dvmp

dvmp

[	userinfo	\|	livejournal userinfo	]
[	archive	\|	journal archive	]

THANKS GIVIN'	[Nov. 26th, 2009\|03:07 am]
(note: TO HEAR ALL THE MUSIC MENTIONED IN THIS WEEK’S BLOG CLICK THE LINK!!!http://www.playlist.com/playlist/18540776459 ) In honor of Thanksgiving I would like to thank everyone out there that takes a few minutes out of his or her busy lives each week to read my blog (you know you won’t get that time back. Those precious moments of your short existence in this world are gone forever, sucked into the abyss along with all those other hours of your life you have wasted watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island, playing computer solitaire and cleaning that film of slime that magically keeps reappearing on the inside of your car windshield). I started this blog over three years ago as a challenge to keep myself doing something creative. I have attempted to write remotely entertaining vignettes about my universe on a weekly basis without falling into the pitfalls of journaling or preaching; I write it for me but truly do appreciate all my readers and your many comments. There are days, though, when I wonder if being self-indulgent enough to write a weekly blog is really just another indicator of some deep-rooted sort of psychological issue like Puer Aeternus or Peter Pan syndrome without all the Mother crap (that can’t be right, that would be like Oedipus without the Mother hang up and the eyeball gouging). I am an extremely responsible adult; I just still like the same wacky crap that I enjoyed as a little kid. OK, maybe the same wacky crap I liked as a little kid but with occasional sex and drinking added. OK, a lot of sex and drinking added. Yes OK, a whole lot of friggin sex and boatload of drinking added, sometimes even at the same time. (hmmm that was not very Thanksgiving-ish… or maybe it is… I think we have the concept for a new holiday themed porno possibly named “Plymouth, Rock My World”, “Poking Pocahontas” or “Stuffing The Bird”.) The point is, I have opted to successfully function in the real world as an adult but remain very young at heart (you thought I was going to say ‘Jung at heart’, didn’t you). Nowhere else in my life does this seem more obvious then in my taste of music. I have been listening to ‘wacky crap’ for years. Back when I was a little kid, before becoming obsessed with sex and drinking, my favorite records were ‘They’re Coming To Take Me Away’ by Napoleon XIV (forwards and backwards) and ‘Surfin Bird’ by The Trashmen. I remember my Mom telling me to get out of the house and go outside to play. I hooked up a long extension cord and dragged my little record player and stack of 45’s out to our tiny city street backyard and repeatedly played obscure oddball stuff like Lou Monte’s ‘Papino, The Italian Mouse’, Soupy Sales’ ‘Pie In The Face’ and The Kingsmen’s ‘Jolly Green Giant’. This past week I got into an e-mail debate over the merits of Bob Dylan’s new Christmas cd. Of course it is horrible and barely listenable. That is what makes it so fantastic! My friend Kathy just yesterday posted a link to William Shatner singing Rocket Man from a 1970s performance. I had to comment because not only have I been torturing people with my old copy of Shatner’s album The Transformed Man but still have four different Leonard Nimoy albums from the 60s too. I still occasionally play them and still laugh out loud. There really is nothing funnier then famous people singing that should not be and I have a rather large collection of that stuff to prove my love of it. Back when I was in high school my sister-in-law, who worked for a record company at the time, gave me a copy of a just released album that changed my life. I had been listening to the Dr. Demento radio show for years so I was familiar with the genre of music that can only be described as ‘so painful to listen to that it is fabulous’ (Wild Man Fisher’s classic ‘My Name Is Larry’ comes to mind). The album she gave me was the first public release of the 1969-recorded album ‘Philosophy Of The World’ by The Shaggs. Rolling Stone magazine later voted the album ‘comeback of the year’ and Frank Zappa was quoted as saying they were ‘better then the Beatles’. I was hooked before that after my first listen. Some say their music unlistenable but I adore it. My continuing love of The Shaggs is really the best example I can give anyone that I really have not changed much (for better or worse) since I was a kid. Or maybe it is just stuff in my life like The Shaggs keeps me young. I certainly am a more complete and well-rounded person then I was in High School, but I feel the same with the same insecurities as way back then. I guess it’s like the Shaggs said: We do our best We try to please But we're like the rest Whenever at ease Oh, the rich people want what the poor people's got And the poor people want what the rich people's got And the skinny people want what the fat people's got And the fat people want what the skinny people's got You can never please anybody in this world TO HEAR ALL THE MUSIC IN THIS WEEK’S BLOG CLICK THE LINK BELOW!!! http://www.playlist.com/playlist/18540776459
Link	2 comments\|Leave a comment

I WAS THAT GUY!	[Nov. 19th, 2009\|12:19 am]
Oh man! I was that guy. Me. I was that guy that wished beyond all hope that I could suddenly turn invisible and slink away from the glare of hundreds of staring eyeballs. Like the first seconds of a traffic accident when suddenly everything moves in slow motion, all sound collapses into a hushed vacuum, and your body cringes to protect itself from the inevitable impact, then everyone, with the instinctual uncontrollability of a moth to light, looks to see the carnage laden aftermath. Yes, I was the one sheepishly standing amongst the wreckage and ruin when the world stopped to look and see who had been the absent minded fool that could not pass where thousands of others had easily navigated before him. I stand naked before you, striped of my dignity. I am that man. It all started innocently enough, just like every other Sunday… My wife and I headed to one of our favorite little French bistros for our usual brunch. The birds were singing in unison with a knowing vigor that almost put their song on the tip of your tongue like a long forgotten Motown tune. The fall crispness gently pinched our noses red as the late morning sun bathed us in a warm glow like a spotlight following the suave hero and beautiful starlet heroine across a stage. We got to the restaurant and, like Moses’ parted Red Sea, the waiting crowds separated to let us quickly sit at our favorite table. Our cosmopolitan conversation was surely the envy of any eavesdroppers. “Tee hee ha ha” I knowingly chuckled at my wife’s Euro-wit just a little to loudly so all could hear me. You could almost see a beret on my tete, a pencil thin mustache above my lip and a cigarette perfectly balanced between my fingers as I leaned back sipping coffee spinning yarns that turned the mundane into verbiage gems of gold. “Au contraire” I cried for all listeners to hear (and who would not want to hear?) “ I could not imagine my joie de vivre being disturbed by a fait accompli in my future caused by my own faux pas. Heh heh hee ha.” Knowingly pausing too long for effect, my wife slyly retorted with l’esprit de l’escalier “quelle horreur?” Ah it was just another one of our typical enchanting Sundays together like all the others. It was as if God himself took a break from all the church services to reach his mighty hand down to caress our necks and lovingly pinch our cheeks forcing us to uncontrollably smile as wide as the Cheshire Cat. Ah, yet another magical carefree Sunday. “Let’s venture across the street to Whole Foods where we might find a few special treats for later.” Then the horror began… I enjoy grocery shopping. Really. It’s no secret. I love food and the market is chuck full of it so I approach it with the vigor of an alcoholic at an open bar vodka festival. As if exploring all the various gastronomic possibilities is not enough, you can always have fun playing grocery store games like ‘find the most repulsive item’ (potted meat food product usually wins… look at the ingredients if you don’t believe me, the 1st one is partially defatted beef fatty tissues), ‘product mascot dating game’ (where you figure out what couples would work best like Aunt Jamima and Uncle Ben or Mrs. Paul and the Jolly Green Giant) or the classic ‘what can I hide in your cart without you noticing’ (getting someone all the way to check out with an unseen oversized package of Depends and 14 pounds of liver was my personal best). On Sundays gourmet grocery stores, like our nearby Whole Foods, are always jam packed with an amazing diversity of people. My wife and I slowly wove through the crowd carefully adding a few selected items to our stubby mini-cart. A few fresh herbs and veggies, a bottle of our new favorite Castano organic monastrell grape wine to hold us until the new Beaujolais Nouveau are released Thursday and finally some fresh bread for our dinner. That’s when it happened. I tried to follow my wife out of bakery area when an elderly couple using carts as walkers boxed me in. As I cut around the long way another older woman abruptly attempted to steer her cart into a near impossible tight u-turn. I was boxed in from all angles. Feeling a frenzied claustrophobic anxiety as I watched my wife get farther away, I quickly doubled back, juked around a display of fresh bread, twisted around behind a large Asian family and, with my wife back in sight, rounded one last display to catch her. Unfortunately my cart did not quite clear the corner display stack of bottled lemon curd. CRASH!!!!! “Sacre bleu!!!” Several dozen bottles of lemon curd hit the ground. In almost slow motion some shattering with a follow up splat, some simply bounced and others rolled in all directions. A hush fell over the huge crowd as hundreds of eyes fell upon me. The loudspeaker called for a ‘liquid clean up’. Instantly the grocery store swat team swarmed drawing even more attention. With my pride and dignity shattered like the sea of glassy lemon curd around me I offered to pay for my mess as I bent down to help but the damage was done. I walked away fading into the crowd at the check out line opting to leave before I caused any more embarrassing destruction. I was that guy.
Link	Leave a comment

IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY	[Nov. 12th, 2009\|06:23 pm]
My wife’s birthday is this week. It is not one of those scary head-trip ‘round’ number birthdays that causes you to reassess your life’s achievements and accomplishments (or lack there of) but just the same, she does not seem happy about it. She is all right with getting older; she simply has had some bad stuff happen to her around her birthday so she likes to play it low-key in the hopes that the bad joo-joo will not notice. Personally when it comes to my own existence, I like to think that I still have more in front of me then behind. Of course being middle aged has a sneaky way of messing around with your hopes and dreams. I know that sooner rather then later those numbers will become out of whack and I will catch myself looking in the rear view mirror a bit more then I should. I think it would be wise for me to continue my low expectation philosophy of life which basically says at the end, no matter when or where, if I can look back and say I had more good days then bad, I won. Over our nine years together I have given my lovely wife numerous mushy birthday gifts. The kind that I always imagine will garner a collective ‘awwwwww’ from a large semi-circle of her friends gathered around her as she retells the exploits of her husband’s perfect present presentation. (You might now ask where exactly is this secret portal to my dream world that I obviously must spend some time living in.) Of course during this recession while I am living on the precipices of unemployment my gift buying options have slightly changed. This year there is no hand-made origami bird mobile made of folded gift certificates to her favorite stores. No expensive jewelry. No fancy artwork that she raved about months earlier that I secretly obtained. No mystery vacation. This year’s gift is not even a surprise. We are going recession style utilitarian this year and she is getting just what she asked for, a new speaker to replace the blown one in her car. Ah yes, I again can imagine the collective ‘awwwwwww’ from that semi-circle of female friends, just before they start throwing rocks at me for giving a grossly unsentimental gift. Maybe for the holidays I’ll get her an iron and vacuum. Or a full body chadri style shuttlecock burka. I guess romance is another casualty of economic downturn. I did get her a few other little fun gifts and a couple of cards. I had to get more then one card because the one I feel in love with mentions ‘hairy buttocks’ in it and although I could not resist getting that one, it was not really the sentiment I wanted to completely go with. It is fun when you spot the perfect card but usually these days I find myself settling. First of all half the shelves are now filled with lame musical cards. The annoying music usually has nothing to do with the card and just seems to shoved in there as an excuse to jack up the price. Just because I like the song Twist And Shout does not mean I want to hear a bad version of it blaring out of a 2 millimeter speaker while looking at a picture of a monkey in drag wishing me good luck on my colon blockage surgery. $3 is already an insane price for a hunk of small thin cardboard with some printing on it. Throw some crappy music in there and the price gouging really gets out of control. While searching for a Birthday card that was at least remotely amusing I came upon a section I had never seen before that I will call the ‘crumbling relationship’ shelf. From afar the cards look like the birthday ones your Grandmother would give you with some long boring anonymously written soppy poem on the front but upon closer examination these cards say things about ‘still loving you even though our relationship is falling apart’ or ‘even though you cheated on me and I hate your guts I still wish you happy anniversary’. I hope I never need one of them.
Link	1 comment\|Leave a comment

TEXAS SIZED AGIDA	[Nov. 6th, 2009\|11:49 pm]
It’s been a very long week. Very long. It’s one of those weeks that is so long you are sure someone slipped in a couple of extra days in there somewhere, and I am not talking about fun days like a bonus Sunday. Noooooooooooooo. It felt like there was two or three successive Mondays followed by an extra Tuesday or two tossed in there somewhere. A regular week just cannot be this long. While eating breakfast the other morning I did a double take when I realized that the date on my newspaper said it was only Tuesday. It just couldn’t be. Certainly I am not the only one that has been hit in the side of the head with a nasty funk in these days of unrest. The ramifications of this recession are raining on the picnic of a lot of lives besides mine. The problem is as much as I have always tried to keep a huge separation between Work-Dan and Play-Dan, the former seems to have taken to sneaking around and giving the latter a painful daily atomic wedgie. The imminent demise of my current job is not really something I am keen on but is one the harsh realities that is causing Play-Dan some nasty agida. Even though I do have some future plans, things often do not work out as you expect so I am in a bit of hunker down mode. For someone that only agreed to move to Texas if his wife let him leave the state a minimum of four times a year, the idea of ‘hunkering’ is not a pleasant one. The ironic humor that I have lived in Texas for almost a decade now is not lost on me. For years the state I made fun of the most, even more then Ohio (who’s state motto easily could have been ‘we might be a square and ugly state but we are almost a palindrome’ or ‘at least we don’t have Detroit’) was Texas. The whole big hair, cowboy hat, holier than thou ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ attitude is a bit off putting to this Florida raised New Yorker. My first lengthy stay in Texas was back in 1986 when I worked a two month consulting job at a jewelry store in Pearland, a far far southern suburb of Houston. My first night at the hotel featured an invasion of hundreds of cricket like creatures that repeatedly pounded into my lit window all evening creating a crickety carcass mess to step over in the morning. My first day I noticed that the storeowner had cut the legs off the antique showcases so they sat a foot or so lower to the ground then normal. He did it so he could look down the female customer’s tops as they bent forward to gaze at the jewelry. Welcome to Texas. My days in Pearland passed very slowly. One night I ventured to the nearest movie theatre in the next town over, Friendswood. When I got there I discovered they had converted an old grocery store into the theatre. I stepped on the black pad to open the automatic doors and walked up to the counter made of raw plywood and purchased a ticket. I walked down the hallway made of unpainted sheetrock till I got up to a wooden door that could be on any apartment bedroom. The sideways hanging sheet of lined copy paper with the name of the movie handwritten on it hanging above the door let me know I was in the right place. I sat in one of the few rows of folding chairs and tried to enjoy the hideous film Howard The Duck. Welcome to Texas. Over the years I have come to appreciate the state as well as the people and now call Texas my home. Maybe it’s time to look for a ten-gallon hat and some boots?
Link	2 comments\|Leave a comment

THE GROSS DAYS OF WINTER	[Oct. 28th, 2009\|11:40 pm]
I looked in the mirror the other morning and noticed three new facial blemishes. No I am not talking about anything we need to run a biopsy on. I’m talking about plain old run of the mill zits. Well to be exact two of them were those nasty undergrounders that if you touch in any way, shape or form this early in their development your face will be grotesquely marred for at least a week and the other one was the standard garden variety type that if poked you hope it does not make a mess out of the mirror. The point is that I woke up to three, count em’ three, new ones. This is crazy; I’m middle damn aged. There should be some law that says once you hit 40 there shalt be no more acne. It’s bad enough dealing with my balding head and crazy quick growing old man ear and nose hair, I really do not need pus-laden visitors from my teenage years. I can’t wait for the real irony of being old when I get zits on my liver spots. I guess I should take it as a beautiful sign that there is a God, that as you get older your vision begins to wane and you can’t see the hideous things that happen to your body as it slowly breaks down. Usually a few new pimples won’t set me off, certainly not at 5:45am but I was already in a mood. About a half hour before my usual 5:30 alarm was to go off one of my cats decided it was time for me to arise. I ignored his usual step on my head and nibble my fingertips tricks to get me moving. Then he played dirty and woke up the dog. Once the dog is up, all bets are off. If I do not get up and let him out when he asks, I will end up having to clean up a significantly nastier mess then my acne splattered mirror. BJ is just a 12-pound Weiner dog but I think he is completely hollow based on the fact that some mornings he excretes quantities that have to be double his body weight. I dragged myself out of bed way too early already dreading the day ahead of me. I stepped out in the yard with the dog only then to discover that it was the coldest morning of this fall season so far. I should mention that I am talking about the North Texas version of cold. When I lived up north we made fun of people who described 42 degrees as cold. In temperatures like this an average Chicagoan is wearing shorts and a t-shirt looking for an outdoor picnic spot to eat his Italian Beef sandwich and can of Old Style I live in the South to get away from the cold. Sure it’s great fun to break out the coats for a wintry visit up North as long as I do not have to deal with it for half a year. I truly adore the eerie city silence as you take a walk during a heavy snowstorm while the fresh flakes are still white and pristine. Of course eventually the piles of snow will change into a nasty speckled black, gray and yellow stained mess turning from something you try to catch on your tongue into something you try to step over without touching. Winter is great for a month or so but by early January I’m done with it. Forget the next three months of frozen tundra like conditions. I’ll stay in the South. I stood outside in the pre-dawn chill as BJ very slowly emptied any and everything that might be floating down his miles of doggie intestines. I had plenty of time to think of how much the fall depresses me. Some people groove on autumn’s brisk temperatures and falling leaves. I just get sad. The warm carefree days of summer fade into the gloomy gray skies of winter. I should have put on my sweatshirt before I took the dog out. The cold wind wakes me up fast and puts me in a mini funk. The rainstorm the night blew off the last of the leaves on the now barren trees behind my house. My hollow dog finally finished his business and I grumpily head back inside to take care of my own bathroom issues before my for my morning workout. That is when I discovered the zit farm on my face. It’s going to be a long winter and it is only October.
Link	1 comment\|Leave a comment

FOREST PARK AND THE FOUR FOOT RED DIAPHRAGM	[Oct. 22nd, 2009\|03:04 pm]
Famed landscape architect Frederick Olmsted was the primary designer of Manhattan’s amazing Central Park (named for it’s central location within the bustling city), Brooklyn’s beautiful Prospect Park (named after Mount Prospect, the tallest of the park’s wooded rolling hills) and Queens’ Forest Park (thusly named because they had obviously run out of good creative appropriate names and decided to stick with the incredibly silly and blatantly obvious title highlighting the truly unique concept of trees in a park). I grew up a couple of blocks from the 538 acre Forest Park which features numerous wooded trails, a carousel, band shell, golf course, ball fields, horseback riding trails, and at the time I lived there, drug peddling burnt-out hippies, broken down playgrounds, packs of roaming teenage thugs, sleeping bums, a multi-laned highway cutting a swatch through it and of course the famed site where my first non-hand-me-down brand new 10-speed Schwinn bike was stolen from me. http://dvmp.livejournal.com/2007/09/12/ Were I bit more gregarious as a little kid, living next to the park would have been a lot more of a bonus to me. Instead it was just another part of town I ignored in favor of sitting in front of the TV or listening to records. I recall one day my Mom got fed up with my preteen sullen TV-addicted lethargy and told me to get out of the house and play with some other kids. I walked across Myrtle Ave to Forest Park, picking up a couple slices of pizza on the way, and sat around watching the old men play speed chess on the rows of stone tables while snarfing down mouthfuls of cheesy gooey pie. Probably not what my Mom had in mind. When I figured I had been away long enough I started the short trek back to the house. On the way I got hit by flying ice cream cones hurled at me by a bunch of laughing teens in a beat up old car. No wonder I preferred staying indoors. One of the few kids near my age in the neighborhood was Johnny Yonke. He and I had very little in common except that we both had few other friends in the area. When I was not camped out alone in my room, I was usually hanging with Johnny, besides, he had a decent looking older sister. We shot hoops, played stoopball and such but more often then not we spent our days looking for something to do that would not get us in too much trouble. Sometimes we headed over to Forest Park in search of something to break-up the monotony. In hindsight, everything we did seemed to have a city edge to it. Once we made a tree house by dragging the back seat of a car into a tree. Another time we found a wheel-less kiddy Big Wheel toy and proceeded to slide down the steepest hills in the park on it in a vain attempt to get to the bottom without tumbling uncontrollably into a tree or car. We tried riding our bikes down the horseback rider’s bridal path which proved to be yet another very messy and unwise idea. During the occasional winter snowstorm it felt like half the city would climb through the numerous holes in the fence around the Forest Park golf course to sleigh ride on the best hills in the area. My family had two old, but cool, Flexible Flier sleds but since I was the youngest my siblings usually stuck me with the red round sucky saucer shaped sled. You could lay, sit or even stand on the slightly steerable Flexible Fliers which in actuality were really just a thin slated wooden frame mounted on two long metal blades that speedily glided through the snow. The saucer sled was just a crappy round piece of red metal in the shape of a four foot diaphragm. All you could do with it was sit dopily in the center and hope it didn’t spin enough to make you puke as you limped down the hill. Not long before we moved out of New York I noticed that my Dad had destroyed the long ignored saucer sled by mixing concrete in it. I hated that horrible sled. It was near useless. If it were in Citizen Kane it would have been called Rose-dud. Yet seeing it all chipped up with lumps of dried cement in it made me feel sad. It was like the end of an era. I soon moved 1300 miles away from old Forest Park. It’s been 32 years since I wandered into the park to find something to do. 32 years since I’ve been sleigh riding on the golf course. That’s too long; I hope it snows here in Texas this winter.
Link	Leave a comment

POT	[Oct. 13th, 2009\|11:07 pm]
Oh man. Oh Man! CRAP! My world has been shaken. I mean I really now have cause to question just about everything in my life. I’m now wondering will the sun rise in the morning? Is red, my favorite color, really as I see it? What about my whole religious belief system? SHIT. Nothing makes sense anymore. I did not need this in my life right now. Not today, not now. Dammit. And it is all because of that friggin’ Food Network. I mentioned the Food Network last week. My wife and I love to cook so that station gets a lot of airplay at the house (following that logic I can not explain why we also watch those lame sell your house shows on HGTV because home repair is miserable and moving is about as much fun as an afternoon bound and hooded in an Afghanistan mountain cave with two Taliban torturers). Since we are both attempting to lose a little weight (talk about a Taliban torture, I hate that it is once again time to reign in my ever-expanding gut girth) we should probably turn those damn cooking shows off. Watching them right now is definitely akin to an alcoholic working in a bar or a coulrophobic* working in a circus. I also stated last week that I hate admitting that I am a bit of a Foodie because not only is it an embarrassing thing to say but the concept is just not that impressive. Being a Foodie, or 'fan of food' as Webster describes it, is not much of an accomplishment. It truly is the goofiest and laziest of all hobbies; we all eat. I like breathing too. Does that make me a ‘breathie’? I'm not sure being an 'amateur gourmet' is anything to be proud of. Of course being a dieting Foodie is even more ridiculous. But I, as usual, digress and throwing the brakes on my insatiable appetite is not why my universe has suddenly been thrust into turmoil. No, what has me in a tizzy is pots and pans. I do not remember my Mom teaching me about pots and pans. I do not remember a class in school going over pots and pans. I do not remember anyone in my 46 years teaching me about pots and pans. As far as I can remember pots have just always been pots and pans have always been pans. Just like men are men and women are women or cats are cats and dogs are dogs. It is inarguable common knowledge. When I moved in with my wife I noticed one of her quirks was that she called certain size pans ‘pots’. I was quick to correct this silly faux pax of hers. She also has some strange beliefs about driving laws too. I just tossed the pot as pan thing into that cute quirky colloquialism category. I mean come on, a pot is a pot and a pan is a pan. Or is it? Saturday night I got home from work and my wife told me I needed to watch the TiVo’ed Alton Brown’s Good Eats show at the 10 minute mark. I waited till after I was done watching my college lose a close football game so I was good and weak. There it was. A casual aside as Alton walked down the isle in a cookware shop. Those words that will now forever cause me to question everything that I ‘just assumed’ to be fact. All the things that, of course, just ‘are’. I somehow had gotten into my core beliefs that a pan is a low sided wider then tall cooking apparatus and a pot is a higher sided taller then wider cooking tool. But I had to eat eight years of crow. My wife, according to Alton Brown who everybody on the planet respects, likes and trusts, was right. According to him a pot is deeper then it is wide and has two handles. A pan has one handle. What?!?!? These things I sat on the floor banging with spoons when I was a baby, these things that I boiled water in for the first time in my life as a preteen, these things that I use practically everyday are not pots but are in fact pans!!!!! How could I not know the difference between a pot and pan. It’s such basic information. How much other simple knowledge am I wrong about that I have spent my whole life assuming I knew. Are you supposed to stop at green lights? Am I sitting on toilets correctly? Am I worshiping the wrong God? I have been assuming I know the answers but I do not remember learning these things either. Have I been just making assumptions for so long that they have become fact in my head? Life is hard enough in these turbulent times. I did not need this. I should go to sleep… I just hope I am doing that right. * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2nK_qmvJ7A DAN QUESTIONING ALL THAT IS.
Link	2 comments\|Leave a comment

FAT OR FOODIE	[Oct. 10th, 2009\|12:00 am]
A few weekends ago my wife and I drove down to Hill Country for the weekend. In an oversized painfully flat state like Texas, when you have an area with a few low rolling mountain-like geographic features they make a big deal about it (imagine that, Texas making a big deal over something). Thus the lumpy earthed area between San Antonio and Austin has been ceremoniously anointed by the Texan political gods of yore with the blatantly obvious moniker of Hill Country. Following that same logic I’m not sure why the Gulf Coast region is not Watery Country or West Texas is not Sandy Country or the eastern Port Arthur/Beaumont area is not Smelly Country. Those are certainly the most predominant features of those places. We stayed at a resort overlooking a currently very dried up and shallow part of Canyon Lake, another really creatively named locality. I think our favorite meal of the trip was at Frank’s Bait And Taco. The place was an aging oversized wooden shack of a building that was part Tex-Mex Restaurant, part tackle shop and part kitsch antique store. The place was an assault on the eyes with virtually every bit of wall and ceiling completely covered by all manor of odd stuff glued, screwed or hanging on them. Thousands and thousands of toys, trinkets, gadgets, plates, collectables and so very much more engulfed every inch of the place. Oh yeah, and the fresh homemade Tex-Mex food was great. Most of our meals that weekend benefited from location. We had a way below average lunch at a faux Irish pub on San Antonio’s trendy River Walk. If you are unfamiliar with the area, River Walk is a touristy area featuring a very long winding extremely old concrete canal with murky water flowing under an array of bridges and abutted by dozens and dozens restaurants, bars and hotels. Another less then average meal improved by its surroundings was at Austin’s famous Oasis Restaurant on Lake Travis. Oasis is not really known for it’s amazing food and drinks as much as it’s hilltop view of the lake from it’s massive array of multilevel balconies protruding from the side of the mountain.* I guess my wife and I spent a lot of time planning meals those days. We are both on the precipice of a necessary diet, so we used the weekend to indulge in some less then healthy treats before crunch time befell us. I even cooked up mess ‘o’ bacon for breakfast in our little hotel suite kitchenette. I hate that food is so important to me. My brother Arthur appreciates a good meal, but on the whole food is just substance to him like air. I guess that is why he is rail thin and my clothing size is somewhere between Mondo and Ginormous. I know I am overweight because of a lack of self-control and a joy of over-indulgence. but it feels better to blame it on being a Foodie (a ridiculous term that should be defined as a ‘rationalization used when you are shoving too much crap in your face’). It must be all those damn Food Network shows hypnotizing me with subliminal (and blatant) messages to eat more. Is my life really better because I ate grossly overpriced average mofungo in a Miami dump because Guy Fieri said it was ‘off the hook’? The truth is I like to eat. I eat when I am happy or sad, perky or sleepy and busy or lazy. The words ‘I forgot to eat lunch’ have never passed my lips. I have missed lunch but I sure as hell never forgot about it. So now with a grumbly stomach I sit with my memories of meals-gone-by thinking about the hunger I have to deal with as I shift back to Healthy-Man Dan mode. Or maybe this here Fat Foodie will have just one last bad-for-me meal. I hear the corn dogs at the Fair are extra-good this year. * http://www.oasis-austin.com/video_home.html?height=450&width=700 FRANK'S BAIT AND TACO INSIDE FRANKS
Link	Leave a comment

DON'T GIVE ME A MONKEY	[Sep. 29th, 2009\|08:39 pm]
Hey kids, lets get in the time machine and go back, back, back. Before Wii, before the Sony Game Cube, before Playstation, Nintendo and Gameboy. Hell, I’m dragging you way back before Pong to the deep dark ages when I was a wee little lad. I was a preteen when I used to go camping every summer upstate New York with the Boy Scouts. Yes, I was a Boy Scout; I guess they will take anyone. And yes, I cannot remember my cell phone number but I still can remember the Scout Motto, Oath and Law. “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.” Hmmm, after reading that list I guess you can see why I have not been a Scout for a very long time. Every few days at camp the whole troop hiked to nearest store called Bob Landers. (‘Liar’ was not up in the list was it?) Well, OK, we actually did not walk there. We usually just piled into the leaders’ cars and drove to the store. (There was no mention about ‘stretching the truth’ in that list either was there?) Well, OK, it was less of a store and more of a bar/restaurant that sold some snacks to the kids and beer to the adults. The leaders would sit and have drinks (well earned having put up with us) while we gorged ourselves on potato chips and waited around to play the old beat-up pinball game. Each of us lined up our quarters up on top of the machine marking our turn at the flippers to play our five-ball game. We stood around and watched the other Scouts play, careful not to rattle the easily tilted old rickety game. Unless you were good enough to win a free replay, you usually only had the time to play one game before it was time to go back to the campsite. If a really good player was there, they could rule the game by continuously winning free games causing a lot of us to never even get a chance behind the machine. I was not a pinball wizard and usually my five balls unceremoniously disappeared past the flippers in rapid succession. I was younger and less experienced then most of the other kids and my piss-poor pinball playing was just another item on the lengthy list of things I was embarrassed about. Years later, pinball games started to get a lot more sophisticated with multi-levels, habitrail-like tubes, and complex themes. One game that I loved called Xenon featured a female robot voice that cooed several double entendre comments like “enter Xenon” and “try a tube shot” that my buddy Mike and I still quote. Along with the boom in freestanding video style games like Pac-Man, video arcades started popping up everywhere. During my first year at college Mike and I occasionally hung out at nearby arcade that for a while offered a ‘by the hour’ price instead of the usual quarter per game. For a bad player like me, this was a very very good deal. I was not particularly good at the popular games like Ms Pac Man, Galaga and Centipede but for some reason I was an idiot savant on a lame one called Pengo that featured a little penguin that scored points by shoving ice cubes around the screen. Although the real reason I played Pengo was because it was the only game that was not a quarter vacuum for me, I told a few friends I played it because I liked penguins. That started a steady stream of penguin gifts that kept coming for years. I do not dislike penguins. They are cute and in a dapper wacky sort of way but I do not want to surround myself with them. That is the problem when people find out you like something. You might get excited in a store when you see a figurine because it looks similar to something your Grandmother had and reminds you of her. A friend sees your reaction but does not see why you reacted that way and suddenly you wake up one day with a floor to ceiling curio cabinet filled with Hummels and Precious Moments. Ack! So to make it official I ended up with a bunch of penguin crap because I sucked at Ms. Pac Man. Besides, monkeys are a lot funnier. Hell, I think the word ‘monkey’ is humorous and the word does not even throw it’s own shit at people. My wife knows I like monkeys and occasionally gives me some monkey-related wacky gift but I cringe when anyone else learns about the monkey thing because I fear the holiday and birthday time flood of lame monkey related presents. That is why I do not tell anyone about the dozens of rubber ducks my wife and I have in the spare bathroom…. oops.
Link	Leave a comment

REMEMBER TO FORGET THE FUNERAL HOME	[Sep. 25th, 2009\|07:55 pm]
I used to travel for work. A lot. For over 15 years I wandered all over the country doing consulting work. When I was not working, I tended to travel even more. I cannot begin to fathom the huge amount of stuff from those days that my bum memory has caused me to forever forget. I should have gotten around to writing names and dates on the back of all those photos in the box. It would have been great if I ever got to week two in all those journals I started. Ah well. I guess your never belle of the ball dancing with the past anyway. Of course, a stranger thought is why have the weary brain cells in my hippocampus opted to hold onto the weird crap that I can recall. The other day I sent an e-mail about my football pool to my friend Judy and suddenly had a flashback from Gallipolis Ohio, a small city I worked in for three months in the early 90s. I was staying at the dumpy Blue Fountain Motel, a rundown one-story old-fashioned place that had no functioning fountain blue or otherwise. One day in town I overheard a conversation between two older women shopping for gifts. While looking at the sample photo in a picture frame, one said to the other “those are pictures of people in there.” Why my brain has managed to retain this scintillating conversation destined to win the ‘most inane blatantly obvious comment’ award, yet it can not manage to retain my 7 digit cell phone number remains a mystery to me. My memory (or lack there of) seems to come up a lot here in the blog. When I am sitting at the computer introspectively staring at the blank screen I dream of having a more powerful memory. The tidbits that have managed to stay wedged in my cranium are often disjointed and I’m not sure would make good reading matter. Does anyone really want to read about a woman I briefly dated years ago that lived in a funeral home? Hmmmmm…Maybe you do. Actually she lived in a little room above the funeral home that currently occupied a 75-year-old mansion. They asked her to remain low-key when there was an actual funeral going on but otherwise she had full run of the house except for the storage and embalming room. The kitchen was barely used by anyone except her but I often wondered what condition were the other clothing besides hers that were cleaned in the basement washer and drier. It was creepy enough that the laundry-folding table was next to several currently empty caskets. Since this was ages ago I guess it is OK to admit that I actually laid in one of the caskets. I was truly amazed at how comfortable it was. It’s kind of a rude question but begs to be asked; what is the point of making it so comfortable. I assume no one has ever complained about it not being soft enough after they were put inside. One night I sat on her floor and noticed that there were large chunks of wax in the carpet and she explained that the flooring had originally been in one of the viewing rooms downstairs where they burn a lot of candles during the services. They moved the old stuff up to her apartment when in the viewing rooms new carpet was laid (to rest). I guess this might have seemed creepier to me had I not had pizza in an embalming room years earlier when I was a kid. My brother Neil had a friend Dave that worked nights on ‘pick up’ duty at the ‘Werst Funeral Home’ (I’ll skip the obvious joke) in my Queens New York hometown. With pizza in tow, we met him late one evening at work and shared the pie in the one room it was easiest to clean up any mess we made. Dave looked appropriate for the job; he was an imposing wide-shouldered 6’6” with dark hair and a bad complexion. He opened the pizza box on the body shaped lipped embalming table usually used for replacing bodily liquids with embalming fluids. While we ate, I recall him regaling us with various gory work stories. A guess it is not a surprise that a memory like that has not managed to escape my skull in the past 32 years. Although I would probably be all right exchanging that one for my elusive cell phone number. http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/glendale/16.Werst.jpg
Link	Leave a comment

MOIST!!!!!!!!	[Sep. 17th, 2009\|10:40 am]
I think I need to become better friends with my next-door neighbor. His name might not be Noah but he does have a boat and if this rain keeps up he might be someone important to know. It has poured every day for about a week and I might be OK with the overly moist gray gloomy skies but my metrosexual dachshund is not amused. Unfortunately I missed my window of opportunity to mow the backyard last week before the deluge. I am now wondering if I have to tell the homeowners association that my latest home improvement is the new lakefront property abutting my back door. My yard now features a rich thick layer of swampy goo with islelets of grass taller then my pup. For a dog that hates any dampness on his paws, my lawn has turned into an unfriendly habitat not conducive to his normal daily bodily needs. The past few days the only way I can get B.J. Brisco (Brisket) Jones to do his doggie business is to repeatedly carry him from the porch to one of the drier less half-foot-high grassy patches until he decides standing in ooze for a few moments is better then lugging around a full bladder and colon. He keeps looking at me with an incredulous expression as if saying ‘what have you done to my bathroom’ as he dodges the mushrooms, crickets and spiders that have claimed my backyard bog for their own. I keep thinking he will seek his revenge by covering my toilet seat with sloshy muddy knee-high reeds and submerging the whole thing in a pool of fetid water. I guess if my belly and private bits were only and inch or so off the ground I might have an opinion on the matter as well. Carrying him in out when I am in my normal clothes is no problem. I do not mind helping the little guy except when I am about to go to work. Carrying him when I am dressed for work without making a mess of my clothes is sometimes a little difficult. I usually use the one hand scoop method but sometimes I get a little too close to his male parts and it creeps me out. I have not really checked out other dachshunds but I think, proportionally speaking, he is kinda well endowed. I am not sure if I should be proud of having a nine-pound well-hung pup or not. I’m sure if I had a son with the same condition I would be bragging at the country club (assuming that if I had a son I would suddenly feel the need to ‘cretinize’ myself to rub shoulders with the power elite to help get my son into a good university instead of a life of drugs and disillusionment as a porno star). At least the weatherman has said things might be getting a bit drier soon and I will not have to be reminded of my dog’s ampleness until the next time I run the sprinklers.
Link	1 comment\|Leave a comment

MY BROTHER'S BRAIN	[Sep. 9th, 2009\|11:46 pm]
I have a brother that is smart. Let me rephrase that statement because it’s a tad bit of an understatement. One of my brothers is an uber brainiac. Dr. Brainenstein. A Brainosaurus Rex. He is not just smart, he is Doctorate in Math from MIT, and top 20 published economists in the world smart. He is also a real personable nice guy. His brain always seems to be working. You can hang around with him and almost see the wheels spinning. Sometimes you will catch him jotting down a bunch of numbers on a piece of scrap paper and you realize that while you were debating the opposing sides of the Yankees Red Sox rivalry, he was also finding the solution to some extremely complex econometric equation. In some ways I understand how his head works because my brain has no off switch either. As much as I might try, I can’t stop it. The difference between my brother and I is that while his mind might be solving the world’s problems through math, my brain is usually preoccupied with a slightly different bill of fare. The following is just a partial list of the highly technical sophisticated issues that my brain opted to wrap itself around while I read the paper eating lunch today: ·Was ‘Magilla’ really the very best name they could come up with for Magilla Gorilla? ·I wonder if Robert Steadman, Ralph Steadman and Steadman Graham know anything about each other. ·How do you clean a bar of soap? ·How come when someone turns 21 we take them out to drink? They should exercise their newfound right to drink by taking everyone else out and buying them drinks. ·Is the flap about letting Obama speak to schoolchildren really a sign of the apocalypse or just utter stupidity? ·Wouldn’t it be smarter to make toilet seats a yellowy brown color? ·Why are dimes smaller then nickels? ·The next time some distant high school acquaintance friends me on Facebook, I’ll respond with the line ‘ Ah, I knew you back when I had dreams and hair’. Personally, I would love if this crap did not jump into my head. Maybe I would be able to remember my cell phone number or the chords to Cat Steven’s ‘Miles From Nowhere’ if my brain was not ruminating with the ebb and flow of useless heavy ponderances. (Hmmm, why did I knowingly misuse the word ‘ponderances’ there? Is that just ignorance on my part or am I purposely again butchering the English language again for my own amusement. That would be really self-indulgent. Shit I have got to stop over thinking this stuff. Now where was I…)
Link	2 comments\|Leave a comment

I WOES	[Sep. 2nd, 2009\|11:17 pm]
About three weeks ago my eye got really irritated. It just suddenly felt like there was a charcoal briquette with a small cactus growing out of it wedged under my contact lens. I looked in the mirror and did not see any Kingsford chunks with a prickly pear protruding from my pupil but I did see a very bright red eye. The kind of red that makes people assume you have been drinking all night… every night… for a week straight… in a very smoky bar...with a dozen pink eye sufferers sharing a bar towel. I might not be the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree but after two days of discomfort, bright redness, sensitivity to light and panic over the little gray dot that appeared on my pupil, I thought maybe, just maybe, I should see someone about this. I called my optheemolo..opthemoleigst..optomotryst…my eye doctor, but she was booked solid for the next week. I decided to do the next best thing and straight after work I went to a McDoctor in the Box walk-in clinic. I paced around the waiting room wondering if the medical instruments were as dirty as the dusty dead bug laden windowsills. A wave of hypochondria came over me and I got really creeped out with the concept of sitting in one of the waiting room chairs. I envisioned them teeming with little germs ready to leap on me and infect the rest of my body with some nasty disease. I kept pacing. The nurse called my name (or a reasonable facsimile there of) and casually checked my vitals as I cracked bad jokes about them putting me in the children’s examination room. At least I had a wooden puzzle to play with and a copy of Highlights to peruse. I am still waiting for Goofus and Gallant…The Movie. Come-on the script writes itself. The doctor looked into my eye with a groovy black light thingie that looked a bit like the viewer they used to sell on late night TV to see if urine was present on carpet. He said I had a scratch on my eye and gave me some antibiotic drops. I left the International House Of Germs and headed home to start my two weeks of eyeglass wearing. Yesterday I finally got in to see my real eye doctor. I teased her again about her backhanded compliment a few years back when she said my “eyes are good for someone my age”. Well my vision is still unchanged but it might get worse if next time I have an issue I choose again to not go to a real eye doctor. No, the minor ‘corneal ulcer’ that I actully have likely won’t kill me but I think my optomitrist (hey I got it right) might if I stupidly trust my vision to a man with a Urine Gone Stain Revealing Light. Here’s to another two weeks of eyeglasses. http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=76519202&blogId=324240027
Link	Leave a comment

SPLOTCHES AND STICKERS	[Aug. 27th, 2009\|12:50 am]
I got ripped off. I hate being taken advantage of! What is this friggin’ world coming to… A week ago last Sunday my wife and I were trying to squeeze in a bunch of errands before going to the ‘gog’ (that’s groovy hipster Jew talk for synagogue) to watch the final phase of my friend’s conversion to Judaism (see last weeks entry for more on that). We had Dim Sum for brunch where I loaded up on my favorite distinctively non-kosher delectable tidbits filled with mostly pork and shrimp. I am assuming the calamari and scallops would not pass Orthodox Rabbinical inspection either but I am not sure about the taro and tripe. (Man I love eating… years ago I tried to become a vegetarian for somewhat humanitarian [or animalitarian’] reasons but the call of bacon lured me back into the carnivore world. Between all the cheese and pasta I certainly did not lose any weight eating veggie. Maybe I could use religion to lose a few pounds. Keeping Kosher has too many loopholes for gaining weight and the only yearly fast is for one day on Yom Kippur. It might be a more effective diet if I become catholic and give up fattening foods for lent or better yet I could take the more extreme route and become a Muslim for the month-long fast each Ramadan. Screw it; I’ll just stay fat) I ate very carefully to try to avoid getting food on my slightly snazzier then usual ‘gog-wear’. OK, so nobody really calls it the ‘Gog’, but these things have to start somewhere. Some snooty Bostonian had to have been the first person to refer to Cape Cod as ‘The Cape’ (although The Cod would be a more humorous low-brow name). I wonder how long until the Hamptons are ‘The Hamp’ and Malibu becomes ‘The Boo’? Amazingly enough I made it out of the restaurant without wearing lunch. A rarity no matter what clothes I don. Unfortunately somehow at the Asian Market next door I managed to get several large pinkish red splotches of freaky unknown substance all over the upper left leg of my khaki pants. So much for my pseudo-stylish ‘Gog’ outfit. Even worse who is going to believe I did not spill food all over myself snarfing down my non-religious fattening meal versus leaning over open creates of exotic Asian drinks looking for a case of my wife’s favorite Chrysanthemum Iced Tea. But that is not how I got ripped off. Our last stop before the event was Fry’s, the huge electronic superstore. While my wife got on line to drop off my Mother-In-Law’s laptop for service, I made a beeline to the rest room to try and remove the scary pinkish red stains. Mountains of smelly hand soaped soggy paper towels later, I now had a tremendous discolored wet spot on an embarrassing area of my pants on top of the non-faded even more obvious large pinkish red splotches. I caught up with my wife just as the technician realized that the computer was still under warranty and simultaneously discovering that the problem must be the motherboard and not the sound card since Sony was going to be paying for it instead of us. Since it looked like this process might take a bit longer I strolled over towards the exit to kill time in an area that was easier to hide the giant moist pinkish red splotches on my pants from the other shoppers. I hovered near the large array of red metal and glass kids toy and candy dispensers. When I was a child you could score a lame plastic ring or gumball for a dime. For a quarter you could get a jawbreaker or try for the little mini spy camera that was supposedly mixed in with some other crap stickers. Needless to say, no matter how many times I tried, I never got the spy camera. While waiting I discovered one of the dispensers had little tiny plastic ‘Homies’ dolls and another had ‘Family Guy’ figurines for 50 cents each. We were running very late when my Wife finally came along but I still made her take a moment to choose between a Homie or a Family Guy toy. Now I saw amongst the array of displayed dolls that there was a little afterthought of a label slapped on the dispenser between the sample dolls that read ‘collect limited edition stickers’ but blindly ignoring my childhood experiences with the spy camera hope sprang eternal and I slipped my 2 quarters into the Family Guy dispenser. It’s not bad enough that I am late for a religious shindig and have soaking wet pinkish red splotchy pants, now I am again reminded of my childhood mini-traumatic let downs. I got ripped off. I hate being taken advantage of! What is this friggin’ world coming to… Damn sticker!
Link	1 comment\|Leave a comment

SOLEMN BLASPHEMY	[Aug. 19th, 2009\|09:49 am]
Frequent readers of mine might notice I do not often bring up religion in the old blog-a-roon-ee. I try to keep things fairly light and religion is pretty weighty stuff. I have always felt religion is deeply personal, solemn and maybe not appropriate to mock in a public forum with jokes like “A Priest and a Rabbi leave a bar and see a ten year old boy…” I figure blasphemy might not be the way to go here. I might think of myself as a religious soul but I cannot say I am huge fan of most organized religion. Despite all the good they do, I have a hard time getting over the ‘mine is better then yours so you better give me money so I can convert all the wrong people and if they still don’t listen I will kill them’ attitude that seems to frequently reoccur throughout history. That, to me, is real blasphemy, even more blasphemous then the Priest and Rabbi joke. Needless to say, living here in the Bible Belt I tend to keep my opinions to myself. Well, until now god dammit (oops sorry, more blasphemy). I now admit in print publicly that although there is kindness and love in my heart, I rarely practice any religious rituals (I wonder what solvent will dissolve tonight’s spray painted ‘HEATHEN ROT IN HELL’ graffiti on my garage door). I could ramble on for quite some time about my strong feelings on this topic but when push comes to shove, even though I do not identify myself by my religion, (much as I do not identify myself by my current career, another subject I rarely touch on) I was born Jewish (I wonder if those same solvents will remove the swastika that is now likely to soon appear on my front door). That is what has been sociologically imprinted in my skull since I was a wee tot, so that is what I more closely believe in (well that or Taoism which I became fascinated with when things were a bit empty in my life years ago). Although when I was a kid my Mom used to take me to visit Santa and we exchanged gifts on Dec 25 (conviently enough my Grandmother’s birthday so the excuse was it was a party for her)so its no wonder my views are a bit jumbled. Even with my somewhat liberal (oh crap, I used the ‘liberal’ word while living in Texas…at least now I won’t have to worry about the graffiti and swastika when the locals burn my house to ground) views about religion, I am still very effected when I enter a house of worship. Those places are really smartly designed; a few centuries of practice and they can make you feel the desire to become more pious the second you step into a chapel. I walked into one this past weekend and suddenly started wondering if I should be spending more time there. A close friend completed her conversion to Judaism this past weekend. Now that is a hard card to shop for at a Hallmark Store this side of the Gaza Strip. I was honored to attend the final step of her process in the temple. It was an exciting emotional moment for her and I was surprised by how happy I was to be there. Although she had to go through a lot to convert, including a baptismal like ‘mikveh’ bath (that my Methodist wife told me about having seen it on Sex In The City), the process is easier for a woman since she does not have to deal with the whole circumcision thing. Watching someone desire and work so hard to become something that I fell into by birthright is very humbling. When I was a little kid I hid my religion because that was easier then hearing all the jokes or having the other kids taunt me as they threw pennies at my feet. Even nowadays I have an acquaintance that feels the need to bring up that I am Jewish in a ‘where’s your horns kinda way’ every time I see him. I am not embarrassed nor am I egotistically proud of my religion. Even though I rarely observe Jewish holidays and customs, it is still a part of me and I probably should treat it with a bit more respect then I do. I just wish my religion, and all the others, were a bit more tolerant of each other and practiced a little bit more of the love thing that they were all founded on. Oh by the way, ‘a priest and a rabbi leave a bar, and see a ten year old boy. The priest says, "Let's screw him!" and the rabbi says "Out of what?’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-E_9ADC-kA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0oHAgfVgiw
Link	2 comments\|Leave a comment

DIRTY BOY	[Aug. 13th, 2009\|11:16 pm]
My wife and I, our two cats, dog and brick house managed to survive a week of having a 10 year-old visitor. The house, pets and I have recovered all right but my wife still seems a bit dinged up. My Nephew, accompanied by my Sister-in-law, joined our happy household for a week of fun activities in the blazing mid-summer Texas heat. Some heavy walking at the Dallas Zoo, Ft Worth Stockyards (yee-ha I do live in friggin’ Texas don’t I) and The Heard Wildlife Sanctuary wreaked havoc on my Wife’s bad knees and a seemingly possessed pesky piece of jumping Ikea furniture made matters even worse. Luckily Dawn should make a full recovery (not sure of the Ikea table’s status). Erik is a really good kid and I think he had a fun week. We sure tried hard to keep him amused and took him on a wide array of adventures geared towards a boy his age. When we were stuck indoors I was a good Uncle and pretended not to see his rather obvious cheating in Life, Battleship, Simpson’s Chess and the recently invented hit game Arrow Tag that features running around the house at full speed trying to shoot your sometimes hiding opponent with a foam arrow while trying not to damage any or everything living or inanimate in the house. I forgot how grubby 10 year-old boys are. Dirt sticks to them like a magnet and his millisecond trips to the rest room, so as to not miss anything important with the grown-ups, obviously afford no time for proper washing. Of course I was no different at that age. I remember showing my horrified older cousin Sharon what I called a ‘magic trick’ but really just consisted of me rubbing my arm until several small gobs of rolled dirt appeared on my sweaty smelly skin. Like most boys, I got a bit tidier when I started getting into girls. Of course I have had relapses like my somewhat repulsive dead skin collection I kept on a shelf in my freshman college dorm. As I have grown older I have defiantly become more of a germ-o-phobe. I might not be walking around in a hermetically sealed bubble slathered with antibacterial gel honking like Felix Unger but I do get a bit creeped out by potentially germ-ridden situations. I catch myself now doing a lot of ridiculous (useless) things like holding my breath if someone sneezes near me. One night last week we went to Medieval Times, the insanely hokey dinner theatre set in a faux 11th century castle which features a “royal” feast while you watch scripted tournaments of sword fighting and jousting wrapped in a paper thin plot about a peace treaty with a nearby nemesis kingdom. The last time I had gone was in Chicago for a drunken bachelor party. Believe me, the grossly oversized (and overpriced) goofy alcohol drinks helped. Years ago the original Orlando one featured all the beer and wine you could drink which might have helped an audience member enjoy the show more but likely caused an array of other problems that might seem a bit medieval as well. Before the ‘Royal’ feast is served everyone is told that since ‘there WAS no silverware in medieval times there IS no silverware at Medieval Times’ which certainly makes life easier for the dishwashers. So everyone eats their slab of chicken, ribs, toast, potato, soup and turnover with their hands. Even though I was with my Nephew when he washed his hands an hour earlier after we visited the on site museum of torture devices (an extra fee is charged for that) I was still a little grossed out thinking he was eating everything with his nasty little boy germ-laden hands. I did not want to be the one responsible for him catching some medieval swine flu. Of course then I started thinking how the servers were part of the show and seconds before a piece of possibly salmonella soaked dead bird was plopped on my metal plate, my waiter was wearing a stinky old costume robe and carrying our section’s Red Knight’s dirty old flag through the sawdust covered horse poop filled center stage floor. I imagined microscopic airborne steed fecies flakes floating onto our dinners with every gallop. When my Nephew was all slimed up with dinner he asked me to wave his Red Knight souvenir flag (one of the cheaper gifts at the grossly overpriced gift shop) for him as our man challenged the Green Knight. I winced with the same contorted face I might have were I to have diarrhea and no options but a desolate highway old concrete brick gas station’s one toilet bathroom on the side of the building with no locks or any paper products and obviously not been cleaned since the 1970s. I waved the flag, cheered on our Knight, finished my dinner and lived to tell about it. Next time I’m bringing the hermetically sealed bubble.
Link	Leave a comment

A NOT SO PERFECT 10

[Aug. 6th, 2009|01:07 am]

My 10-year-old nephew is staying with us for the week. Not having children of my own I can say I am definitely NOT an expert with kids that age but I have ‘Uncled’ a bunch of them so I know how to walk the line between generic adult and goofy bad influence. I find that boys that age are pretty easy to win over. I just make a few creative but slightly gross bodily function jokes and I’m in. Then again, that has always been my method to win most people over. It certainly is the same philosophy behind 3/4s of the kids animated movies these days.

I do not remember feeling as little, young or immature at that age as my nephew seems to me, although I am sure I was. I know I was far more annoying and obnoxious then he is. I dug out my old 4^th and 5^th grade class pictures and I do not look any more worldly then he does. Of course it is hard to tell behind the groovy early 1970’s hair and clothes. Looking at the pictures did bring back some scary memories of when I was my nephew’s age.

My fourth grade teacher was Mrs. Hunt, a mean old coot on the latter side of her career who was so close to her retirement if she spat she would have hit her pension. She seemed done with teaching and was obviously just going through the motions. She frequently leaned in my face when she loudly admonished me for my usual lack of discretion. When she talked, little drops of spittle would shoot through her rattling false teeth. The more excited she got, the more her teeth would rattle and the more balls of spit you had to dodge. After getting in trouble for throwing crayons out of our second floor window in an amazingly successful attempt of hitting a napping driver through a half opened window above the front seat of a school bus, my classroom seat, despite my height, was moved to the front row where I spent the rest of the year blocking the shorter children behind me and dodging the daily spit-fest in front.

Fourth grade was a wash for me; I mostly picked up bad habits there. I really looked forward to the next year and getting to start fresh with someone new. I had a wonderful 5^th grade teacher that helped me focus and learn. She was young, presumably had her own teeth, never spat on us and seemed truly excited about educating us until she left on maternity leave about 3 two months into the school year.

For the rest of the year I got stuck with the evil Mrs. Jensis, a miserable beast of a substitute that never had any control of the class and managed to make the cackling spit-laden anemic lessons of Mrs. Hunt seem downright dynamic. Mrs. Jensis was a big heavyset woman that was devoid of personality and as soon as she took over the class my mischievous behavior kicked in again. To strap in her wide girth she wore a huge thick girdle with a circular grid pattern under her tight 1970’s polyester slacks. Before class we often placed numerous multi-color thumbtacks on her chair and, on the rare occasions she bothered to drag her fat butt out from behind her desk to write on the chalkboard, we would see who’s color tack got closer to making a bull’s eye.

Mrs. Hunt and Jensis exemplified everything bad with the school system. I fell behind in math in their classes and really never recovered my entire school career. Luckily I had a very high reading level, so I always got by on my English grades. The teachers quickly caught on that the best way to get disruptive Dan to behave was not to challenge or teach me but to get me out of the classroom. I soon became monitor of everything. I was milk monitor delivering little ½ pint cardboard containers of milk to the kindergarten kids. I was AV monitor rolling the antiquated movie projector to show heavily spliced classics like Hemo the Magnificent to every class. I also was briefly Science Lab monitor and score checker for SRA (cheesy individual reading comprehension quizzes popular back then).

All these memories are very vivid yet I know they are filtered through the eyes of a 10 year-old. I hope when my nephew is my age the memories of this vacation filtered through his current ten-year old eyes are all good and fun.

DAN'S 4TH GRADE CLASS MRS JENSIS (NOT WITH DAN)

Link

1 comment|Leave a comment

LUCKY 7 & THE HAPPY SNAILS

[Jul. 30th, 2009|12:39 am]

Oh no! It happened. This light wacky peek into the oddness of my existence and my askew views of this mortal coil seems to have recently become a psychiatric sofa of sorts for me. This has never been my intent. No one wants to sit and read a boring narcissistic diary of self-analysis; personally if I were reading someone’s journal I would prefer to skim past the minutia and soak up the good stuff about making a fool of one’s self and the various life trauma de jour. That has always been my goal here. To entertain by putting the spotlight on the goofiness that is my life.

I should offer less whining about my twisted inability to fully relax when I am floating in a pool next to a waterfall at the Doral Country Club and blog more about things like the truly frightening magazine selection I saw at the 7-11 today (not a Time or Newsweek in sight but about a dozen capitalizing on the death of Michael Jackson, several about body art, fast vehicles, dieting, guitars and the largest grouping focusing on women in various stages of undress).

So rather then complain about my vacation last week I should share the highlight. My wife and I celebrated our anniversary with a sunset stroll down the beach we got married on. Seven years ago to the day Dawn walked the aisle, well actually strolled from the parking lot down the sandy path between the sea oats, to the tune of Here Comes The Bride as played by my sister on a little red oar-shaped electric guitar, up to the patch of beach we all gathered upon.

Seven years ago as I woke up the day before the wedding my first thought was that there was a very good chance this event would not happen. By then Dawn and I had been sharing a Dallas apartment for close to two years but we decided that night would be our last romantic night together as singles then on the eve before the wedding we would stay in different rooms. Unfortunately when I slowly floated into consciousness the day before the wedding I first realized I was not next to my future wife for our last romantic night as singles. Nor was I in my hotel room. Shit, I was obviously not even in the right hotel.

I rose with a start and noticed my buddies Mike and Andrew sound asleep in the room. The fog of the previous night started to run through my head. I recall starting the evening by chugging several Irish Car Bombs (Guinness + Baileys + Jameson Whisky) and at some point much later I remember talking about my upcoming nuptials from behind the bar making my own drinks at another place. Not much else was clear. I certainly do not remember calling to say I was not going to make it home.

I snuck out of the room and sheepishly and called Dawn to pick me up. She told me that Mike informed her last night of my green complexion prior to passing out at his hotel. Still very weak but incredibly relieved that my best friend helped me not ruin my marriage before it began we headed back to our hotel to prep for a long day’s events.

As I ate a greasy fast food breakfast Mike called. In my haste to contact Dawn I forgot to write a note leaving Mike and Andrew clueless as to my whereabouts. Being a good best man he danced around the obvious question and never admitted he did not know where I was but before Dawn got around to saying I was sitting across from her, Mike rushed off the phone to search for the missing groom. It obviously all worked out but Mike still claims he will one day get revenge on my wife for not quickly confessing my whereabouts before he frantically searched the hotel grounds, pool and a nearby cannel for my collapsed carcass.

My wife and I had a wonderful anniversary day at the beach. When it got dark we parked the car at a nearby upscale touristy shopping area and sat at an outdoor sidewalk table in the first restaurant we walked by. As we ate an amazing dinner we reminisced about the wacky things from our wedding that we planned and the even longer list of wacky things we did not plan (a mannequin head presentation, my family passing out en-masse, 2 Elvises [Elvi] one live and one a life size cardboard cut-out… guess maybe I should blog about my wedding sometime). I had just commented to Dawn that wacky stuff just seems to follow me around when she looked down and noticed to snails on the ground next to our table celebrating their relationship by engaging in a snail sexual act. Happy Anniversary Dawn and Happy Humping little snails.

Wedding Shot

Humping Snails

Link

Advertisement