked, "Youth Court is now in session; the honorable Melvin "The Hammer" Thruffington, presiding." Somebody read the charges and asked us, "How do you plead?" One or both of us mumbled "guilty," managing to sound quite so.

Then Judge Melvin spoke. "By your actions in this case, did you intend any harm or threat to the victims." I assumed at the time that he meant the elderly couple who owned the garage, not the garage, windows, etc..

"Um, no."

Judge Melvin scribbled something on the pad before him. It was a legal pad, so you know it must have been something important. Then he asked, "Were your actions—specifically painting the words, "Helter Skelter," on the garage wall—meant to praise Charles Manson or his actions?"

Seriously??? I mean, if we did want to glorify Manson or follow in his footsteps or something, wouldn't breaking a few windows and smearing some corn syrup and red dye 7 on a wall be setting the bar a bit low? Can you imagine if word actually got back to Manson? "Hey Charley... some fans of yours went on a crime spree somewhere in New York." "Really? Cool! What'd they do?" ... "You're shitting me, right? Man, my followers are lame!"

"Um, no."

(Scribble...scribble...) "I hereby sentence you to four hours each, community service, to be served at a time and place to be determined later. Bailiff Skippy, escort them from the courtroom." It was upon exiting the courtroom that Jim and I had to sign a number of documents, and were told that, if we managed to stay out of trouble until our eighteenth birthday, these files would be sealed, and remain so, into perpetuity.

As for our punishment, we didn't have to wait long to find out what it was, and it will please you to know that you won't have to wait very long either.

This train done need a good scrubbing, oh, this train... (Sealed... Pt. IV)

2007-09-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

The human brain is an amazing machine. It oversees the day to day operations of the human body like a giant supercomputer, only considerably smaller and squishier. From the moment there are two neurons present in an embryo, they begin communicating, trying to make sense of their environment and the body's place in it. "Hey, what's all this?" "I don't know." "Me neither." "Where's everybody else?" "Oh hey, here's another one. Hi." "Say guys, what's that sound? ... Is someone vacuuming?" And so on.

Inherent in this search for meaning is a need to learn what things feel good and what things hurt. Most human beings, when they realize that something feels good, want more of it. Similarly, most humans will strive to avoid anything they identify as a source of discomfort. (The few exceptions to this rule are big Marilyn Manson fans.) This desire to avoid pain is key to the effectiveness of criminal punishment; we punish criminals in the hopes that they will associate the pain of punishment with their criminal behavior, and choose not to do it again. (Or at least, that's what we ought to do with criminals. Commentary on that issue will have to wait for another blog.)

As a reasonable facsimile of an adult, I am a firm believer in the punishment part of "crime and punishment." It should be swift and should fit the crime. Given that our crime involved vandalizing a garage, the authorities couldn't exactly simply vandalize us in return. (Though my step-father thought it appropriate.) Even in the hinterlands of Upstate New York in the mid '70's, they had some standards for what you could and could not do with kids (unless you were their parents or clergy).

Jim and I were ordered to appear downtown at the courthouse that following Saturday morning, dressed in work clothes and ready to work. Mom picked the most ripped and stained jeans from amongst our supply of ripped and stained jeans, we donned t-shirts and sneakers, and Dad gave us each a pair of work gloves, which he assured us we would pay to replace should they be lost or damaged. We hopped in the family truckster and headed downtown. At the courthouse, the police took custody of us from Mom, and told her when she could reclaim us. We took it as a good sign that they assumed she'd want us back.

The Pullman Sleeping Car was invented by cabinet-maker turned industrialist George Pullman in 1857. The Pullman Car parked on the railroad siding next to the court house, was probably one of the first to roll off the assembly line, and—if its condition that day was any indication—saw the hardest, dirtiest use during its day. Apparently the city or the county or the state had bought this hollow, crusty wreck of a thing and had plans to fix it up for use in bicentennial celebrations. The first stage in the car's rehabilitation coincided nicely with this first stage of ours; we were to clean it.

There we were, two teenagers with a fairly spotty record of cleaning something as simple and small as our own bedroom, and we're handed a train to clean. Looking back, I give them an "A" for creativity, but a "C-minus" in forethought. We were certainly likely to learn our lesson, but were they likely to get a clean train? Doubtful. Doubtful, at best.

The cops (we felt we knew them well enough by now to call them cops) gave us buckets, hoses, brushes, soap and a hose that ran all the way from the side of the court house. I imagined that they used this same hose to delouse prisoners, and so resolved not to drink directly from it. We started by filling the bucket with water, adding soap, soaking the brushes and sponges, and then picking an area to begin scrubbing. This was slow and fairly ineffectual work, so we eventually hit upon the idea of just hosing down the whole interior of the car, using the force of the water pressure to dislodge the crustier bits of the train's history.

Before long the car and Jim and I were thoroughly drenched and more than a little sudsy. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to tell you that water + soap = slippery. There we were, soaked to the bone, sliding all over the inside of the Pullman car, doing our best to scrub anything and everything that slid by. After a couple of hours we were surprised to see that the train was noticeably cleaner than before we started. The hot sun streaming through the broken windows and playing off the puddles and soap bubbles began to look more and more like a light at the end of this particular tunnel.

In the end, we served our time, and the train got clean. We were wet and exhausted, but we'd had fun. I don't think they'd bargained on that, but we did. If I sat down with a calculator and a calendar, I could compute the number of days in my childhood, and hazard a guess as to how many of those were days during which I had fun. It would be a big number, yet looking back, so few days stick in my mind. But that one did.

Did we learn our lesson? It's hard to say. We certainly never got into that specific brand of trouble again, but I'd be lying (and more so than usual) if I suggested that we were angels from them on.

Time and geography have frayed the bonds Jim and I once shared. When you grow up in the same house with someone who is the same age as you, you can't help but spend most of that childhood stumbling through the good and bad together. I like to think that the paths we each have taken since then were the right ones for each of us, that they diverged because we each needed to go where the other could not. But most of all, I like to remember that there was a time when we stood together, soaking wet, looking down a set of railroad tracks, and thinking that, like those two ribbons of rusty steel, we'd run side-by-side through the world forever.

No preste ninguna atención a este blog...

2007-09-21T07:11:00.001-07:00

I was thinking the other day how cool it is that my daughter has been learning a little Spanish here and there since her first days in Kindergarten. This seems to be fairly standard for elementary schools in North Carolina. I assume our children are being taught Spanish starting at such an early age so that those who drop out of school prior to graduation will be able to get work on a road crew or at the drive thru of a fast food restaurant. Speaking of fast food places, am I the only one who's noticed that the only chain not being completely staffed by Latinos these days is Taco Bell? (Yo quiero explicación!) The one place I really want to hear a Mexican accent, and I'm greeted by, "Y'all wanna try our new Scrapple Chalupa?"

I tend to assume that the nice, hard-working people taking my lunch orders and slowing my progress on local roads are here legally. I also tend to assume that I may be wrong about that, but since I can't tell just by looking at someone whether he or she came here through proper channels or by clinging to the underbelly of a tanker of pomegranate juice, I'm inclined to treat everyone I meet with at least as much respect as the next person who can't understand most of what I'm saying. (You know who you are.)

The issue of illegal immigration is a hot topic these days, and while I don't harbor any animosity for anyone who's trying to improve their lot in life, I do have a bone to pick with those trying to pretend that illegal aliens are anything else. Words mean things; that's why we don't just grunt at each other. (Unless we've got a big mouthful of chalupa, of course.) Those who have tunneled or ridden or skipped or catapulted across our borders without going through the proper channels aren't undocumented immigrants any more than a bank robber is just making an undocumented withdrawal. They're breaking the law, which makes them illegal. Noting that does not make me a bigot, it just makes me someone who recognizes the legitimate meaning of words.

And they're not immigrants at all; as much as it may (apparently) hurt some feelings for me to say it, they are aliens. Immigration is a legal process, one these people have specifically and intentionally avoided undergoing. They did not immigrate to our country, they snuck in. These people are illegal aliens. That's the proper term. (And I expect you all to use it.)

And don't give me that "we need them to do the jobs no one else will do" crap. Here's how we fill those jobs... We start deporting illegal aliens en masse, and for every individual we send back across our borders, we kick one person off of welfare. See? There's now a new hungry person in need of work to replace the one who we got rid of. Problem solved! Of course, this hungry person in need of work happens to be a U.S. citizen and so is actually able to legally work in our country.

For the record, I'm no xenophobe. (I'll wait while you look that up... okay, moving on.) Yes, it infuriates me to know that someone can take their driver's license test in Espanol, but only because these people then have to go drive on roads dotted with signs written in English. How many rusty, pale blue pickups go careening out of control off of bridges in January because we don't have signs reading, "El puente congela antes de camino"?

If private businesses think they can make a buck by advertising in Spanish or printing "El Cheetos" on my bag of cheese puffs, that's their business. I'm not sure the government should be doing business in any language other than English, but aside from things like that driving test, I don't really care. Of course, doing so creates something of a slippery slope. How many languages should Wake County print it's forms in, and how much more does it cost us, the taxpayers, to do so? Perhaps we'd all be ahead in the long run if we used some of our tax dollars to fund ESL classes for new immigrants.

Oh, and I'd like to send a shout out to Mexico's president, Felipe Calderón. In his recent state of the union address, he stated that "Mexico does not end at its borders," and that. "Where there is a Mexican, there is Mexico." Um, I don't mean to quibble, but I feel the need to make a minor point of clarification... Mexico pretty much ends where and when we say it does. Felipe would do well to remember that. (After all, if we ever did decide to take a few battalions down to the Rio Grande and golpee algún asno con el pie, it's not like Felipe could put up much of a fight; all his able-bodied young men are over here.)

Meet me in St. Louis, Louie, but get directions first.

2007-09-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

I had to fly to St. Louis recently. I say "had to" because nobody goes there by choice. Don't get me wrong... there's nothing wrong with St. Louis, it's just... well, it's not someplace else; any place else. St. Louis is that other place. The place you go when you can't be where you wanted. Or at least that's how it seems to me. I suspect people who live there will feel differently, and will have stopped reading by now, in a huff. Of course they should... I mean, who the hell am I to cast aspersions on a city I've only been to once now? Anyone reading this should know to either ignore my opinion entirely, or at least take it with a healthy dose of sodium (chloride, not pentothal).

They say that "all roads lead to Rome." Well, if that's true anywhere it must be doubly so in St. Louis. I assume that all the roads in St. Louis lead to Rome, because I can assure you that none of them led to where I wanted to go. I performed more U-turns than a female sheep rolling down a hill. (Wait for it... ba-dum-bum!) My brother, who was driving, finally resorted to the most extreme of measures and stopped to ask directions. I don't know whether our route was especially difficult, or whether the people at the Stop-N-Go were just shocked to see a grown man stop and ask "how do I get there from here, and by the way, where is here?"

Oh, we were there for a funeral. Not at the Stop-N-Go; they're full service, but there are limits. No, we were in St. Louis for a funeral. My uncle, my father's brother, died. His was one of those ends that had been coming for a long time. There was no shock, no surprise for anyone. Uncle Sam (yes, I have/had an Uncle Sam) lived for seven years with the cancer that took my father in four months.

I liked Uncle Sam a lot. In a way that's kind of strange, because I had seen so little of him in my life that I really didn't know him. I'd like to chalk it up to my having a "sense" about people, but I don't. People, to me, are closed books. Oh, and they're still wrapped in cellophane and stacked on a shelf where I need to ask for help to even get the book down, but I don't, because I'm not good about asking for help, even with the small stuff. That said, I believe I felt I knew Sam because Sam was one of those people, one of those men, who spent his life in life.

What?

I know, I know... Lemme 'splain.

With me at any given time there's the guy I'm trying to be, the guy I'm trying to show to others, and then—somewhere hidden safely from view—there's the real me. Whoopy, right? I mean, that's most of us, isn't it? Heck, most of you who like to go around believing that you're showing the world the real you have just crafted a mask out of "hey world, this is the real me." Pretending to be real is the mask you wear. And that's cool. There are plenty of worse masks out there. (How about the, "Hey world, I like the taste of human flesh" mask?)

But Sam. Recognizing that I didn't know the man well and that I'm mostly full of shit most of the time, I think that Sam was one of those rare individuals who really lived as who he really was.

I heard a lot of nice things said about him at his funeral. Now sure, funerals are not generally places where people jump up to tell you all the worst dirt they have on the deceased, but I'm inclined to believe what I heard. One of the most, no, the most memorable thing I heard said about Sam was that when he talked to you he was more interested in what you had to say than in what he himself had to say. That struck me as a wonderful trait, probably because it is so patently lacking in me. Half the time when I'm on the listening end of a conversation my attention is 100% committed to planning my next comments. The other half the time, I'm asleep.

Yes, I suck. I'd love to be like Sam in this regard, but I'm not.

The funeral was beautiful. Sam's children, my cousins, both got up and spoke about their father, and his best friend shared some comments as well. I couldn't help thinking how much I hoped that people would speak as well of me when I'm gone, but neither could I kid myself that they would. That's not false modesty; I'm not looking for disagreement here. The reality is that—by my own measure (the only one that really matters for me)—I am not living up to the potential I believe I have. I feel as though I'm sleepwalking through my life, and while it's a pretty good dream most of the time, there's a part of me that yearns to wake up, shake off the lethargy that's gripped me for far too long, and really live.

Or maybe I just need another cup of coffee.

Burning off steam...

2007-09-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

One night, at a time significantly beyond the hour at which I and my brothers, Mark and Jim, were supposed to have been sleeping, we were instead raising Cain; one of my step-father's many clever phrases for doing that which you were not supposed to do. Whatever we were playing at or arguing about or throwing back and forth or tooting on or dismantling at the time has long since been forgotten, but it must have been something interesting to have included all three of us.

You see, being only six months apart, my step-brother, Jim, and I shared a room. It wasn't unusual for us both to be called on the carpet after bedtime. If either one of us was either not sleepy or in the mood for mayhem, the other really had no choice but to be pulled into the fun and the subsequent punishment. Mark, being older by two years, had his own room down the hall. For him to be pulled into the mix meant that this was no ordinary shenanigans. Since I don't recall what we were up to at the time, I'll make something up.

So there we were, playing monkey-in-the-middle with some of Dad's fissionable material. I'm pretty sure it was a baseball-sized chunk of strontium 90, but Mark remembers it as being uranium 238. I was in the middle, of course. Jim and Mark were both active, sports types, and as such were quite adept at throwing, catching, and the basics of ridicule. For my part, the countless hours I had spent with my nose buried in books were paying off as I jumped up and down, flailing at but failing to catch each successive throw, and complaining that it wasn't fair with a fairly impressive vocabulary for a six year old.

But, as often happens when kids get caught fooling with their father's radioactive isotopes, we were hauled up short by a shout from downstairs. Dad was mad. "Put that down in a safe, lead-lined container, and get back to bed!" This being the third time he'd yelled up at us that night, we knew he meant it. So, being as rational as the next six, six, and eight year old you might meet, we kept at it a bit longer.

We lived, eight of us, in a rather old house. I think it was built in the 1920's, but I'm not sure (and I'm too lazy to check). Being an old house, the floors creaked whenever you so much as thought about walking on them. Sneaking around at night without making noise was simply impossible, yet somehow Dad could just appear anywhere he wanted in the house without making a sound. So, there we were, out of bed and misbehaving, when suddenly there he was, right in the middle of it.

"That's it. You boys have that much energy, let's give you an opportunity to burn it off. Come with me."

We followed quietly. Not frightened really, but worried. The normal consequence of the kind of behavior we'd been engaging in was a good spanking, some yelling, maybe a bit of both. But a chance to burn off some energy? We had no idea what that meant, but we were each quite certain it wouldn't be good. Mark, being the eldest and most rooted in the way things actually work, assumed it meant we'd be pressed into service cleaning the house or some such menial activity for a few hours. It was a reasonable assumption, as this would have served well both as a punishment and as a way to tire us out and burn that excess energy off. It also would have served a useful purpose; that of cleaning the house. Yes, Mark's was a reasonable assumption, but it was wrong.

Jim, being the more optimistic of the three of us, thought that perhaps Dad was about to challenge us all to an impromptu game of touch football in the backyard. Never mind that it was dark out and that we had no real lights for the backyard back then. Forget that we had never once played touch football with Dad up until that day (nor have we since). Given all the possible options Jim's brain presented, this one was the most fun, and so he settled on it, and began planning how to ensure that Dad picked him for Dad's team. Sadly, Jim also turned out to be wrong.

If Mark was the most realistic of the three of us and Jim the most optimistic, then I was the most fanciful. My imagination wasn't quite so tethered in reality as Mark's, nor quite so thoroughly ensconced in rose-colored glass as Jim's. Mine was shaped by a simple, overwhelming, and deep-rooted belief that life was pretty much the way they depicted it on TV and in movies. And so it was that as Dad led us downstairs, I imagined that our ultimate destination was the basement, where we would spend the hours until dawn shoveling coal into the rusty, monolithic blast-furnace that crouched at it's center, waiting to devour our childish joy along with shovelful after shovelful of jet black coal. Never mind that our furnace ran on oil, and was a boxy, pale-green affair that would frighten no one.

As you might have guessed, I was also wrong. We all were. Dad didn't take us downstairs and present us with mops, brooms, pails, and dust-rags; he didn't grab a football and call us into a huddle in the backyard; he didn't drag us kicking and screaming into the searing, sepulchral dark of our basement. No, he took us out onto the front porch and into the cool night air of an Upstate New York fall.

"You boys have so much energy, how about you run it off?"

"Wha??"

"Quiet. I want you to run around the block right now."

"But we're in our pajamas..."

"Now! Get, before I lose my temper!"

And off we ran. At first I think we thought he'd call us back, but once we turned the first corner, I think it dawned on us that he meant to have us actually circumnavigate the block. It's important to point out here that this was a reasonably small town and a reasonably quiet neighborhood. In fact, during most of the time my family lived there (and my parents remain there to this day) about the only thing that ever seemed to cause any problem or present any real danger to anyone was our family. So, while it might seem like a very foolish thing to do when viewed through a lens of today's world and views, it was a harmless, reasonable solution to the problem of three boys with energy to burn at bedtime.

And so we ran. Once we realized that this was our punishment, we got over being scared as to our fate and began to enjoy this strange romp around the neighborhood. We'd never done anything like it in our lives, and though we didn't know it at the time, we never would again. We ran and skipped and laughed. We ran so fast that our slippers flew off, and we had to go back and slip into them again and again. At the second corner, we decided to cut the corner and run across the front lawn. Apparently, people doing this was something the owner was trying to discourage, because at roughly the half way point across the lawn we simultaneously flipped in midair and fell flat on our backs. Startled and still laughing we climbed back to our feet and felt just there at about waist high for kids our size... a thin wire stretched from the corner of the house to a pipe driven in the ground at the corner of the lot. Mark and I stepped carefully over it and headed off down the sidewalk. Jim, who thought flipping over the wire had been a riot, took a few steps back and ran straight at it again. Apparently, it was just as funny the second time.

We made it the rest of the way around the block without incident. When we ran up to our own front porch again, winded, but sporting huge smiles, Dad said, "Now get to bed, and I'd better not hear another peep out of you." He sounded stern, but despite the darkness there on the front steps I could have sworn he was smiling too.

If Dr. Bendover calls, tell him I just left...

2007-09-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

I spent 36 hours at the dentist yesterday. Okay, it wasn't actually 36 hours, but it seemed like it. Don't get me wrong; I don't dislike going to the dentist, per se. See, my wife works for a dentist, so that's the practice I take my teeth to. They specialize in prosthodontics, which I assumed meant you could pay both to have your teeth fixed and for sex. (My bad.) Turns out that means they focus on dentures, bridges, and—for the most part these days—implants. (Once again, not the kind I was initially thinking.) It's a good practice, so I'm not harmed by the lack of choice, but I really have no choice; if I need something done to my teeth, I have to go to that dentist. (There's a very good analogy to be made here relating to another activity that my marriage constrains me to undertake with one specific individual only, and which lack of freedom likewise causes me no harm whatsoever... but my wife might just read this one day, and I don't need that headache.)

On the whole, I consider it a plus that I actually know the people who work on my grill. It doesn't get much more personal than having someone spend half their day up to their elbows in your mouth. Being able to share a laugh with them, even if that laugh sounds like the death rattle of a drowning harp seal, well... it takes something patently un-fun and makes it almost fun. Of course, the perceived value of this familiarity drops off rapidly as the portion of your anatomy they are working on nears your middle bits. As much as I enjoy knowing, socially, the people who work on my teeth... I would rather discuss environmental issues with Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio than socialize with my proctologist. (If it happened, through some bizarre twist of circumstance and fate, that I discovered that Dr. Bendover was a friend of a friend, I would have to relocate to Guam.)

But back to my teeth. I was there to get a crown placed on a tooth. (My understanding is that this means that the tooth will be able to move in both directions on the checker board, capturing enemy teeth as it moves.) At least I thought I was there to get a crown. As it turns out, the last time I was there, they gave me a filling instead of a temporary crown. I've looked into this, and as far as I can tell they did this because they had an overstock of amalgam and novacaine, and needed my help to get rid of the stuff. So, instead of the quick, painless pop and glue procedure for which I'd planned, I got to enjoy the whole needle, numb, and grind thing (again). Add to that the fact that the tooth in question is apparently located so far back in my head that it's technically considered part of my ankle bone, and... well, it's hard to imagine having less fun while having so much fun.

Of course, I did not complain. When it comes to doctors or dining out, I think it's best to smile and go with the flow, because in each case the people you're dealing with are in a position to make it very unpleasant for you if you piss them off. Of course, in this particular setting I'm even more constrained to behave like the prototypical model patient, because if I whine or complain or bleed too much when they lance my tongue with the drill I'll hear about it later at home. I think I'd get less flack from fondling the hygienist than I would if it got back to my wife that I was a difficult patient. No... best to grimace and bear it. And that's what I did.

In the end they managed to get the filling out and a temporary crown pressed in place, and I laughed around the instruments and grunted in answer to questions about my kids, my band, my world. I suppose it was as much fun as you can have in a dentist chair, at least without the gas. In a couple of weeks I'll go back and they'll replace this temporary with a nice shiny gold crown. All in all, I should probably consider myself lucky that my wife works where she works, affording me the ability to find some small enjoyment in an otherwise un-enjoyable setting. (And thank God she doesn't work for Dr. Bendover.)

No Room For Whom?

2007-09-21T07:04:00.000-07:00

I go to church. Not always; sometimes not even often, but I go. I really wouldn't call myself religious, I just have a thing for stale bread that's been handled by other people, especially if I can dip it in some really cheap wine and gulp it down in front of an audience. I keep hoping one Sunday I'll take my crappy little piece of pita, and find as I move to dip it that the chalice is filled to the brim with sour cream and onion dip. Body of Christ; blood of salivation...

Admittedly, there are a lot of Sunday mornings when I'd rather stay in bed than go get my weekly infusion of Godliness. Okay, that's pretty much every Sunday morning. Sometimes the bed wins, and sometimes God wins. Actually, I'd rather think that God always wins, it's just that sometimes what God wants most is for me to keep dreaming about being king of Greglandia; where I am worshipped by all the gentle citizens as something of a... well, kind of like a god, but not so much that it would offend you-know-who.

I bring this up by way of explaining my overall view on religious belief, and specifically my attitude toward the beliefs of others; that being that whatever you may believe that makes you happy and causes you to at least try to be good to those around you is cool with me. I have my own beliefs, and I while I have no firm conviction that they are "true," I think they fit what I am able to observe of the world and give me some fleeting sense that I understand the universe and my relationship to it. I like to think I have a pretty good bead on the really big picture, but that doesn't mean I don't have room for other points of view. In fact, it is only by remaining open to other points of view and new information that I have come to my beliefs as they exist today.

What I believe here in 2007 is quite different than how I viewed the universe in 1997, and that evolution has only been possible by reading and listening and remaining open to points of view that often told me, in effect, "you're off your nut." As it turns out, from time to time I have been just that, and only by listening to others have I been able to move toward a more enlightened personal view of the cosmos.

The thing is, not everyone is that open-minded when it comes to their religion. Were I to share some of my more heretical views at church, I have no doubt that those decrying my notions regarding the nature of the soul and whether Jif or Peter Pan makes the better peanut butter would be legion. I understand that. I suspect that most people are fairly closed-minded about their personal view of the world, and few are moreso than those who are willing to conclude that everything they need to know or ought to think about the fabric of reality can be found in a single book. I don't look for debate at church, because I recognize that debate isn't what the other people came there for. People go to church to be uplifted and admonished; and these are both flip sides of a single well-worn coin engraved with the words "In My God I Trust." The world is for questions; church is for answers.

Sadly, I'm finding more and more devout believers demanding that their views not be questioned or challenged out here in the world. "There is no room for debate," is their mantra, and their dogma comes from the First Universal Church of Global Warming. With climate, as with spirituality, where I see questions these people see answers. Where I'm taking notes in pencil, they've scrawled "WE KNOW!!!!!" in ultra-bold Sharpie. I'm all for a lively debate between people of conviction, but what hope is there for such when one side proclaims loudly and with pride, "There is no room for debate." Really? No room at all? Couldn't those of you who know so much make some room for those of us who don't, maybe shepherd us into the warm light of knowing so damn much?

Couldn't we maybe find a little room to debate the value of the data being gathered by weather monitoring stations built in the middle of airports and in front of air conditioning exhausts? Isn't there at least a little room for discussion about whether a temperature monitoring enclosure with a 60 watt light bulb burning inside it might understandably be registering higher temperatures than were measured back before Edison harnessed electricity for light and gave us the single best visual metaphor for the good idea?*

Of course, I'm fairly certain that most of the global warming faithful are blissfully unaware of these facts; but wouldn't engaging in a healthy debate on the issue leave room for them to become informed? How then are we to enlighten those who already deem themselves fully and completely enlightened? Hell, they not only believe they know everything they need to know about the issue (many of them knowing absolutely nothing of substance, when it comes right down to it) but they also label anyone who deigns to ask questions about the issue "flat Earthers."

While the climate warming faithful's mantra of "No room for debate," is intended to convey the certainty with which the question has been answered, what it actually means is "we're not willing to have a debate; our minds are closed." Their conviction is not just similar to that of the devoutly spiritual, it is exactly the same thing. These people have imbued the issue of saving the planet from human-induced climate change with all the fervor and (apologies to the devout) willful ignorance of the most absurd caricature of the Bible-thumping redneck.

Cite scientific reports that suggest warming is not occurring, that warming is natural, that anything they believe is not as they believe, and they respond as if you were telling them there is no God. It's as if these people think the world is inflicted with a terminal case of cancer, yet when you try to show them evidence that maybe, just maybe the test results indicate the planet is going to be okay, they respond with anger and vitriol. "Hey, maybe your mom is going to live..." "NO SHE'S NOT, YOU CRETIN!!!!" (And before you know it they are suggesting that you think their mom is flat...)

Again, I am NOT suggesting that I know all there is to know about global warming; I'm not one of those claiming there is "no room for debate" on the issue. I'm simply suggesting that, based on a considerable amount of reading on my own part, it seems clear to me that there is ample room for spirited debate among those open to learning more about what everyone seems to agree is an important issue. "But wait!" someone is even now saying aloud to himself as he reads this, "what about the ice fields in Antarctica that are getting thinner?" Yes, I've read about those, but I've also read about the other areas of Antarctica where the ice has been getting thicker over the same period. Surely if we're going to draw global conclusions based on what's happening to the amount of ice at the poles, we need to consider all the information about what's happening there, not just the half that suggests we're all doomed.

As with the question of God's existence, there are voices raised with conviction on both sides of this issue; and I'm reasonably sure that these people are all screaming at each other with the best of intentions. So, it doesn't surprise me that very few people are even aware that some of us are quietly, calmly reading and taking in information and searching desperately for others with whom to discuss global warming. If only we could find some room, somewhere, where it would be alright with Leonardo DiCaprio if we debate it.

==

* Here's a link to the Surfacestations.org Website, for anyone interested in reading about some of the stations being used to gather temperature data; data which is being used as the basis for global climate modeling which is cited as indicating and predicting a global warming trend.

Bear with me, I just got up...

2007-06-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

I love summer. I love swimming, I love wearing sandals, and I love the heat. Actually, I don't love the heat itself, but rather the fact that because of the heat so many women wear less around the pool and at the beach than they normally wear under their regular clothes. So, it's not so much the heat I love as the absence of cold. Cold sucks, unless you're a beer. (Sure there's stuff I like about winter, but this blog is about summer, so shut up.)

For me, summer brings with it a fairly drastic upswing in my activity level. This has always been the case, though the delta between my cold-season activity and warm-season activity is far more pronounced than it was when I was younger. Back then I managed to keep fairly active year round. At forty-four, this spring hit me like Deniro in "Awakenings." I stumbled up from the couch, blinking at the increasingly bright days as if struggling to make meaning of my surroundings. And that's pretty close to reality.

After a pretty serious snowboarding injury a couple of years ago I was sidelined for several months. It was physically impossible for me to be active at first. After a couple of months exercise was merely ill-advised from a medical standpoint. Finally, I got to the point where I was cleared to start ramping up my activity level, but somehow my body had lost interest at that point. My metabolism had remained at such a low level for so long that it simply didn't see the point in getting all excited over anything. If there is a physical malady analogous to clinical depression, my body had it for much of 2005 and all of 2006. For all intents and purposes I was hibernating.

Somewhere between our family spring break trip to Orlando and my Y-Princess trip to Camp Sea Gull with my daughter this spring I began to rouse from my coma. These two trips shared key elements that were crucial in waking me. First, they were fun. Secondly, it was physically impossible not to be physically active during the trips. You can't do Disney from the comfort of your couch. Add to that a day snorkeling and swimming with the dolphins at Discovery Cove... well, try dozing under water. As tired as I was by the end of any given day on these kid-focused trips, I realized that if I kept it up they would be the life of me.

So, I'm hell-bent on staying active these days; swimming with the kids and playing Frisbee golf almost daily. I know that over time my heart will thank me for pushing myself, but in the short term I'm only hearing from my knees, shoulders, and lower back; all of whom are steadfastly resolute in their conviction that we should never, ever leave the couch.

Atlanta on $263.78 a Day

2007-06-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, I made that number up, but it's not far off. I'm in town for a training developers' conference. Before you get excited, that's not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Oh sure, Bob Pike is going to be there, and you could do worse if you're in the market for handfuls of cheap promotional pens, but at the end of the day it's just nine thousand-something nerds wandering around talking about how best to pass along nerd-knowledge in a digital age.

I'm here because my employer thinks there is value in having someone attend these things. Ostensibly the notion is that I'll attend a bunch of sessions where I'll learn tons of stuff about where the training field is going, what's out there on that virtual whiteboard horizon, how to capture the learner's attention and keep it when you know deep down that your subject matter is slightly less interesting than the interior of a toilet paper roll (if you're over five)... you know; nerd stuff.

I may not have mentioned before, but I am a nerd. Not old school or anything; I have no tape on my glasses, no pocket protector, no speech impediment, and I don't drool unless it is appropriate to the setting. I'm what you'd call a neo-nerd (if you were nerdy enough to use words like "neo"). I dress fairly innocuously, have interests outside the conventional nerd-sphere, and can pass for normal in most settings.

"What makes someone a nerd?" you ask. Scientists, philosophers, and podiatrists have been trying to answer that question since... okay, they haven't actually, but I'll give it a go. A nerd is someone who is passionate to the point of obsession about things other people find boring, confusing, or of no real interest. It doesn't really matter if your thing is Star Trek, Star Wars, or painting those tiny civil war replicas; nerd is nerd. (I'll be selling "Nerd is Nerd" t-shirts soon; watch this space!)

Anyhow, this nerd walked into a bar... The nerd was me, and the bar was the Vortex Bar & Grill in Atlanta. Cool. I liked the place even before I walked the two miles distance from my hotel room. I had Googled restaurants in the neighborhood, and hit on the Vortex as the place I'd have dinner because their Website, or more to the point, their attitude hooked me. The Vortex is a place where you can go and have a burger and a beer and have it their way. Don't smoke and don't want to be around smoke? Their Website suggests you go someplace else. Like to complain when things aren't to your liking? Take a hike. They advertise their two locations as being both "whine-" and "idiot-" free zones. They even had an explicit "86" policy, which stated that the lines between places open to the public and public places had been blurred for too long; that the Vortex was privately owned, and the management reserved the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. Like I said; cool.

Their beer selection was so vast that I suspect they may have actually traveled forward in time, bringing back beers that have no actually been invented yet. (By comparison the selection at most places here in Raleigh is only half-vast.) You could get an "In Heat Wheat" from Flying Dog or a "Peg Leg Stout" from Heavy Seas or a zillion other strange or staid brews from their wall-to-wall coolers. (I had a St. Pauli N.A.. Nerd, remember?) The food menu was actually more substantial than I'd expected, but since they'd won best burger in Atlanta for some number of years I failed to commit to memory, I decided to have a burger. I ordered their "black and spicy," which featured a half-pound patty blackened with Cajun seasonings and topped with jalapeno jack cheese, red onion, lettuce and tomato. The only thing I had to add to it was my teeth. It was hands down one of the best burgers I've ever eaten.

So, that's my brief travelogue of three days and nights in Atlanta. The conference? If you're really, really, really into training and the exciting new technologies for delivering learning on-demand to a global audience, then it would still boor you to tears. Sure, I learned a couple of things; yes, it was time well-spent if you do what I do for a paycheck. But since you probably don't, nothing at all is more than enough to say about that.

No, YOU grow up!

2007-06-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

I like being a kid. It's one of my favorite things, and I submit that it is one of the best things in the world. It's better than candy, or cartoons, or playing cowboys and Indians. Of course, all of those are very cool, but being a kid is just better. In fact, the only thing better than being a kid, is being a kid with my kids.

My daughter, Loren, and I spent this past weekend at Camp Sea Gull with our Y-Princess tribe (The Crazy Crocodiles) along with hundreds of other daddy/daughter pairs. It was a wonderful, active, fun-filled, magical weekend. We shot arrows from bows and bb's from rifles, we panned for shark's teeth like they were made from solid gold. We ate cafeteria fare in a huge mess hall filled to the rafters with laughter and love and the wonderful noise of memories being made. It was amazing. That place was lousy with kids. Most of them were six or seven, but an awful lot of them were in their thirties and forties too.

Yes; I'm Greg, I'm a kid, and I'm forty-four.

Being a forty-four year old kid can be a mixed bag if you concern yourself with the opinions of others. First, there are the adults. Some of them are going to find your joy at the little things in life a bit strange. Others will find it downright bizarre. A few will quietly decide that it is evidence of some deep-seated emotional or mental problem. Maybe both. Maybe he's a Democrat, they'll think to themselves. And the other kids... there's no ignoring the fact that most of them are still in the single digits when I'm almost eligible for AARP discounts. Kids notice that kind of stuff. In a world where not wearing the right sneakers can land you on the outside looking in, being twice as tall as everyone else and having gray hair definitely puts a question mark after your name.

Years ago—when I was twenty-five, and just a kid compared to the kid I am today—I was playing in the sand at the beach when another kid approached me to check out what I was doing. I'm guessing he was about five. "What are you doing?" he asked, watching me carving a pair of feet out of sand (so it would look like someone was stuck there).

"Playing," I answered.

He puzzled over this for a minute. "Are you a grownup?" he finally asked.

What a cool question, I thought. I answered as best I could at the time; "I don't know."

He puzzled over this for a minute. "How old are you?" my new friend finally asked.

"Twenty-five."

He sighed wistfully, and said, "Yup, you're a grownup." He said it like an oncologist delivering the sad news that I only had seventy years left to live. Seriously, to the five year old, twenty-five puts you on the downward slope to oblivion. It's all over for you. See that tag on your toe, filled out in crayon? Humor aside, at that exact moment I kind of liked the idea that I was grown up. That random child's decree made me stop and think; yes, I suppose I am grown up now. (Of course, it's important to remember that I was playing in the sand at time.)

As time has gone on, I've come to realize that there is a lot inherent in the term grownup that simply doesn't fit me. The great thing, the cool thing, the Saturday-morning-cartoon-happy thing is that you don't have to be grownup at twenty-five or forty-four or fifty-three, etcetera, ad scooby doodum. You can be a kid for as long as you live. (Maybe longer, if certain religious ideas turn out to be true.)

Yes, little Timmy was wrong about me. I wasn't a grownup then, and I'm not one now. Sure, I pay my bills and my taxes, I drive a car, and occasionally wax nostalgic for the way things used to be. Paying your bills no more makes you a grownup than drinking and driving makes you Paris Hilton. Those actions are just functions of managing my life at this stage of my life. I did that when I was three. Of course, at three managing my life mostly meant hiding things; hiding the peas I didn't want to eat, hiding myself in games of hide-and-seek, or hiding the fact that I'd pooped my pants again.

Being a kid transcends the simple trappings of age. The physicist, Richard Feynman, won a Nobel Prize for his work on the atomic bomb. He also worked out mathematical formulas to describe the way a Frisbee flies, figured out how ants tell other ants where you keep your food, and removed doors from their hinges just so he could laugh at the frustration this caused in the grownups around him. He was a brilliant man who did amazing things, not the least of which was remaining childlike until the day he died, despite the weighty times and weightier achievements of his life.

Last summer, when my daughter Loren was six, we two were on our way somewhere in the car. Out of the blue, she said, "Daddy, I don't think I want to grow up. I want to be a kid." From her expression in the rear view mirror I could see that she was serious.

I thought about it for a moment, then I responded, "If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it secret?"

"Yes."

"I'm still a kid." I put it out there like it was a secret; something important that I was sharing only with her. In a way, it was. We talked for a while about the difference (as I see it) between getting older and getting old; which is a lot like the difference between walking and skipping. The great thing was that she already knew what I said was true. She'd seen me being a kid every day of her life. Telling her it was so just allowed me to hammer home the message that being a kid (just like being happy or being sad) was a choice.

At the end of the day, we're handed an age, but we can always choose our outlook, and I'm here to tell you that you could do a lot worse than to choose to view the world through the eyes of a child. Sure you're going to have to endure the occasional comments and glances of the grownups around you who don't understand, don't get it, but you know what they say... "Sticks and stones may break my bones..."

My conscience, like my lapel, is clear...

2007-06-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

I don't do ribbons. Don't get me wrong; I understand why people wear them, and I'm all for some of the wonderful causes the ribbons are used to represent, but I just don't wear them personally. I don't have a pink ribbon for breast cancer or a red ribbon for AIDS or a really limp little flesh-colored one for erectile dysfunction. It isn't that I couldn't have them if I wanted; my anti-ribbon position is an affirmative stance. I don't wear ribbons because I do not want to wear them.

Why? Because ribbons annoy the pants off me more surely than a phalanx of sweaty soccer moms swooning over Al Gore. ("You know... you really need to watch 'An Inconvenient truth!'" Um, the really inconvenient truth for me today is that you are currently breathing my air.) I abhor empty gestures, and for me, ribbons are the emptiest. (Heck, there isn't even a gesture. The thing just hangs there.)

I remember back during the first gulf war (you remember... the good one) when some students at NC State were staging a "die-in" on campus to protest the war. Literally pairs of kids took time out of their busy schedule of copying off of each other and begging for extensions on papers they didn't really intend to finish, late or otherwise, to lie on the ground and do nothing for an hour or two. I mean, first of all these were college students; lying around doing nothing is hard-wired into their collective consciousness. As gestures go, it certainly wasn't a huge undertaking to drag their lazy asses out of their bong-water stained beanbag chairs and plant them on the sun-warmed bricks of the brickyard for a couple of hours.

If your intention is to show people how strongly you feel about something, shouldn't you do something that takes a little effort? For example, if one guy walked up to one of the protesters and calmly said, "I disagree with you," but another guy ran over and began kicking the patchouli oil out of a couple of them, well... I'm going to be inclined to think that the second guy feels quite a bit more passionately about the issue than the first.

Even more importantly the gesture was empty; it was devoid of value, meaningless, and several other synonyms for "empty." Lying down for a couple of hours does nothing to change the situation about which these people claimed to be so worked up. If you really care about an issue, shouldn't you do something substantive? Maybe write letters to your congressman or your senator, or better yet, Oprah? But hey, they were just college kids, so I should probably cut them a little slack. I mean, how many of them would actually know how to write a letter, anyway.

But this ribbon thing... I see fully grown adults wearing these things, proudly. "Look at my ribbon! See how much I care about {insert cause here}? I care a lot, and you need only look at my ribbon for proof! By the way, I couldn't help noticing that you don't have a {insert color here} ribbon on your person, which shows how much better than you I am, you worthless {insert expletive here}." These people wear ribbons on their lapels, stick them to their bumpers and windshields... they'd probably get them tattooed on their asses if society allowed them to walk around without pants. (Though at least that would be a gesture.)

Years ago I attended an AIDS benefit. (You remember back when people used to care about AIDS, don't you?) The entire evening basically went like this. "Hi, I'm Blaine (or Hunter or Justin or Thad; you know the type...). It's so nice to have you here! Let me give you a ribbon."

"No thanks."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. I'm fine, thanks."

"But, um... everyone else has a ribbon."

"Yes. I can see that. They're lovely, but I'm deathly afraid of pins."

"Oh... well can I scotch-tape one on for you?"

And so on...

Seriously, I spent the entire night trying to avoid having to explain why I didn't want a friggin' ribbon. Here I was at an event that was raising money for a worthy cause. The very act of being there was not only a gesture, but one that resulted in money going to the cause in question, and despite this I was hounded by people who couldn't understand that I didn't need to make an empty gesture to show I cared. If my money or my presence there or my oath never to have unprotected sex with a man didn't prove I was doing my part for AIDS, how was a ribbon going to?

And now, in the aftermath of the horrible, tragic, unimaginable, and did I say tragic events at Virginia Tech, here come the black "VT" ribbons. (Sigh...) I guess I should respect and understand people's need to wear their empathy on their sleeves (or lapels, or blouses, or bumpers...); heck, I guess I do respect it. But it still bugs me. It's bad enough that I have to be reminded that my children are growing up in a world where things like this can happen. (It's always been that kind of a world. It's the reminder I'm lamenting, not the reality that the world is a dangerous, capricious place.) To add insult to injury, I get to know what this sad, pathetic little person looked like; I didn't need a face to go with this evil, but I got one anyway. Of course, if just knowing what he looked like wasn't enough for some of you, NBC provided you front row seats for the "here's why I killed all those people; aren't I just too much?" show when they aired the killer's little home movie. (Shame on NBC for airing it and shame on you if you watched it.)

Almost before the echoes of the final shot fell still, the blamethrowing commenced. This person or that person didn't do enough or did too much or wore the wrong color shirt that day and we need to fire them or censure them or shun them (unshunning them only when we absolutely have to say something to them) and all in an effort to hold someone accountable when the only one accountable had his finger on the trigger when the gun went "bang!" This was a bad guy. Life is hard for a lot of us, but we make our choices and we follow a path that leads us inexorably to who we are and through what we do in this world. Cho was bullied, he didn't fit in, he had an axe to grind, he was considered unstable. It will probably come as no surprise to my readers that all of that was true of me at one time or another in my past, and despite that fact I have never felt the need to kill anyone over it. (And if I ever do, please, please blame me and only me.)

These days the norm is to fall over ourselves searching for answers, wear ourselves out digging for root causes, and above all to rush madly to find someone to punish for any disruption in the fragile facade that life is easy, that our neighborhood is safe, or (as Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it) "that someone, or at least some force, {is} tending the light at the end of the tunnel."

Whatever or whomever that force is, I bet you it is not wearing a ribbon.

Who is this ''Alyssa'' person, and why should I care?

2007-06-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

I don't like country music. Period. Please don't take offense if you happen to like it. I don't like shellfish either, and I know plenty of nice folks who seem to genuinely enjoy eating the very same science-fiction-sized insectoid sea-critters that I find so off-putting. My stance on country music isn't a matter of me being "above" that particular musical style, it's just one small facet of who I am.

Besides, I actually like some country songs; it's just country music that makes me want to cut my ears off with a dull pair of pinking sheers. It isn't so much the music itself that I despise as the category. In fact, I probably feel that way about most musical styles. In the end I either like or dislike the song, without regard to what aural box the industry decided to shove it into. As I think about it, it's more the trappings of this or that style that annoy me. Does a country singer lose his voice if he doesn't have a ten gallon hat or sideburns? Does having their pants down around their knees help hip-hop artists when they consult their rhyming dictionaries? But I digress...

A couple of years ago I received a cheap but functional shower radio from a coworker in one of those obligatory and largely joyless corporate gift-swaps. I slapped a couple of double-A's into it and stuck it to the wall of my shower, and from time to time I bother to turn it on and search the dial for one of the three stations that it actually receives. (I assume the transmitter for these is located somewhere in my backyard.) I switched it on yesterday, and after a few minutes of painstakingly twisting the tuning knob by no more than a couple of Angstroms at a time, I managed to tune in a country song.

The song was called, "Alyssa Lies." I knew that within a few seconds because it only took that long for the singer to croon "Alyssa Lies" roughly 74 times. For reasons I can only attribute to a knee-jerk desire to find fault with country music "on spec" combined with the fact that at 44 years of age, there is absolutely nothing I find interesting about my own body, I actually bothered to pay attention to the lyrics. Besides, in 2007 we're pretty much hard-wired by the media to want to know everything about everyone else, so my curiosity was piqued. Who the hell is this Alyssa, and what's she lying about? I figured Alyssa was some woman who'd done the singer wrong... that old staple of country music themes. But I was wrong.

As I listened to this stupid country song playing on my stupid orange shower radio in my stupid preformed fiberglass shower, I started crying like a little girl. I didn't "get misty" or "tear up" or "get verklempt" (as they used to say on SNL's "Coffee Talk"), I bawled like a frigging baby who's been spanked hard while dicing onions in a tear gas factory. I cried so hard that I actually laughed once or twice at how absolutely pathetic it was to be reacting that way to some stupid country song. I put one hand on the wall to steady myself, hunched my shoulders, and sobbed uncontrollably while the words of the song sank in...

"Alyssa lies, in the classroom.
Alyssa lies, everyday in school.
Alyssa lies to the teachers
as she tries to cover every bruise."

I guess the meaning of the song took me by surprise. It was so far removed from what I expected, and simultaneously so completely on-target where what's most important to me in the world is concerned. I don't know whether it's a good song or sucks. I lack the capacity to make a dispassionate, rational critique of it musically. I'm pretty sure it isn't a bad song, but it wasn't the music that hit me so hard. What yanked my heart out through my tear ducts was the thought of any child finding pain and sorrow where every child should find only love and solace.

Being a father is the single most important thing in my life. I realize that statement is something of a cliché, something every parent is supposed to say; but those of you who know me and have known me in the presence of my children have seen for yourselves that it's more than that for me. I am good at many things, but I am a great dad. I don't write that to brag, I write it to express how completely incomprehensible it is for me to know that anyone could do anything but cherish those whom God has placed in their care.

Loving and caring for my children is the one thing in my life that has from day one been effortless and joyful. I spent most of my life waiting for something to happen, feeling somehow unfinished and incomplete. That changed the day my daughter was born. As soon as she was delivered, the nurse took her over to the warming table and gave her a vitamin K shot. My little girl cried for the first time in her life, and when she did, I whispered a promise in her tiny ear that I have kept and will keep for the rest of my life, "Nothing that hurts that doesn't help." That's such a little thing to promise. Seems to me it's the very least every child deserves.

Of Present and Future Realities (or ''What I Am Going To Do On My Summer Vacation'')

2007-02-07T11:05:00.000-08:00

A little bird asked recently where I'd been and why I hadn't blogged lately. The answers to that question are essentially, (a) I've been right here. (b) I've had nothing much to say. Answer "b" does not mean I've had nothing going on; in fact, the opposite is true. I've had so much going on that I have had no time to stop and process any of it and consider what, if anything, any of it means to me.

So lets do now...

Christmas came and went, leaving behind it a few cherished gifts and a pile of bills so daunting, that I've been forced to go on Zoloft while we figure out how to pay them off. We had fun, though the weather conspired to deny us our usual snowboarding/skiing (and sometimes crashing and emergency-rooming) trip while in New York to see my folks, siblings, nieces and nephews. After years of being frustrated at having to "fit" a trip to my father's home into our too-short trip North, I was profoundly saddened that we had no need to "fit" that trip into our plans this year. After having gotten to know the area where he lived fairly well over the years, it seems strange to think that I have no reason ever to go there again. And his home, which was always somehow so familiar to me yet never a very comfortable place to be; the knowledge that it belongs to someone else now, and that I will likely never set foot there again, is tough to get my head around.

That present reality has forced me to face a future reality; one upon which my brain has seized far ahead of actually being ready to think of it. That being the sure knowledge that one day (may it be many, many years hence) my mother and step-father will follow where my father has now gone. That knowledge has led me to think of the time I have left to share with them in a very different way than I did only a year ago.

Between them my mother and step-father share six kids, and have shared them since I was two. With three boys and three girls, we were the "real" Brady bunch. Unlike the TV version, we had more than one bathroom and no live-in maid. Our trials and tribulations were similar to theirs at first blush, though I like to think ours would have made for more entertaining television. While TV's Marcia was nursing a swollen nose, my sister Tracy was throwing one of our cats out a second-floor window to see if it would still land on its feet. (It did, and was fine, though it tended to keep a safe distance from her after that.) When TV's Jan was struggling to find her place while living in her sister's shadow, my brother Mark was shooting one of the neighbor's kids with an arrow. (In Mark's defense, the kid did dare Mark to do it.) During another episode, my step-father came home one day to find one of my sisters being held at sword-point by yet another of the neighbor's children. (In his defense, it can reasonably be said that our family fired the first shot in that particular war.) Yes, we were a lot like the Brady's. (Maybe the Brady's on acid?)

Growing up in Upstate New York, we spent a lot of summers in the Adirondack Mountains (where the phrase "bear with us" is actually a call for help), and we've managed to keep up a tradition of getting together there on or around the Fourth of July each year. For most of the past twenty-odd years we've spent the time "roughing" it on a small island on Fourth Lake. (Alger Island, if you care.) As we've gotten older and more numerous (we kids now have kids) the will to endure the elements just for a chance to rehash old arguments has waned for many of us. Also, as more and more of us reached the legal drinking age it became harder get a good fire started and even harder to keep from falling in it once we had. So it was that in 2006 we eschewed the arms of Mother Nature (and the charms of crapping in an outhouse) and rented a lodge on the channel between Fourth and Fifth lakes in Inlet, NY, thus beginning a new chapter in our shared summer history. (And no doubt a new file in the local sheriff's file cabinet.)

Of course, like every chapter before it, this chapter has its associated problems, hassles, dilemmas, and such. High on the list is the fact that as families go, we are legion, and so it is hard to find any single domicile capable of housing us all comfortably. ("Comfortably" here means with enough room to allow combatants to find neutral corners when someone needs to cool off after a row over whether or not "pantine" is a legitimate word in Scrabble.) Fortunately for us, the place we've found has beds for 22 individuals, which pretty much covers the subset of our tribe most likely to show up for the Annual Fourth of July Family Get Together and Hand-to-Hand Combat Training Extravaganza. Unfortunately, the draconian, anti-business residential codes in and around this particular Adirondack burg mandate that no more than 16 people actually stay there overnight.

That's right! We've got 22 bodies and we're renting a place that has beds for 22 bodies, but only 16 bodies can sleep there. This means that this year, as last year, a couple of people will have to sleep a few doors down at the venerable, "Fish-Smell Motel." (Okay, it's not actually called that, but it should be.) And who decides who stays where? Well, the long answer to that is that we will work out a reasonably equitable solution betwixt the family heads in such a way as to please everyone. The short answer is; I will.

See, everybody wants to stay at "the lodge." Remember the episode of The Brady Bunch where both Greg and Marcia stake a claim to the attic room as their own? Same thing, except the lodge is the attic and we are dealing with roughly 10 Greg's and 12 Marcia's (give or take a couple of each). Nobody wants to be the odd Brady out, but someone has to be. There are simply no other places that could hold all of us to be found in that area. (Certainly not on our collective Brady incomes.)

As in all things familial, the week we spend together is always worth the trouble, but the trouble is always part of the price we share for that week of memories. And that's another problem... with so many families coming together and so many variables to be considered, deciding who pays what at week's end this year will no doubt be a hotly contested issue (as it was in 2006). What variables? Well, for starters, not everyone can come and stay for the entire week. Should those people pay the same as those who stayed longer? Second, my family will take up four "slots" in the lodge (myself, my wife, my one kid, my other kid) while my sister's will take up three (her, her big kid, her smaller kid). Should she pay the same as we do for a week at the lodge for her family, or should she pay for three "slots" while we pay for four? Oh, and her husband will be coming down later in the week, but we don't know how many nights he plans to stay. Since the house will be at capacity at that point, does he get a room down the road away from his wife and kids, or do they all move down the road, or do we hide him in the attic?

However we work out these and other issues this year, I hope we can minimize the number of panties that get tied in a wad over them, because (and here's where we find our way back to my point about future realities) we have no idea how many more years we are going to be able to spend together. My mother and step-father, matriarch and patriarch of the gang that couldn't shout straight, aren't going to be here forever. I get that now. And "getting it," I've come to realize that they are the glue that binds the entire happy/loud/crazy/scattered/contentious lot of us together.

With all the difficulties inherent in gathering any significant number of us (along with a sufficient cache of alcohol, snack foods, and first aid supplies) in any one spot at any one time, I wonder whether we'll find the wherewithal to brave the highways, the vacation housing dilemmas, and the occasional unavoidable hostilities with any frequency in that inevitable future reality. How many years will it be before I'm looking back on my memories of so many summer visits to the Adirondacks and realizing that I have no further reason to go there? I mean, maybe my siblings and I will stay connected and keep committed to our shared traditions. Maybe we'll be making memories together as a group, in one form or another, for the rest of my life and beyond.

There's an emotion I cannot name. It comes in the form of sunlight reflected off ripples on the black water of a deep mountain lake, the bottom of which is layered with memories of raucous laughter and quiet contemplation—the sounds and silences of a family—that have drifted down and settled there to be stirred only by our eventual return or the errant angler's hook. I hope we can go back there forever, or in the alternative, that I never actually know when we've seen it for the last time.

If Balloon Animals Scare You, Skip This Blog...

2006-06-29T08:47:00.000-07:00

Originally published February 22, 2006

When I was a child, I spake as a child... only at the time I didn't use words like "spake." My vocabulary, like my life back then, was far simpler than it has become. What few words I knew, I used to tell the world honestly and incessantly who I was and what I thought. I was brutally, even painfully honest in a manner which children share only with parrots and the insane; I told anyone who would listen anything that came to mind and never stopped once to consider what was appropriate to the setting, how they might respond, or whether they cared. It was a lot like having Tourettes, but without the redeeming novelty of randomly blurted obscenities. Yes, just like Tourettes, only boring.

I shared my every waking thought with others because I did not know not to. They say that ignorance is bliss, but the reality is that ignorance is only blissful for a while, because at some point you will bring your ignorance of the reality that fire is hot into the presence of an actual fire, at which point ignorance becomes 2^nd and 3^rd degree burns. Likewise, your ignorance of the sexual history of your latest one-night stand may only be blissful until a few days later when you notice that it feels like you are urinating pure jalapeno juice. (If you're smart, later the same day you will lose your blissful ignorance of what a really big shot of penicillin feels like.)

And so it was inevitable that one day my belief that ignorance is bliss would run afoul of someone else's belief that silence is golden. I'm not certain which specific beating by which specific classmate at my elementary school alerted me to the possibility that there might be something valuable in keeping one or two thoughts to myself, but since I remember more than a few such beatings, I have to assume that it wasn't the first. Armed with such helpful input as my classmates were willing to offer, I learned over time to filter much of what went through my brain and to exert some control over which thoughts begat utterances. I also made very sure never to use words like "begat."

That doesn't mean I stopped thinking all the things I used to tell people, it just means I kept them to myself. Virtually everyone does this. It's a natural dichotomy of human existence that we simultaneously want people to know who we are while intentionally hiding information from them that is critical to an accurate understanding. (Another is that most people can yodel, but very few people will admit it.) Historically, some people have kept journals in order to record, apparently for themselves alone, the thoughts they've chosen not to share with the rest of us. It's almost as though the urge to reveal ourselves to others is so strong in some people that, having chosen to hide certain things from others, they decide to reveal it instead to themselves.

And then blogging came along and screwed the whole system up. Writing a blog feels exactly the same as writing in a journal. Of course, with a journal you'd have to invite complete strangers into your bedroom in order to share those thoughts with them, but with a blog you just post it and they will come. This means that more and more people are treating their innermost thoughts less and less as would adults and more and more like children. (Or parrots... or the insane...)

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, but... no... that's exactly what I'm saying. If we stop hiding who we are from each other and start "letting it all hang out," even if only in a blog, the impact on society could be devastating. I mean, what if everyone started sharing their deepest fears, and found out that, yes, strange as it may seem, lots of other people piss themselves when confronted with balloon animals? What if the two lonely Creed fans in the world were to discover each other? What if Letterman were to read Oprah's blog and discover that once you get past the difference in their height, gender, skin color, background, interests, and entire outlook on life they are actually a lot alike?

Recognizing what parts of our psyche to share with others and which bits are best kept to ourselves is an art form humankind has developed and honed for millennia; like music, it has both its sounds and its silences. Blogging is karaoke for the mind, and it's every bit as vile and dangerous as the musical variety. We're meant to keep some of our shit to ourselves, people. God gave us lips so we could zip them, or in the alternative, so that other people could fatten them for us if we didn't.

The rules are simple folks: think what you want, but keep most of it to yourself, or at some point you're going to take a beating. (Trust me. I know of what I spake.)

Edible Condoms, Decapitated Saints, and Thee

2006-06-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

Originally published Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Valentine's Day has come and gone and no doubt left many an otherwise blissful couple dealing with a heart-shaped assortment of unmet expectations. You bought her flowers and she wanted jewelry. She wore a fire-engine red lace teddy to bed and you had your "heart" set on black latex. You brought edible condoms and forgot she was a diabetic. And why wouldn't things go wrong? We're just arbitrarily demanding on one specific evening out of the entire year that all the men prepare for romance and all the women prepare for sex. How could that go wrong? (Hell, why not just perform a mass cross-gender brain swap?)

February 14th isn't about how much you love your significant other, it's about how well you can exactly meet his or her expectations of what it takes to prove you love him or her sufficiently. And that's a tough nut to crack (no pun intended), because no matter what you may think you know, the reality is that you probably haven't got a clue what he or she really wants.

As far as Valentine's gifts go, more is usually better, but there are exceptions. Love isn't poker*; two dozen roses will usually beat one dozen roses, UNLESS the one dozen roses were delivered in a gold-leaf trimmed box with a red ribbon by some kid wearing a name tag, and the two dozen were hand delivered by you in a plastic grocery bag with the little adhesive paper price sticker still attached.

While there's some debate about who Saint Valentine actually was, it appears he met a pretty gruesome death, being brutally beaten and then decapitated on the orders of the Roman Emperor, Claudius II. As I think about Valentine's Day, I can't help wondering whether the two were dating. I bet St. V. left the tag on the flowers.

*Don't even go there.

You May Prefer Death...

2006-06-27T10:11:00.000-07:00

Originally published Friday, May 19, 2006

They say that, to the brain, chocolate feels almost exactly like love. Of course, chocolate is a lot harder to get off your sheets...

I was just reading a friend's blog wherein she lays out, in rather painful detail, a recent dating train wreck. (Dont worry folks; she was thrown clear before the engine jumped the rail.) Her missive got me thinking about my old dating days; that special time in my life when I had no idea what I wanted and no idea how to get it, when "love" was just an alternate spelling for "lust," when "the blues" was more than a musical style; it was also my pet-name for my man-bits.

While I'm sure it's hard to imagine it today, during the heyday of my daring and misspent youth the female equation was for me a mountain too imposing and too high. I spent the better portion of my formative years fumbling for purchase on anything and everything that batted an eyelash within striking distance. (Yes, they batted, and I struck out.) To this day I'm not sure whether the problem was that I was socially inept, or that I was inept socially.

Dont believe what they tell you; it's desperation that's blind, not love. I couldn't tell the difference between a woman who found me entertaining and a woman who was entertaining thoughts of suicide as a humane way of sparing us both further embarrassment at the hands of my unschooled and unskilled advances. Seriously, the only way I knew to be sure a woman was interested in me was to open my eyes while we were kissing to see if she was grimacing or actually enjoying the experience. Self-confidence was for sissies! Dating only means something if it scares the shit out of you, and for me it was a trial by desire.

Yes, the single life was a real blast! Throughout it all, I held tight to the conviction that there must be something more, something better in life if only I could find it. Fast forward a bit and I stumbled headlong into married life, which cured me of that conviction. (It's critical that I mention here that the above refers to my FIRST marriage to she-who-shall-not-be-named; critical both for clarity and because I hope to live past the point where my sweet, wonderful, loving wife of 10 years who happens to know Kung Fu reads this.)

But back to dating... There is nothing wrong with the concept in and of itself; you cast a net around you and see what fails to claw its way clear before you pull the net in. Men like to think they are the ones casting the nets, but thats just because we're genetically wired for hunting and gathering. No, in my experience it is the woman who ensnares the man; and if she likes you well enough she may decide to keep you for a while... usually in a box in her basement or in her walk-in closet if you behave. (Your dating experiences may vary somewhat from mine.)

In the end, dating eventually leads either to marriage or to death. This second (and final) time around, I am quite happy with the marriage alternative. Sure, some will argue that death is preferable, and that's their call, but for me married life has definite advantages that go far beyond simply not decomposing in a box underground. For starters, youre not decomposing in a box underground. Also, there's a certain Zen-ness to embracing the knowledge that you will never, ever, win another argument.

There are those who call me "Oil Spot"

2006-06-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

Email spammers have somehow learned what specific phrases to employ in the subject line of their emails in order to get me interested; phrases they somehow know will speak to me in a personal and powerful way. Their messages arrive in my inbox bearing subject lines populated with provocative phrases such as "Hi, oil spot," "Shook up accomplish," and "them taken."* (That last one probably reels in a lot of suckers. I know when I read "them taken," I can't help but wonder what was taken, or whom, and where were they taken to, or what was taken from them? The need to unravel mysteries like these is something I suspect we all share.)

Of course, I'm being facetious. These weasels... er, people, seem to have gotten the idea that we can be moved--either to action or towards the formation of an opinion--by simply throwing together strings of random words. (Maybe they've been paying attention to the speeches of the latest crop of politicians.)

I'm hardly a novice where computers are concerned, so I think I have a fairly good idea of how they get their hands on my email address; no mystery there. What puzzles me is how they know I'm having problems getting and maintaining an erection. Personal privacy experts tell me that I should be concerned at such intrusions into my personal information, and I am, though in my case I'm more concerned with the types of information these people are accessing as opposed to the fact that they can access it at all.

You see, the way I figure it is if the spammers actually got their hands on the right information at the appropriate time and emailed us offers we really, truly needed, why we'd have a national holiday in their honor. "Spammers Day" would fall on September 29th every year, because that's my birthday and I'm the one who thought of it. We'd all grill out in the Indian summer heat (sorry, "Native American" summer heat) and we'd cook nothing but tuna steaks. (I know you were expecting me to write "Spam(TM)," but I hate that stuff and it's my holiday.) We'd feast on grilled yellow fin, and sing the praises of those brave men and women who gave up nothing (that I can think of) but who provided us such valuable information, for free, via email, over the previous year.

Of course, it would have to be really useful information to warrant such a hullabaloo, but that's the point I'm getting at (slowly, true, but I'm getting there). Instead of refinancing offers, drug offers, and such; how about emailing us with information on where to get the best price on the Bedazzler(TM) or tips on which sores to worry about. You know... stuff we can all really use.

* Actual email subject lines from actual emails in my actual inbox today. Actually!

La-la-la-la ... I'm not listening...

2006-06-16T16:10:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I don't drink anymore is that, in my experience, alcohol has significantly lower standards than I for a whole slew of things like what stuff is okay to eat, which places are good to lie down and take a little nap, or where to plant my flag. (Now, I don't want to brag, but back in the day I took more than my share of naps!) Another reason I gave up alcohol is that when I drank I used to lose things; things like friends and consciousness.

Once, while at a late night beach party in Western Australia, I got into a confrontation with a guy who seemed pissed off that I wanted to borrow his bottle opener. (In the early eighties, Australia was only just getting around to adopting color TV; technological breakthroughs like the screw-top beer were still years away.) When I pressed Mr. Bottle-opener-guy for an explanation for his open hostility, he informed me that he was still angry about the last fistfight we'd had. This struck me as odd, since I barely knew the guy and certainly had no recollection of mixing it up with him. "When was that?" I slurred. "About an hour ago!" was his reply.

I probably should have taken a moment right then to consider the deeper ramifications of the knowledge that I had been in a fight only an hour earlier and had no memory of it whatsoever. I should have taken a step back and said, "Whoa, I clearly have some stuff to sort out. Sorry to have troubled you." I should have; but, being drunk, I did not. Instead, I responded that he and I probably got into a fight in the first place because he was such a dick about letting people use his fucking bottle opener, at which point we started throwing punches again*.

But that's not what I wanted to share with you all today. I only mention it because when I look back now I can see that my body had been trying to tell me that booze and I simply weren't working out and that I ought to consider letting alcohol see other people. I guess when you're in the middle of something like that, it can be hard to see the vomit on the wall. I bring it up, because my body is trying to get my attention right now. It's been doing so for a while, but I realize that I've been doing my best to ignore it. When I make an effort to tune into it, I can just hear it screaming at the top of its lungs, "YOU'RE IN YOUR FORTIES! SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"

"But I don't want to slow down!" whines my inner teenager, giving my body the su-fi**, trying to be both defiant and simultaneously hip, and pretty much failing at both.

I realized this at the emergency room the other night, where I received a handful of Percocet, a slew of stitches, and an update from my wife on how many times she's taken me to the emergency room since we met. (I'm averaging a visit every two years, which doesn't seem so bad to me, though I suspect it's a bit above the national average. Besides, one more punch on my card and the next visit is free.)

Yes, at 40-something I realize that my adolescent brain is writing checks my body can't cash, but I just don't care. I can just about guarantee that I'd never see the inside of an emergency room again if I just refused to leave my couch, but then I'd miss a lot more than a few stitches or class 4 shoulder separations. That latter, by the way, is one mountain of gasp-for-breath pain I highly suggest you avoid. In fact, I'd give up just about anything to ensure that I never, ever, hurt like that again. Anything except going out there and attacking things like I'm still fourteen. (Because the thing is, deep down inside--starting about a millimeter beneath the skin--I still am.)

*(What's fascinating to me is that I didn't remember the first fight right after it happened, but that I remember the rest of the evening in such detail almost 20 years hence. Oh the vagaries of the human mind... especially when pickled.)
**(Super-finger. Click here if you don't know what it is, and then stop giving people that lame-ass old-school finger! Give 'em the su-fi!)

Short, Retarded Roommates I Love

2006-06-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

Originally published Monday, February 20, 2006

I love my kids. There's nothing more immutable or more true in the universe. I'd give up TV for them. (Well, maybe not Battlestar, but everything else for sure.) That written, I've come to realize that for all intents and purposes kids are just roommates who don't care about your stuff. (Or simply "roommates" for short.) That's it... roommates who don't care about societal norms or any of the usual niceties that make living with someone bearable. Oh, and they're retarded.

Seriously! I love my kids more than most people love their Tivo, but along with being wonderful and precious and cuter than a macaroni-art scene of Santa riding a flying unicorn over a field of smiling daisies, they are mental. Pick any ten minute period within the last week and imagine for a moment that your kids aren't kids at all, but are in fact full-grown adult roommates, and replay the scene in your head and you'll see what I mean. Here, let me...

The other day I was working from home, typing away furiously on my laptop, and while I was trying to work, my roommates were taking turns jumping off the couch and screaming "Wheeeeeee!" Then one of my roommates pulled a throw blanket over his head and said "You can't find me" about 37 times until the other roommate pulled the blanket off, at which point the younger roommate collapsed into tears and had to be given a lollypop to get him to calm down. Somewhere during all of this the younger of my two roommates shit his pants, which event he announced proudly by saying, "I have poopy!" with the same entusiasm you'd use to announce you found a 20 on the ground.

See what I mean? At 2 and 6 it all seems perfectly normal, but at 32 and 36 they'd be mental defects. Or celebrities. Yeah, that's actually a much nicer analogy. Having kids is like living with celebrities.