| FOR SALE |
[Nov. 19th, 2010|07:30 am] |
Due to the heavy advertising on LIVE JOURNAL, I have decided after 4 years to move my BLOG. If it does not work out I might be back here but for know please go to:
http://mrdvmp.wordpress.com/
Thank you Live Journalers... hope to see you at the new digs. |
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| CLIQUE |
[Nov. 12th, 2010|12:57 am] |
I’m not sure of the exact date back in High School that I met my friend Allyson, but I do know that she has yet to forgiven me for telling her that day that she had excellent hips for ‘birthing’. Although I still manage to shove my foot deep into my mouth on a frequent basis, I have gained enough insight into the female psyche to understand why that was a really bad thing to say and should never be uttered again. At the time I meant it as ironic humor because she was, and still is, rather slim. But, yeah… as all the females reading this are shaking their heads and saying aloud “Dan, Dan, Dan…” I will flat out say yes, although memorable, it was not the wisest opening line and certainly not one that you would expect to lead to a three-decade friendship.
I recall really getting to know Ally while crammed in our friend Jamie’s VW Beatle. There were more kids in our little clique then there were seats in that car, but we all frequently piled in for lifts home after school or quick drives to the Burger King drive-thru during our short High School lunch breaks. We would shove down our food racing back to campus and then toss our lunch trash in another kid’s car. Why Jeff Jacobs never locked his doors after weeks and weeks of his auto being used as a garbage receptacle I will never understand, but he was a bit of a smart ass and for some reason we found great humor in this long running prank.
It’s hard to believe that was over thirty years ago. The world is so different now and we are now the people telling kids the stories about a foreign time way back when phones with dials had cords attached to the wall, the only movie you watched in your house was when one of the six TV stations chose to show one and the only way to check a fact was to look in a book. My little circle of friends and I were young back then. We were all full of hopes and dreams. The brashness of youth still burned in us but we all felt a little more grown up then some of the other kids. I think it’s because we were already lugging around some heavy baggage.
Two of my friends both had to deal with the death of one or both of their parents. Another lived through quite a bit of parental divorce (we used to joke when we first met that he would have to remember the names of all my siblings and I would have to remember the names of all his parents). Someone else had a bucket of cultural issues that soon led to their family breaking up too. I was dealing with my recent move from living with five older siblings in one of those busy ‘center of the neighborhood’ houses up in New York to a tiny temporary Miami condo with only my mid-life crisis Dad and my Mom who was dealing with the recent death of my Grandmother. We were all a little broken, I guess, but we sure knew how to laugh. And we knew how to take care of each other.
I recall a surprise birthday party for me in a rented apartment recreation room. After blowing out the candles on my large chocolate beer mug shaped cake, we realized that there was no serving knife so I suggested everyone just take a handful. Julie flicked a little frosting onto Mike’s nose and then things rapidly went downhill from there. When the massive cake fight finally ended there were globs and smears all over the kids as well as the walls, carpet and furniture. Madeline’s younger sister, who was to be driven home to her strict parents shortly, was thrown in the pool along with several other cake-covered guests. My circle of friends jumped into action. Jamie led the charge in restoring Mad’s sister rapidly into a presentable to parents form and everyone else grabbed towels and sponges to amazingly return the room into good enough shape to get the deposit back.
At different points in the many years since we all met, I have personally done crappy things to each of these people. Dumb kids learning about life do stuff that they later regret. Luckily these folks love me for the human I am, as I do them, and everything has always been forgiven. I am lucky to still have most of these people in my life. Yet, just like all those years ago, we are all still a little broken.
Jamie passed away almost a decade ago due to illnesses aggravated by self-abuse. The demons she had run from her whole life caught up with her but up to the end she never stopped being that hero that would do anything for you. The rest of us all seem to have some gaping hole in our life causing a roadblock from that idealistic happiness we dreamed of. Its like one has an amazing career but a lonely personal life, one has an amazing family but their work is in negative flux. And me… well, I had this hole that I wished I was doing something more creative and for some crazy reason writing this blog seems to help. I still have hopes and dreams along with a bit of brashness; I hope when I grow up I don’t lose that.
AT THE DADE COUNTY YOUTH FAIR (1980?)
AT MY WEDDING (2002) |
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| MAN VS. NATURE |
[Nov. 5th, 2010|08:45 am] |
Attention readers… if you work for the Army Corp Of Engineers, the Texas Bureau of Parks and Wildlife or any land conservation group, either stop reading immediately or rest comfortably knowing that all the crazy stuff I write about could never happen to one person so obviously it must all be fiction… right?
Sheshhhhh….
O.K. I think they are gone… hee hee hee. I think they believed that crap. Okay? here goes…
Man Vs. Nature… One on One… Mano y Mama N.
Sweating under my hoodie, I repeatedly drove the reinforced tip of my gleaming new heavy gauge steel and titanium double reinforced ‘Jackson Titanium Xtr’ fiberglass long handle round-point shovel into the ground. Hack after hack*, gouge after gouge, with all my might I attacked the Earth in an attempt to get her to release to me what I brazenly was trying to steal from her.
Thwack, chop, crunch, rip…I imagined the words flashing in front of a cheesy background in between my many strokes, like during the fight scenes on the original 1960s Batman TV show. I dug and dug and dug. And when I thought I could dig no more, when giving up seemed like the only option, I stopped, took a deep breath, raised the shovel into the air till the sun caught the shiny gray double reinforced steel and titanium blade, and like a possessed man following the will of God on his singular quest like Abraham lovingly sacrificing his son or Noah blindly building an ark, I drove it into the ground yet again. I dug and dug and dug and… well… you get the picture.
At this point I think I should mention yet again, that I was born and raised a city boy. I have a special relationship with Mother Nature based on mutual discomfort. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have been dealing with Mama N slapping me around a bit in my back yard where I seem to be having an issue growing trees and bushes. My wife keeps doing research as to what looks pretty and should grow in our yard, yet we have lost several trees and a big mess of bushes that we have planted. Now I am no horticulturist but I know when all the leaves and bark fall off a tree while the branches become dried out brittle and they show no signs of new growth for a year or so, there is a very good chance its not doing the living thing anymore.
About 10 feet from the hole where my most recent tree met its demise is a four-foot high wrought iron fence that separates my yard from the thick over grown very green and lush Army Corp of Engineer land behind my property. On the other side of that fence, everything seems to grow like crazy. On my side, rapid death. Is Mother Nature sending me a sign that she is pissed about my house encroaching on her turf. Should I consider moving back to a mid-city apartment?
Tired of hauling way too big of trees home hanging way out of my Mini Cooper Convertible, I declared that the obvious only solution was to illegally dig one up in the forest behind my property. Mind you, I have never tried to transplant a tree before. But crazy facts like that should never get in the way of a man with a vision.
A couple of weeks ago I gave it a shot. I clumsily climbed the fence and dodging poison ivy, mosquitoes and spiders (all of which I have unsuccessfully avoided in a my other rare visits to the wild back there) wondered around in search of a tree. I found a beauty but in no time at all as I attempted to dig the hole around it, my shovel broke under the weight of the gloppy dense Texas mud/soil in this area.
It took a couple of weeks to get up the drive to return. Armed with my new shovel, I ventured back into the woods. I pushed through thickets and climbed under branches aimlessly till I found a great tree. I dug a bit but it very quickly became obvious that it was too big. I moved on and eventually found a little guy in a clearing resembling Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. Not wanting Mother Nature to win, I started digging out my glorified twig but I kept tearing its tentacle-like roots.
My hole started out pretty far from the tree’s trunk, but it somehow kept shrinking. Then the damn thing would not come out of the hole. I might not be a savvy woodsman but I was not going to let this thing beat me. I now had several hours invested in this folly. I became possessed. In between my digging I kept trying to get the tree out of the ground. I was determined not to let this tree beat me. I pushed it, pulled it, tugged it, twisted it, turned it and basically mangled it until all I ended up with a scrawny five-foot practically leaf-less pole with little or no root ball.
Disoriented from my searching and digging, I worked my way back to the house holding the tree and shovel in front of me to protect my face from branches and spider webs. With little fanfare I tossed the thing into the hole in my back yard with about as much care as a drunk on a bender uses when throwing a beer bottle out a car window. I won the battle but I am pretty sure Mama N will win the war. Maybe I should look into a rock garden?
* No Ellen I’m not talking about your family in a parade!
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| A HAIR RAISING EVENT |
[Oct. 29th, 2010|07:54 am] |
Yesterday I discovered a photo of myself online taken a couple of months ago at the Dallas launch party for the 2011 Porsche Cayenne. No, I was not there shopping for a $70,000 sporty SUV. The likelihood of me buying that car is less then the chance I’ll get a transgender operation and legally change my name to Daneilla - Goddess Of The Papaya Monkeys. I was there stretching my puny knowledge of cars with the other guests because at the last minute I found out I needed to work a table at the event as an ambassador from my company. At the party I did my best at making ‘under the hood’ small talk with all the gear heads but at times I felt as out of place as Daneilla - Goddess Of The Papaya Monkeys at a Sarah Palin family values rally.
The picture is taken from the side as I chatted with a fellow guest about a rare watch made out of magnesium. I am not sure why a watch would need to be made out of magnesium or who would want a watch made out of magnesium but at least I know more about the magnesium watch made by Italian designer Momo then about Porsche engine aspirations and torque. In the small-talk world of the cocktail party universe, I have learned its best to stick with what you know.
I looked at the picture for a while. It’s always weird to see yourself from a different angle then the usual straight on mirror view. Once I managed to finally look past my messy poofed up slightly untucked shirt straining itself to cover up my middle-aged paunch, I noticed my shaved head. I don’t often see it from the side, especially when I am in what my wife calls ‘serious Work Dan’ mode (I wonder how different serious work Daneilla – Goddess Of The Papaya Monkeys’ expression would be?).
Although my Dad is in his eighties, he still has a full head of hair. Mine started thinning in college and by my mid-twenties I was working on the start of a nice bald spot. I first noticed it while bending forward in front of a three-way mirror to adjust the leg cuff on a suit I was being fitted for. I called several friends franticly to announce this discovery but apparently I was the last to know.
A couple of years later I went to South Beach in Miami for a few days like I had many times before. Knowing the Florida sun very well, I slathered myself in suntan lotion before hitting the beach but later that night I had an odd headache. Eventually I realized it was not an inside the head ache, it was an outside the head ache. My hair had thinned just enough during the winter that I now could get a sunburn on my noggin.
When the early prescription version of Rogaine, the magic hair growing juice, first came out in the late 1980s, a buddy of mine said he would try it if I did too. We visited our doctors and bought our expensive little bottles of miracle grow liquid at the pharmacy. To effectively work you had to squirt the glop on your head twice a day, massage it around and follow a list of other dos and don’ts. After a few weeks of this embarrassing silliness I actually started to grow the slightest little peach fuzz in the noticeable receding parts of my ever-expanding forehead. The problem was I felt incredibly silly and vain doing all that just to grow some dumb hair. At that point I decided I was done worrying about my lack of skull coving.
About five years ago my wife and I flew up to Vancouver for a weeklong Alaska cruise. In the hotel room the night before the trip I announced I was going to shave my head. You never know how scary your skull is going to look so I figured if it was bumpy like an ugli fruit, wrinkled up like a shar-pei or dented like a junkyard car, I could have a weeks worth of grow-back hair before re-entering the real world. My wife then proceeded to shave racing stripes on my head before we took the whole mess off. I have been a baldie ever since, although shaving your head for the first time in the icy Alaska cold turned out not to be my most well thought out move.
I think at this point everyone is used to my bare head but it still catches me off guard when I see it from the side like in that photograph. That’s a lot of naked skull but I would rather spend my morning prep time shaving my head then sculpting a few wispy strands in the middle of my monk’s wreath into a comb-over or twisty swirl. Of course if I become Daneilla - Goddess Of The Papaya Monkeys, I will surely have to grow it out again.
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| MADELINE AND TREES |
[Oct. 22nd, 2010|07:54 am] |
She might be a ‘social media’ wizard now, but I have known my friend Madeline since my first year of High School. Nicknamed Saint Madeline when I met her, she was a seemingly straight-laced book-wormish sort of girl with slight Latino features and solid 14K gold glasses that contrasted with her long black hair. She usually wore earthy flowing Indian-ish style blouses and often gushed about her family’s travels and the horses they raised on their property.
Advised by more then one person (including one of our teachers) that hanging out with me might lead to her downfall, I knew she did not need me to shove her down that slippery slope. Being one of those people that ‘got it’, she was more then capable of wandering down that path without me. The real amazing thing was that for the first time in my life this geeky four-eyed, braces wearing Dork-a-saurus Rex somehow for the briefest magic moment managed to attain ‘bad boy’ status.
The first night I spent time with Mad we skipped the movie (Young Frankenstein) that we told her folks we were to attend and ended up talking for a couple of hours in Lums, a local cheesy diner. Even though we were both only 16, ‘bad boy Dan’ looked older then his age with his not quite filled in mustache, so we consumed that famous adult combination beloved by ‘bad boys’ all over consisting of several glasses of nasty house blush wine and a split chocolate éclair.
Prophetically enough, later in the evening a psychologist in the next booth admitted to eavesdropping on our conversation about the universe, life, show chickens, The Beatles, the Teaton Mountain Stomp (and everything in between) and, although claiming to be simply amused, felt the need to give us a couple of his business cards in case we needed him. As Mad’s and my friendship has meandered and morphed over the last 30 years, I think we both should have called him a few times.
During the next two years I spent a lot of time hanging out at Maddie’s impressive house. The large property had a screened in pool and a huge yard with many large fruit trees. Growing trees in tropical Miami is pretty easy, just lay a few plant clippings in, on or near the soil and in two weeks you will have a lush forest on your hands. That said, her Mom did a great job keeping up with the foliage. Currently living in a condo, I did not have a lawn, but I recall telling countless stories about the front yard of my old house in New York City.
To this day I still hate to rake. My older siblings always had the glamorous lawn jobs like mowing or trimming the hedges. All Danny, the baby of the family, was allowed to do was rake. Once it finally got to be my day in the sun and I was old enough to be the mow-er and the clip-er, everyone else was gone and I was still stuck with the raking.
Madeline listened to me tell this tale of woe countless times until years later when she finally visited my old New York neighborhood. She stood dumbfounded in front of the two tiny swatches of grass wedged between the sidewalk and my old house. “This is the lawn you complained about mowing?!?” she cried out incredulously. I never spoke of my childhood lawn maintenance hardships around her again.
Although not as big as Madeline’s old house’s yard, my current lawn is several dozen times bigger then the one at my New York house. The other day I was thinking about Maddie’s old place and how easy things grew in Miami. I was digging up the forth tree in two years that my backyard has killed. Our soil has the consistency of half dry cement and about has about as many nutrients as the water around the Deepwater Horizon Oil rig.
My wife and I have been a couple for over ten years now and I am still trying to prove to her that my thumbs are green enough to get something to actually grow back there. I got it in my head that the trees we have been dragging home from Lowes and Home Depot sticking several feet out of my Mini Cooper’s convertible roof on the ride, just will not root in the slop under our grass. So the other day with shovel in hand I climbed our back fence into the densely thick Army Corp of Engineer open land back there in search of something that obviously will grow in our area.
I now have several scratches on my arms, a bunch of bug bites, a hole in my yard where the last dead tree stood and two broken shovels. Madeline knows a lot about growing stuff. Maybe I’ll wait till she comes to town to visit my wife and I and I’ll let her figure out what to will grow back there. I’m sure she would help, as long as I do not bring up my New York yard.
THE NEW YORK HOUSE |
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| FORGET THE ALAMO, REMEMBER THE ASPARAGUS |
[Oct. 15th, 2010|11:26 pm] |
I love asparagus and not just because the spears are fun to throw or that they look like creepy armless aliens or even that I’m one of those people whose urine smells funny after eating it (although that is a kinda’ cool fringe benefit). No, I just like the taste of the stuff (asparagus, not urine). I don’t have it much because its not my wife’s favorite so on the rare occasion these days that I do, I am always pleasantly reminded how tasty those funny looking green spears are.
The other day I noticed we had some asparagus stalks in the fridge that were hovering dangerously close to the ‘cease to be food’ point. Since I was a little kid I can recall my Mother telling me to eat some particular item from the refrigerator now or otherwise she was “going to just throw it away”. I still find humor in the concept that the difference between something being food or garbage hinged on me saying I would eat it right then.
When I noticed the unused asparagus leftover from a surprise dinner my wife made (even though she hates the stuff), I thought it might be nice to cook them a little different then usual, so I walked into the front room to start digging through our mighty shelf of cookbooks. As is typical, I never found a new recipe because walking into that room frequently causes numerous distractions. If I don’t put my head down and stick to the task at hand, I can be lost in our library/media room for hours.
Two of the walls are lined with shelves full of books, records, CDs and DVDs. There is another set of smaller floor to ceiling shelves in the opposite corner full of goofy toys that we have collected over the years. There is so much to look at that it takes awhile to notice one of the last vestiges of my groovy kitch-tastic bachelor-pad days lurking in the corner. In the one room my wife will tolerate it, atop the stereo cabinet recessed in the far corner is my life-size bust of Elvis lamp wearing a bright red fez.
Now I am at the age where it is not uncommon for me to walk into a room and completely forget why I am there. I’ve learned that the smartest thing to do at that point is to immediately double back to where I came from and hope for something to trigger the memory. Only bad comes from standing there all frustrated trying to figure out what the original goal was. Imagine my inner voice patter sounding something like this: ‘ Now why did I come into the kitchen, hmmm, well since I am here I can get some Fresca to drink since my throat feels very dry and scratchy… hmmm now what did I come in here for? … while I’m trying to remember maybe I should spray the air with Lysol since it smells like burnt food… damn, well I can’t remember... Wow, I did not notice all this ashy colored dust on the counter tops, let me just wipe those down and I’m sure I’ll think of why I came in here… crap, I don’t recall, I’ll just turn down the thermostat since it is hot and I’ll retrace my steps… Ah, that’s right… the sofa is on fire… I was going into the kitchen to get the fire extinguisher.’
When I walked into the front room to thumb through the cookbooks, I quickly noticed a stack of old pictures waiting to be put back in the photo albums. I glanced at the familiar images and stopped at an old stained picture from 1973 that I took of my Mom and Sister when I was about 10. They are in our New York City house’s dining room sticking their tongues out at me. I started looking at our old small kitchen in the background and was flooded with memories of things I had long forgotten. The yellow rotary telephone on the wall, the protruding screws on the metal edging that held down the fifties patterned laminate counter tops, the tinny AM black radio on top of the fridge, the metal window blinds my Mom would soak in a bathtub full of bleach to clean off the City grit…
I looked up from the photograph and thought ‘now wait a minute… why did I walk in here. I hope the sofas not on fire!
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| HOARDERS, HOREMONES & HOOTERS |
[Oct. 7th, 2010|12:41 am] |
Sometimes I have pack-rat tendencies. My wife does too. Don’t worry, our house is nothing like an episode of Hoarders but we do have a rather scary full storeroom. For the first 38 years of my life I could brag that everything I own could fit into a car pulling the smallest U-Haul attachable trailer (and several times it did). Of course since most of it was books and records it was a rather heavy load but I could cram it in there. That has dramatically changed since I settled down and got married.
As I learned when we moved into our current house a few years ago, I now own (or co-own) enough furniture, decorations and general stuff to fill a huge full size moving van. We have a lot of stuff on display but a lot of our precious junk is in the extra bedroom we refer to as the storeroom. Buried within the massive floor to ceiling stacks are three old boxes of mine containing junk from my youth that I just can’t seem to part with.
One box is filled with plastic cups from stadiums all over the country. The last time I thought about throwing them away, I rationalized keeping all the cups because the whole box must weigh less then three pounds. So what’s the harm in saving them? They take up virtually no space at all, from a weight standpoint.
Another box is filled with old papers. Back in High School I wrote a bunch of scripts; some were performed a lot were not. I also wrote a lot of comedic (that IS a matter of perspective) bits for between the acts of various talent shows. I was proud of them at the time but now I find most of that stuff very cringe-worthy.
By my senior year when we were assigned to perform a scene for my theatre class, as a way of rebelling against the frequent repetitive blandness of others, I secretly wrote my own scripts and attributed them to pseudonyms consisting of the letters of my name rearranged. Wendle Blaney wrote and old English comedy and Yannd Lubwel wrote a stark modern one act. My teacher, Mrs. Lowery, surely knew but rarely said more then a raised eye-browed “where did you find that one”. I still have all that stuff and really have no desire to reread it, yet I cannot bring myself to throw it away.
The third box is full of various odd memories: cut up baseball cards with drawings on them from Junior High, a ruler from my Grandmother’s house (the only thing of hers I asked for after she died back in the late 1970s), a reel to reel tape of me reciting The Three Bears when I was three years old that I have no way of playing … Last time I peeked in the box I saw Frumpie, a small green stuffed frog that triggers a huge memory from the life story of Lil’ Dan that very few people know.
Back in Ninth grade my buddy Mike and I used to kid around with each other making fun of the other kids (a practice we still very much do to this day). We were not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings so our jokes were rarely shared with our victims, but we used to crack each other up constantly at the expense of others. Now at that delicate age, a flat chested girl that frequently wears a t-shirt that reads ‘Peaches’ across the chest, must surely not be surprised to find out that a couple of immature adolescent boys might refer to her as ‘Raisins’ (sadly Mike and I still bring that up and still laugh at it). We created just as rude of nicknames for a lot of people, but of course never shared them with anyone but each other.
Towards the end of Junior High a different girl earned the name Bullet Bob from us due to her really unflattering short haircut that shaped her head like a big oversized blond bullet. A few months later I ended up sitting next to Bullet Bob in English. To a dorky, geeky hormone raging young early teen boy, a minor detail like the fact that you used to refer to a girl as Bullet Bob is no reason not to accept an offer of a date from her. Actually it was not so much a date as hanging out with her while she baby-sat a short walk from my home. It also helped that her hair was starting to grow out.
We had fun but I kept thinking how she would hate me if she knew what I used to call her and how much Mike was going to make fun of me for hanging out with Bullet Bob, especially when I admit to kissing her. A few days later I ended up at her house. We sat in her room and she showed me her family photo albums. I acted interested but being a very young teenage boy I really was just buying time till the kissing part started again (actually a lot of guys my current age would still do that part).
Eventually I started kissing her again and then things went a little farther. Not all the way around the bases but much much farther then I had ever been before. A man’s first expedition around the female anatomy can be a rather exciting. Later I remember walking home about six inches off the ground with a huge grin that would not have left my face if I fell into a 20 foot deep pit full of bear traps. The next day at school she gave me Frumpie the stuffed frog.
Having very little in common we did not last too much longer but amazingly enough I still have the frog. I have almost tossed Frumpie out dozens of different times but I still hold onto it because on the rare occasions when I see it, I am reminded of an innocence of youth, the excitement of firsts, the true unfettered sense of glee and the very important lesson that even if a girl has a funny haircut and an insulting nickname her breasts can still be really fun to play with.
FRUMPIE THE FROG...AN APTLY NAMED GIFT
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AFTER READING 'ARSNIC AND OLD LACE', I SAID ANYONE CAN WRITE AN OLD ENGLISH COMEDY... SO I DID. HERE ARE THE FIRST 4 PAGES OF WENDLE BLANY'S 'GOOD MORNING YESTERDAY, WHERE'S TOMORROW' FROM 1980.
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| AN A-FAIR TO REMEMBER |
[Oct. 1st, 2010|10:48 pm] |
I am not a big fan of diets. Besides the fact that diets keep me away from some of life’s greatest experiences (bacon, beer and burgers), they also always seem doomed to fail for someone like me that rapidly gets bored with practicing self-discipline. So for the past few decades whenever the number on my scale starts creeping over the sum of the total weight of an average inner-city kindergarten class including the teacher, I start to ‘adjust my lifestyle’. A few months of healthy eating and a more intense exercise schedule usually will shove me to the better side of the yoyo.
Because my ‘lifestyle adjustments’ (shhhhh don’t tell me they are really just diets) have obviously never been permanent, I end up having to start over again every few years, months or weeks depending on how rapidly my slothism ways creep back into my day-to-day existence. I lost a decent amount of weight earlier this year but, like a really intelligent dog sitting on your front steps after being left on the side of the road in the deep woods two states away a week earlier, a significant amount of heft has incredibly managed to find its way back to it’s home on my gut. Now I am faced with needing to make another ‘lifestyle adjustment’ (stop saying diet or you’ll doom me to failure and I will blame you!) before I end up back where I started. The need to make this change became very obvious after this past Sunday’s activities.
My wife and I decided to visit the Texas State Fair. One of the icons of this 116 year old fair is Big Tex, a giant 52 foot talking and waving cowboy that towers over visitors near the main entrance. Big Tex might be beloved to those that grew up seeing him every year, but to me he is a bit creepy with his ill-fitting clothes that look like they are strapped to his body as a shriveled 90 year-old man would look at a Luby’s Cafeteria wearing a 30 year-old polyester plaid golfing outfit, his doughy eyes that look like he hit the hookah to hard last night and his odd booming voice that sounds reminiscent of a slow back woods West Kansas chicken farmer with a third grade education trying to sound out the words to a pre-written public service announcement in front a church rec-hall gathering.
(Go to this page to see Big Tex and click the link on the middle of the lift side of the page to hear his creeeeeeeeepy voice. It reminds me of that dim-witted grown-up looking kid that sat in the back of the 4th grade classroom selling ciggerettes to the other degenerates. http://www.bigtex.com/sft/ )
The Texas State Fair is huge and besides the usual Midway of rides and chance games, it also features an extensive new car show, numerous craft and local food booths, live concerts, farm animal exhibits and much more. There is even a Broadway traveling play and two college football games played right on the grounds but lately the biggest hype each year deals with what bizarre fried foods are available at the scary concession booths. Sadly, it really is the most talked about part of the fair. If you can throw batter on it and toss it into a vat of boiling oil, they serve it and people can’t wait to try it.
My wife and I avoided some of the foods that just sounded bad or silly like fried guacamole, fried frozen margaritas, fried pop tarts and a ried club sandwich. A few years ago we tried the fried Snickers Bar so we avoided most of the candy ones. Surprising most of my friends, I also passed on the fried beer (little pretzel-like batter ravioli-esque pillows of dark beer) because it just seemed too wrong. Fear not though, we clogged our arteries sampling several of the ubber fattening fried freaky foods.
We kicked things off with this years ‘best fried food’ award winner, fried Frito Pie which tasted ok if you like chili and salty corn chips but if it was not in a battered nugget form you would not be able to tell it was deep fried. We then tried last year’s top prizewinner, fried butter. Yes, it is as ridiculous as it sounds. Next up was ‘The Elvis’, as it was called by the cashier to the fry chief, a fried peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwich which was oddly tasty if you could get your brain to not think abut what it was consuming.
The weakest one we tried was the Texas Fried Caviar, which was really just fried black eyed peas coated in an Old Bay laced batter. They tasted like overly salty corn nuts. Of course we also split a Fletcher’s Corn Dog, since they were the creator of that delicacy and it just is not a fair if you do not have a funnel cake. Thankfully the fair grounds are huge so we walked off a little of our gastronomic gluttonies but if there was any doubt that I needed to make a ‘lifestyle adjustment’, our little fried food fest made things abundantly clear.
FRIED FAIR FOOD
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| PROOF OF MIRACLES |
[Sep. 24th, 2010|12:24 am] |
I was looking in the mirror the other morning when the thought hit me that a lot of religions have bible stories about some magically ‘refilling’ miracle. You know the ones I’m talking about. Where there is not enough of something but somehow more spontaneously appears and prolongs the supply well past its expected depletion.
When Jesus’ Mom informed him they were out of wine he miraculously made more by just adding water. The Jews only had enough lamp oil for a night but miraculously it lasted over a week so centuries later Jewish parents could give their kids socks and stale chocolate gold coins for Hanukkah. Even Buddha pulled the miraculous deal-e-o with some firewood. You get the idea. What made me think of this common theme is that apparently I have a miraculous zit.
For about a week now I have tried to make this zit on my cheek go away. I poke it, prod it and pop it. I drain it, exfoliate it and holistically coat it with anise yet every time I look in the mirror I discover it miraculously has refilled itself back into full-blown whitehead status. Ugghhhh!
This thing should have only lasted a day after I busted the daylights out of it the first night but (cue the angelic sound effects) ‘Aaaaaaa Aaaaa” it just keeps filling back up no matter what I do. Years ago I used to kid around that the human body had a pus layer just below the skin that would lay in wait for any chance to get out of your body. Whenever a breach like a zit or wound appeared on the skin, all the pus would race towards the escape route like water pushing through a crack in a dam. Could that be what’s happening here?
Does this zit know that I am almost 50 years old? Isn’t there some law that says when you hit 40 years old your done with pimples. I mean come-on, male pattern baldness, wrinkles AND acne. That’s not fair. I’ve had old High School friends die, I’m supposed to get periodic colonoscapy exams and I get junk mail from AARP. I should not still have acne. Who do I call to complain about this? I wish a plague upon my miraculous eternal zit. As long as it’s not boils, that plague would only exasperate the issue.
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