Vacation

I am on the last day of a three day break that was supposed to last a week. We haven’t done a whole lot (went to the movies, had a cookout with the in-laws, laid around and dreaded going back to work on Monday), but I find myself wondering if we will ever get back to the days of taking that much needed summer hiatus of year’s past. Like many typical American families, we have grown accustomed to taking one week every summer and heading for the beach or the mountains. Unfortunately, over the last three years I haven’t managed to get out of the state with the wife and kids due to work commitments and our son’s grueling baseball schedule.

Frankly, this has been the summer from hell. Between working a job that has become increasingly stressful and unfulfilling as my hours have continued to increase to the point that I’m working ten hours a day, six days a week, my son tore his MCL playing baseball and my wife tore a calf muscle playing kickball. In the course of a just a few months, we have become a family that was constantly on the go to one of crutches and doctor’s appointments. No baseball was the perfect excuse for scheduling a quick trip to Savannah or the mountains of Tennessee , but the thought of carting one half of the family up the Appalachian Trail on a dolly didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, not to mention the fact that my nine year old daughter would probably hop on the daddy-pulled four wheeler as well.

So here we are rapidly approaching school and we have yet to have that defining moment of summer’s past. How do you give your kids that “wow” experience when you live in the northern part of a state that has a cooler-than-normal summer season that lasts about as long as Janet Leigh in the shower scene from the movie “Psycho?” We have to drive four hours to southern Indiana just to see hills (the kind of land buds that the glaciers laughed their asses off and didn’t even give a second glance to as they headed east millions of years ago). Hell, the tallest point in Indiana is in the middle of a corn field in the east-central part of the state where I grew up. How many Sherpa’s would it take to summit a corn field?

We’ve already done the Lake Michigan day trip this summer, a quick 75 minute drive to Saint Joseph, Michigan, on a chilly weekend in June. It’s a beautiful town on the lake, but about the only thing it has in common with the sunny Gulf of Mexico is water. And let me tell you, it’s really cold water. It’s the kind of water that comes out of a drinking fountain that’s so close to 32 degrees it gives you a brain freeze. If I ever want to experience water that cold again I’ll just go jump in the Elkhart River in January.

I guess I’m just thankful that I’ve got pretty good kids. The type of kids that understand how hard we work to provide them with the creature comforts of a decent life, don’t give us a whole lot of grief when we fall asleep at the movie theater watching a PG movie, and say “thanks” when we deliver them safely home from practices and sleepovers. When I look at our lives in that dimension, I can rest easy at night knowing that even if we didn’t make it past the state line for a ten day vacation, my children understand that we are doing the best we can.

And that’s all I can ask of my family. Work, love, and dream of a better tomorrow.

This Journey

As my son, Ethan, quickly approaches his fourteenth birthday, I’ve found myself reflecting on the wondrous journey that has brought us to this first summit in our lives; the beginning of manhood for himself and the long, slow recognition of this milestone on my part. There is a hint of sadness in this realization, even though I’ve know for years this day was coming. I guess I thought it would be a little later in his teen years (like sixteen or seventeen, which is around the time I started pulling away from my parent’s arms). Either way, I should have been prepared for this unmarked date on my calendar, but truthfully, the years have raced by so quickly that I find myself stunned at where we find ourselves today.

In many respects, he is still the same delightful child that we brought home from the hospital bundled in a blue blanket. He is honest, respectful to adults, opens doors for little old ladies, and works hard at school to bring home honor roll grades. His sparkling brown eyes and infectious laugh still bring a smile to my face, but at the same time he is beginning to assert his independence in a way that sometimes leads us to hours or days of sullen silence. In this supposedly enlightened age of cell phones and instant communication via text messaging, I’m still struggling to loosen the reins and set him free.

Trust is like swimming. I know he can dog paddle from one end of the pool to the other, but could he save himself if he got swept out to sea by an invisible rip tide? Those parents who can cut their kids loose at the county fair with a twenty dollar bill (o.k., maybe two twenty dollar bills) and brief instructions to meet at the entrance in three hours are a marvel to me. In my heart I know he will almost always behave and do the right thing (like staying away from strangers who look like Billy Bob Thornton on a three day Budweiser binge), but I cannot seem to get past that parental hump in the road that our children have to learn from their mistakes.

I’ve also noticed subtle changes in the bonds that have wrapped us together over the years. Many of the activities we used to do together have been cast aside for his need to constantly be around his friends and my growing need for down time from a life that has become more stressful in the last twelve months. Those frequent intersecting times when we would go to see a movie, play golf, or go fishing have dwindled to the point where we seldom spend just father/son time together. Looking hard into the mirror, I have belatedly started coming to grips with the fact that, like his mother and younger sister, he is an extrovert- and I am an introvert.

But the bond between a father and his son is a funny, quirky sort of thing. It hits you very hard and at the least expected times. It happens after a frosty exchange of “Why you can’t spend the night at your friend’s house three nights in a row.” It happens after a bad game where the ball just wouldn’t fall through the basket. It happens when I’ve said the word “no” so many times it flies out of my mouth before I’ve had a chance to consider the question.

Just when I think this impenetrable wall is sliding between us, when I think he only needs me to put a roof over his head or give him spending money, he will ask me something that knocks me back a few steps. Something like “Are you proud of me for getting straight A’s in school last semester?” It’s times like these… that after I’ve assured him how very proud I am and that he has the potential to do or be anything he wants in life, that I find myself getting teary with the knowledge that he is my lovely son, and that we have a bond so strong and resilient that it will never be broken.

Happy Hour at Shooter's Bar, Grill & Crime Scene

Where else but in America can you go out and drink while packing a .45 caliber handgun? Thanks in large part to the election of President Obama and a Democrat majority in Congress, gun nuts across the country have become convinced that Big Brother is going to break down their doors and confiscate their beloved handguns (as well as their Thompson submachine guns, hand grenades and their treasured collection of vintage Hustler Magazines).

Today, the Tennessee State Legislature became the 38th state to allow gun owners to bring their weapons to their local watering hole. The measure, which of course was supported and encouraged by the National Rifle Association (NRA), does have a caveat that you cannot actually drink while playing with your gun, hence, you must be sober before entering the nightly game of Russian roulette at Shooter’s Bar & Grill.

That server not hopping fast enough for you with your drink order? Show him/her your killing piece and you’ll be amazed at how quick that pitcher of beer hits your table. Sick of losing every game of pool? Instead of hitting your opponent over the head with your cue stick, pull your legally licensed six-shooter from your ankle holster and kill the cheating bastard. Tired of getting hit on by Tom, Dick and Harry, ladies? Pluck that nickel-plated nine millimeter from your purse and start shooting. After all, that’s why we call it Happy Hour, right?

Is it any wonder that we have the highest death by handgun rate of any civilized country on the planet? The inmates are running the asylum in this country these days, and with the paranoid greenbacks of the NRA fueling their political fervor, politicians are passing some of the most asinine gun laws this country has ever seen. I have nothing against people owning guns (I even have one myself)- but mixing alcohol with stupid people who have a John Wayne complex or the mind of a frat boy, is a recipe for a sloppy reenactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral every Saturday night at your favorite watering hole.

I guess we’ve reached a point of lunacy where if you live in one of these 38 states where you can carry and imbibe (I’m not sure if we can in Indiana, although you can carry a weapon in our state parks- just in case you get attacked by a rabid mole on a grub binge), it’s probably safer to stay home and listen to the crickets from your back deck while you knock back a Budweiser.

The World Without Us?

I’ve never considered myself to be a day-to-day environmentalist, but late last year I read a book titled The World Without Us, written by Alan Weisman. The book was a fascinating “what if” scientific perspective of what might happen to the planet and all the crap we’ve built- if one day man simply vanished from the face of the earth. Not exactly a pleasant thought (especially since we’re planning a family vacation in early August), but a very interesting thesis given how mankind has treated our home as if it were a giant porta-potty.

I have to admit that I picked up the book primarily out of a fascination of how long it might take the average American home (like mine) and the Gotham-like super structures of our cities to erode, corrode, and simply fall apart or collapse. The book didn’t disappoint in that regard. I was simply amazed at how short a lifespan my house, and for that matter, New York City, would have if we were gone and nobody was home to take care of basic maintenance.

I was also pleasantly surprised to read that cockroaches might soon follow our great leap into oblivion. Apparently without our nuclear-fired squalor and propensity for leaving Cheetos laying around the house like stale popcorn on the floor of your local cinema, these disgusting little bastards would starve to death. Other than mosquitoes and the common house fly, I can’t think of another creature I would rather have rotting beside my dusty corpse.

However, the true beauty of Mr. Weisman’s tome wasn’t the scientific expertise of how our post Dark Ages structures would fall apart, but the resurging aftermath of nature taking back the earth once we are all gone. No more fishing trawlers (or human demand) decimating the ocean’s vast species of aquatic life, no more man-made poisons in the fields, and no more cars spewing carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Environmentalist or not, it’s hard not to fall in love with the thought of a distant future where plants and animals reclaim what was, and is, rightfully their place in the cycle of this planet.

We currently live in a worldwide culture (with apologies to China and their one child per couple policy) where we have lost our ability to count. I’m not even remotely capable of doing the math on how we are going to feed the estimated 10 billion people who will probably be walking the earth in 2075, but I do know that too many people equals not enough food, a messy kitchen, and a very empty refrigerator.

Except for the premise that all mankind would simply disappear with the snap of Mr. Weisman’s talented fingers, I really don’t think it’s such a far-fetched scenario. At the rate mankind is overpopulating the planet, catastrophic disease and famine could be a very real possibility in our lifetimes. Add into the equation our reliance on everything nuclear, and you have the recipe for a disaster of biblical proportions. Given the scenario of the earth looking like a poisoned version of the moon or a landscape repopulated with towering forests and pristine waterways, I’ll take the National Geographic version every time.

Seriously, would it really be all that horrible to imagine a world without us?

Elkhart Will Be Back

Just a few scant years ago, when the manufacturing sector of the economy was humming along at a breathtaking pace, Elkhart was turning out record amounts of recreational vehicles, musical instruments and marine products. Fast-forward to 2009 and Elkhart has become the symbolic dust bowl of America’s faltering industrial machine. Elkhart is down- and the referee in the ring is counting upward to the apocalyptic number ten, but we are rising confidently to our feet, refusing to take the count while lying flat on our backs.

We are staggering to our feet financially poorer, but yet somehow wiser. Gone are the days of decent working wages on the backs of a high school diploma or G.E.D. The classified section of the local newspaper, The Elkhart Truth, has dwindled from three or four pages of “Help Wanted” ads to a quarter page on a good day (like Sundays). A weekend drive along County Road 6 or State Road 13 reveals a montage of industrial “For Sale or Rent” signs in front of empty factories that used to teem with activity five or six days a week.

Many of these hard-working neighbors and friends have packed up and left, leaving foreclosed homes and vacant rentals behind after losing their jobs. The sad thing is that many of these people are not moving to some industrious promise land, but are moving back in with family, even if that means shacking up in Grandma Jean’s spare bedroom in Fort Meyers, FL. But those who have remained, both native Hoosiers and migrants from Mexico and Central America, are doing what is necessary and planning (not hoping) for a better life.

While compacting our lives into manageable means, we are staring hard into the mirror and peering into the future. It is a future where you absolutely must have a skilled trade or education to survive and flourish. Local colleges and trade schools have seen their enrollment skyrocket as the unemployed have enrolled in welding, medical and business classes. We are collectively thumbing our noses at the paradigms of yesterday and shouting “To hell with minimum wage fast food jobs and temporary employment on manufacturing assembly lines!”

We are also recognizing the importance of family versus a monotonous existance of punching the clock and working that Saturday shift for overtime. We are spending more time with our children, an investment that will pay us back in spades with precious memories of mom and dad at Little League games and taking walks in the park. You can’t measure family leisure time spent with grandparents, parents and children in monetary terms, but you can measure it in quality of life.

Mark my words, Elkhart will be back. We may have fewer people and fewer national chain restaurants and stores in the future, but so what? We will be better educated and less dependent on manufacturing, even more culturally diverse, and more appreciative of having battled through the worst of times as a community- a populace that refused to roll over and die.

Goodbye, Texas...

Will the last five people in Texas who don't have tails and crossed eyes please hop the state line and relocate to Louisiana? According to a recent Rasmussen Poll, 33 percent of Texans believe their state has a constitutional right to secede from the Union, and 20 percent would actually like to see it happen. The current talk about secession in the Lone Star State is just another example of why Santa Anna and Mexico should have kicked Sam Houston's ass back in 1836 and taken back the godforsaken place.

The current governor of the Redneck State, Rick Perry, recently flamed the secessionist fires during an anti-tax, tea party in Austin. Terrified that he's going to lose a primary fight to current U.S Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison next year, Perry was at his political worst pandering to the "tea party" idiots and the right wing freaks that produced the likes of Timothy McVeigh.

"We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their noses at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot."

Huh? Have you forgotten about the Civil War and the fact that 600,000 plus Americans died in an apocalyptic excursion that nearly destroyed our great Union? You're not independent, Rick. You're a bunch of racist, misanthropic assholes, who have bought into the Marlboro Man fantasy that Texans are characters in a Zane Grey novel.

The last great governor of Texas, the late Ann Richards, has got to be laughing her ass off somewhere in the great beyond while watching this latest version of "Quest for Fire" meets "The Alamo." The intellectual bastion of Austin aside, Texans should pull out their history books and reflect on the fact, that for better or worse, we are stuck with their sorry, chapped asses.

Unless of course, we can talk Mexico into re-annexing the entire state. Or better yet, allow Texas to leave without so much as a whisper of protest. The new replublic could be called Texico, a funky mix of oil wells, steers, beers, and enough defective people to make Cro-Magnon man look like John Houseman in "The Paper Chase."

Bad Used Car, Bad Buyer

My 2004 Buick Rendezvous has accumulated a fair amount of body damage over the last four years. Every day when I go to work, I stop in front of my car and quickly glance at the broken rear tail light (I backed into a garbage can), several paint scrapes and dings on the back doors (where my daughter has single-handedly managed to door-ding one third of all vehicles on the road today), and the eighteen-inch crack that is creeping up on the passenger side of my windshield (it started out very small until one idle Saturday morning when I decided to wash it- and voila, the damn thing blossomed into a cracked web so big that Charlotte could birth a billion little baby spiders on it and still have room for more).

After four years together, I have finally come to realize how much I hate my car. In fact, hate might not be vitriolic enough to convey my feelings for a silver piece of space junk that’s spent so much time in the shop that I’m now on a first-name basis with the manager of the local Enterprise Rental Car franchise. I’ve seen soap box derby cars engineered and put together better than this vehicle. I’m also pretty sure that the design team behind my weathered hunk of metal and rubber was not only hitting the bottle on Friday afternoons, but every single day of the week. In other words, if these bozos had built Noah’s Ark instead of Buicks, there wouldn’t be a fucking animal walking around on the face of the earth today…

Here are just a few of the brilliant features included on my SUV-wanabee:

A battery that’s so hard to reach, a cardiologist could change out your aortic valve faster than me trying to attach jumper cables to the posts. By the time I finished jump-starting my wife’s minivan half-a-dozen times this winter, my hands looked like I had run them through the meat grinder at the local Kroger’s store.

A funky plastic knob for adjusting the driver’s seat that falls off every other day, and I still haven’t figured out exactly what it does adjust when the damn thing stays on. If I wasn’t so afraid that this do-nothing knob was my car’s linchpin, that one stop-gap device which keeps my Buick from running head-on into a 1985 Peterbilt carrying a load of hogs to slaughter, I would have thrown the damn thing away years ago.

Two compartments for storing four pairs of sunglasses. Who in the hell carries four pairs of shades in their car? Maybe the designers were watching an endless loop of Top Gun, and thought every future Buick owner was either a test pilot or Tom Cruise.

A molded plastic piece for holding drinks that you have to slip into a plastic sleeve before firmly placing your beverage of choice in the cup holder (my "special" sleeve lasted about a week before I accidentally pitched it out the window still firmly encased around a half-empty bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper).

I could easily add another three pages of design insanities, but it won’t make feel any better. In retrospect, I only have myself to blame. I am the world’s worst car shopper. I should have let my wife, Julie, go out and buy me a car while I mindlessly spent the day watching Sports Center on ESPN. She’s a tougher sale than me, knows more about cars in general, and doesn’t view the whole buying process as a complete waste of time.

I was at my absolute worst the day I bought my car from hell. Instead of researching the vehicle on the internet, I was watching the U.S Open Golf Tournament on television and the endless play of Tiger Wood’s Buick commercials. Two hours later, I decided I was going to trade in my trusty Ford Explorer and buy something new. Maybe even something like the cool Buick Rendezvous Tiger Woods was racing around the streets of New Orleans to the tune of “I Put A Spell On You.”

My biggest mistake was probably talking about all of the things that didn’t trip my trigger during the test drive with the salesman (his name was Nate, and he looked like he was thirteen year’s old). Instead of discussing all of the negatives, I spent twenty minutes driving around Goshen talking about golf. I didn’t even object later that day when I picked the car up and found a purple sucker stuck to the fabric in the cargo hold (that would later have to be cut out with a pair of scissors), the gas tank only a quarter full, and the somewhat important fact that the car had done its first 15,000 miles of life as a rental car in San Francisco (which might explain why the shit-faced brakes had to be replaced six months later).

The rest is history. In the span of a summer’s solstice I came to despise my Tiger-inspired purchase. I’m stuck with it for at least another year or two because of the economy, and I’m going to drive it until the damn thing shudders and collapses. I have no clue what vehicle I’ll be driving after that, but you can bet the farm that Julie will be out picking my new ride while I sit impatiently at home, Tivoing through every damn car commercial featuring Tiger Woods or Buick…

The God Question, Part 3

Now, at 46, I find myself lost in limbo. Intellectually, I cannot fathom that anything but evolution has gotten us to this point. Science is our savior and also the destroyer of faith. Genetics, the human genome, and a myriad of other scientific breakthroughs have taken us to a place where we know almost everything about the origin and history of our species. When I compare this knowledge to Biblical myths, my rational mind cannot accept the theocratic dogma as anything but an interesting story.

But I’m also a moral coward, and cannot let go of the faint possibility that something exists beyond the death of our physical bodies. While I have absolutely no faith in the Bible or the Koran- I’m not ready to declare myself an atheist. Call it hedging my bets, but I just cannot make that leap with some of the weird things that have been recorded regarding near-death experiences and that haunting sense of déjà vu I sometimes get that I’ve been somewhere else in another place and time.

Without an afterlife, what is the value of our lives? Why should we go through the motions of being our brother’s keeper if we aren’t accumulating tickets to Heaven? If there isn’t some tangible reward for good behavior, why bother? This is a question that haunts me as I vacillate between god versus nothingness. Do the horror and atrocities of two thousand years of religious hypocrisy outweigh the threat of damnation that has kept most of us walking the straight and narrow path for centuries? If we all woke up tomorrow and declared that God and Heaven are myths, would we become a civilization of murderers and thieves?

I can’t answer that question, but I’m relatively certain that we would not, as a species, degenerate into a horde of barbaric misanthropes, ala Attila the Hun. While it is true that the Bible (at least the New Testament) has a code of ethics that we would all be wise to follow, there is something beyond the Ten Commandments that is instilled in most of us, some innate understanding that human decency is part of our genetic code, and without it, we have no future and no chance of sustaining the human race.

Several months before my dad died from cancer, he told me in a moment of candid honesty on the golf course, that he didn’t believe in God, Heaven or Hell. His revelation didn’t surprise me. He had never been very religious, despite a strict Catholic upbringing, and he was always one of the most pragmatic people I had ever known. His statement also didn’t make me feel any better or worse about his impending death. It did make me realize that we are all lost when it comes to the question of faith and the possibilities of life just coming to an end.

So, my long search for spiritual truth has led me to the brink of intellectual freedom and the fear of a life that will end abruptly, without conscious transition to another dimension. I am paralyzed. Secular humanism is the factual light at the end of the tunnel, yet I find myself trapped in a self-imposed purgatory, caught between the truth of science debunking the religious fantasy and the fear that there is something beyond the light.

I’m very uncomfortable in this place, but I’m stuck here for now.

Limbaugh Crawls Back Out From Under His Rock

Eight years of shitty Republican governance sure goes by fast when your chilling on Oxycontin and getting pinched for the illicit possession of Viagra in a third world country. I guess all of those illegally acquired prescription pills must have sent you into the mother-of-all hibernations. Or perhaps you went on a little eight year journey in search of your soul, and of course, came up empty-handed.

What in the hell got you to crawl back out from under that rock? Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House? Harry Reid as Majority Leader in the Senate? Was it watching televised same sex marriages take place in the Northeast while you were sporting a three Viagra erection?

No, of course not. It was the election of Barack Obama, and gasp- not only is Barack a Democrat, but he’s black, and he’s from the Daley-fueled infernos of Chicago!

Limbaugh and his band of nutty neocons finally have the highest of all political figures to chat about and malign. The thinly-veiled racism of Rush has come back with a muted flourish now that he and his fourteen million Neanderthal listeners can dig their pressed, white sheets out of the closet (of course, one-third of all Republican males were already in there) and call once again for the White Male Revolution.

Rush Theater is back in business, and the lobotomized right-wingers are lining up in droves to buy tickets. He even looks like the old Rush, fat as hell and fun-tanned. I guess the brief version of the slimmed down bozo came to an end when he discovered that Oxycontin gives you the munchies worse then getting high in a rusting Cavalier while sitting in the parking lot of the local Pizza Hut.

After a brief monologue of unadulterated, narcissistic self love, Rush opens his new production to the mad applause of five hundred white males in cheap suits, nine sheep, and a shady-looking character named Doctor E. Rection.

Act One: “I hope he fails (President Obama).”

Rush wants the country to die a slow, four year death, because unemployed white guys don’t have anything better to do than to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Higher unemployment means higher advertising rates for all of the pharmaceutical companies who target his audience of flaccid, heart-troubled goobers.

Act Two: The Emasculation of RNC Chairman Michael Steele.

Thirty days into his chairmanship of a party that is crawling around the front yard looking for that lucky Budweiser pull-tab, Steele had the misfortune of telling CNN Host D.L. Hughley that Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush immediately went on the offensive and twenty-four hours later had Steele groveling at his feet. I guess this Republican Icon's new moniker should be “Rush Limbaugh of Nazareth.”

Act Three: “Before it's all over, it'll be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill."

This comment was made in reference to the proposed health care revisions anticipated by the Obama Administration. Senator Edward Kennedy is fighting a debilitating battle with brain cancer, and Rush Limbaugh is a compassionless prick.

“Rush is da man!”

“Rush is Right!”

The production ends with loud roars of applause as the genetically challenged audience gives their God-King a standing ovation while collectively wondering if Avacor makes a magic pill that will repopulate the pubic hair on their itchy, wrinkled ball sacks.

Keep up the good work, Rush. Keep talking and keep loving yourself. The Tony Awards are only three and a half months away…

Macey

Tonight, as I sit here typing on the computer, something is missing in our house. It’s not the sound of children bounding up and down the stairs or the constant blare of the television or You Tube on our computers. What’s missing is a panting mass of black hair and four stubby legs. A Darwinian creature that was bred to hunt for rabbits in holes and would eat anything that fell off the kitchen table.

It’s Macey, our twelve year-old Scottish Terrier. She died today. She was put down gently by our veterinarian in the sterile confines of her office while my wife, Julie, gently stroked her panting face and whispered goodbye. Despite the diagnosis of a stroke that left her walking around in circles and unable to lift her head for the last few days, Macey’s eyes never left Julie’s bereaved face as she took the needle without a whimper, and slipped quietly away.

Goodbye, Macey. Somewhere in the great beyond, may you find a squirrel around every corner and a comfortable place to rest.

You were loved…

The Naked Mourner

Steaming in the cold
morning air, my breath
rises slowly, crystallized
molecules mixing with the twisted
plumes of chimney smoke
that drift softly above
the wasting branches.

“Let all men’s dying hearts
cease today.”

The cobbled path is slick
with frost, hushing
the emerald moss
that flows over plundered
limestone, brittle and dispirited-
sloping desperately towards a sea
of trampled brown grasses.

“Let them lay down and
become one with my brethren.”

Staked hard through the corpses
of sodden leaves
and the unforgiving soil,
a grieving skeleton
swings softly in the dawn light,
mourning silently for one last touch
of the waning autumn sun.

“Let their final breath escape lips
pressed gently to my sobbing breast.“

Never Flip Off a Witch

We have been cursed. Wilhemina, the Wiccan Wonder Witch, has placed the mother of all b-movie curses on us. We are begging you, Wilhemina, please pull the voodoo pins out of our Kewpie Doll asses and throw us some good karma. I swear that wasn’t my middle finger that I extended when you cut me off in traffic by the IHOP. Please believe me. I would never flip off a fifty year-old woman with bad hair implants and eye brows that looked like Sharpie-drawn, upside down V’s. For the love of Agnes Moorhead, even Endora on Bewitched only screwed with Darren for thirty minutes a show.

Thanks to my stupidity in flipping off this woman or just plain bad luck, my family has been hit by the worst stretch of bad karma over the last six months. Here is just a small sample of what we’ve gone through since the day I flipped-off Wilhemina:

1. The icemaker on our refrigerator sprung a leak and dripped/poured into the basement. I don’t know what was worse, the annoying leak or pulling out the fridge from the wall and discovering Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction crammed behind the fan motor.

2. Our garage door hydraulic system broke and will have to be replaced. A cable apparently snapped and busted a pulley, which in turn cracked open a rusting spring the size of an Anaconda. After examining the amazing number of gadgets that made the door go up and down, we’re probably fortunate that when it broke our house wasn’t catapulted into outer space.

3. Our dishwasher broke. We now have gunked-up dishes that have biologically morphed into new life forms because we can’t seem to keep up with the onslaught of dirty dishes and glasses. My new bff is a moldy, caked-on piece of dried beef and gravy named “Chet.”

4. Some deviant little psychopath threw a rock and broke the outer pane of one of our living room windows. Come to find out- it’s really expensive. Think root canal bill and multiply times two. It’s also possible that Iran has developed and deployed a nuclear warhead, albeit a really shitty, small one.

5. The shower head in our kid’s bathroom stopped doing what it’s supposed to do, spray tiny droplets of water down on our munchkin’s taffy-tangled hair. A cheap fix, but I still haven’t gotten around to buying a new one despite my displeasure of finding that both of my kids use my towel after showering.

6. I fell and sprained a calf ligament while ice skating for the first time. If only I had remembered what a horrendous roller-skater I was in my youth, I would not have spent the entire month of January hobbling around like Ephialtes in the movie 300.

7. My wife fell down the steps and broke a bone in her foot. Now this might not have been Wilhemina’s fault, but I’m blaming it on her anyway. Julie was carrying a basketful of laundry down the steps when she missed the last step and fell, nearly ramming her head through a wall four feet away. Never a graceful ballerina, Julie moved one step closer to earning her master’s degree at the Chevy Chase/Gerald Ford School of Balance.

8. Two more bricks fell off our chimney for no apparent reason. Do you know how disconcerting it is to be taking the trash out on a cold January morning and have a brick fall out of the sky?

9. Our male tabby kitten escaped from the house one morning while Ethan was getting on the bus. Fortunately, after having multiple nightmares about it getting hit by a car or picked off by a marauding neighborhood hawk, we learned that it had been taken to the Humane Society by a neighbor and was later adopted out to a nice family who desperately wanted a kitten (at least that’s the story I told my bereaved daughter).

10. Last but not least, our furnace motor stopped working on the coldest night of the year (-19 degrees). Twelve hours later and eight hundred dollars poorer, we were finally able to un-layer our shivering bodies. Note to Wilhemina… Even while wearing three sweatshirts and two pair of pants, fifty-two degrees is pretty damn cold.

So in closing, I’m asking you, Wilhelmina, to call off your curse gods. Cut me a little slack after six months of torture and I promise to keep that middle finger wrapped around the steering wheel.

The God Question, Part 2

After twenty-five years as a true believer in God and the Bible, agnosticism began to creep into my life. It didn’t happen in a mad rush or because of some calamitous event in my personal life. Agnosticism reared its confusing head because religion is a strange mixture of blind faith and cultural theocracies. Cracks began to appear in my armor as I pondered the probabilities of anything (heaven or hell) lasting forever and the multitude of unanswered Biblical questions that began to eat at me when I looked at them in basic terms of black and white.

“and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

Truth be told, the words eternal and forever really started to freak me out. I had absolutely no concept of the terms and their relationship to time. I wasn’t going to live forever. My house was not going to stand forever. The earth was not going to last eternally. I loved to play with my kids and cuddle with my wife, but I wouldn’t want to do it forever. Of course, the alternative, post-life promise of an eternity in Dante’s Inferno- was even more disturbing. Instead of worrying about going to heaven or hell, I found myself worrying about going to either place, forever.

Another problem with my perception of God that nagged at me for years was the patriarchal designs of religion, especially in my professed faith of Catholicism. Like bread and water, men and women had to exist as biological equals for humankind to flourish. Put into a historical context, ancient societies were predominantly patriarchal, hence if God’s existence was fictional, one would expect a religious epiphany or hysteria to be witnessed and scribed in primarily masculine terms. One of the main reasons for my skepticism in Catholicism was the fact that this branch of Christianity had a gruesome history of not only marginalizing women, but burning them at the stakes as heretics.

It was also during this time of incertitude that I became more aware of what the people around me were saying about God. Now that I had tuned out the clergy, I found myself having revealing conversations with friends and neighbors about their religious beliefs. What I discovered was that if I asked twenty people about their concept of Christianity, no two answers were ever completely alike (even between spouses). The only spiritual theme I heard on a consistent basis was the term: “God has a plan for all of us.” This really bothered me because these true believers suggested that human beings were nothing more than pawns on an earth-sized version of the Game of Life. What was the purpose of existence without free will? Why bother to live, love and laugh if a great puppet master was out there pulling our strings?

Johnny didn’t die in the car accident because God had planned the where and why of his death from the moment of conception. Johnny died in the car accident because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was nothing more than nonsensical, bad luck. To believe otherwise was pure and unadulterated simplicity, a mythical dogma fobbed about our theocracy because people were afraid of the truth. Afraid perhaps that we were all alone- and that God didn't really exist...

The God Question, Part One

Plucked from my mother’s womb, I was thrust into a world of religious ceremony and true belief. From an early age, I witnessed the solemnity of Sunday services, rosary beads on bedroom dressers, and wooden crosses on barren walls. I believed in God because the Bible said he had created the heavens and the earth. I believed in God because my parents told me he was watching down on me from the heavens. I believed in God because I didn’t want to get a movie-of-the week disease and die at the age of seven. I believed in God’s higher power because men who stood behind wooden pulpits told me in stern voices that indifference would be followed by an eternity in a fiery hell.

My God lived in the fluffy cumulus clouds that filled the atmosphere on humid July days. My God had a Disneyland in the sky for deceased children and a floating park filled with flowers and hungry ducks for the elderly. My God had the resonant voice of James Earl Jones and the handsome, bearded face of Charlton Heston. My God hated the Viet Cong because they were blood-thirsty Communists and loved America because it was a Christian democracy. My God cured me when I was sick and made me suffer when I misbehaved. My God granted me small miracles from time to time (like not letting my parents divorce when I was eleven) and punished me with sleepless nights of remorseful fear for the salvation of my mortal soul.

When I entered my teens, my belief in God forced me to lie about who I was and what was ruminating in my adolescent mind. This was the Catholic phase of my life and I believed that priests were walking, talking, human versions of the Holy Creator. My limited understanding of the Bible led me to believe that nearly everything short of breathing and prayer was a sin. God had more rules and bylaws than the Boy Scouts and the United States Senate, combined. Sitting in the darkened confessional box, palms sweating, as I tried so very hard to remember the exact script, I felt lost because I just couldn’t bring myself to tell the priest all of my true sins. Instead of feeling relieved after reciting my contrition, my young mind was often filled with agony over the eternal ramifications of not being honest with God’s chosen proxy.

After high school and into my college years, organized religion and God ceased to be a reflective part of my every day life. I stopped going to church, primarily because I realized that I had quit listening to the priests and ministers years ago, and also because my Sundays had devolved into a day for sleeping in, watching football, and thinking about how much I hated Mondays. But despite my slippery decline from daily devotions and sometime’s worship, I had still not shaken my fear of eternal damnation. It was too hard, too ingrained in my DNA. I had been packaged out of the womb as a God-loving, jaundiced newborn, because this was America. Believing in God was like taking your medicine. You either faithfully took the pill three times a day or your body withered and died. Because of my indoctrination, I still prayed every night without fail, rationalizing that a quick rendition of Our Father and the 23rd Psalm would somehow save me when and if I reached the pearly gates of heaven.

God was out there, wasn’t he?

Thoughts on the Inauguration

A supporter waves as US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle walk along Pennsylvania Ave during a parade following Obama's inauguration as the 44th US president in Washington, DC. With tears and cheers and hope for a better future, more than two million people filled the streets of Washington in a joyous celebration of the inauguration(AFP/Robyn Beck)

Wow! What an incredible day for America. The first racially inclusive presidential inauguration in history was a grand sight to behold. President Barack Obama delivered a stellar address to the crowds gathered on the mall and promised that he would make us proud to be Americans again. The guy just exudes coolness and competency. After eight years of George Bush, it was refreshing to see that we finally have a leader with the intelligence, communication skills and human decency, to get the country back on track.

On NPR, several African-Americans were interviewed who had made long journeys to experience first-hand the joy of this homogeneous occasion. Traveling by car, bus or plane, these individuals, many of them elderly men and women who had experienced the hardships and horrors of segregation and the civil rights movement, treated this event as if it were almost biblical in nature. It was extraordinary to hear the enthusiasm and hope in their weathered voices as they were witnessing this glorious event, something most of them never expected to see in their lifetimes.

With the ascendance of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land, we stopped being a melting pot, and on one cold January day in 2009, became a brilliant rainbow of colors that include all the many tones of flesh that walk this nation. With much gratitude- here’s to you, Mr. President.

Don't Wish Your Life Away

Seven years ago, I used to work with an older woman named Penny, who was our office coordinator at the manufactured housing community where I still hang my sales shingle to this day. She was quiet and somewhat reserved. We worked together for almost two years and maintained a friendly, but somewhat aloof relationship. She reminded me of a librarian or a school teacher, someone who gave their all at work, but kept their personal life very close to their vest (or blouse).

Often, in the course of our polite conversations at midweek, I would tell her in a fit of excitement that I was tired of work, and couldn’t wait for the weekend or some other event in the not-so-distant future. Leaning in closely, as if we were dining in a noisy restaurant and not sitting in an empty office, a solemn look would overcome her bespectacled face. In a soft, measured voice, she would smile back at me and say the same thing every time.

“Don’t wish your life away.”

This went on for almost two years. At first I thought her admonishments were just a silly way of reminding me of our differences in age, but as our days passed and the seasons came and went, I began to realize that she was right. Penny was telling me a simple truth. I needed to appreciate the preciousness of time and how very quickly we grow old and die. Life is not an infinite journey. My children were growing up right before my eyes and changing every single day. The bitter truth was that everything and everyone that I loved- could be gone tomorrow.

The simplicity and wisdom of Penny’s words have reverberated in my mind nearly every single day since she left the company. The times of our lives are not the holidays, weddings or vacations that fill our scrapbooks and photo albums, it is in the here and now. If we all had a fast-forward button and could zoom past the doldrums of work and the boredom of living, what would we have left? Bits and pieces of laughter, love, and good times… a sixty-second commercial.

Wisdom can be gleaned from anyone at anytime, and thanks to Penny, I’ve stopped wishing my life away.

Sleepers

We are few in numbers, but if you pay close attention the next time you’re at the local strip mall or driving through a busy industrial park in the middle of the day, you might notice one of us. At first glance, our cars or trucks appear empty, but if you come close enough, you might see the top of a balding head or the silhouette of an open mouth and tilted nose.

We are sleepers. We are the people who don’t get enough nocturnal rest during the work week, and thus must revive our brains every day with a quick nap in a local parking lot. I know this because I’ve been one of them for the last nine years. Being a sleeper is tricky business. You don’t want anyone in your office to know what you do every day at lunch time. It would be extremely uncomfortable if your co-workers knew that you crashed and burned five days a week.

I have a rotation of three parking lots that I use, all within five minutes of my office. There is nothing scientific about choosing locations. First, you look for privacy, because the worst thing for a sleeper is to be awakened every five minutes by someone slamming their car door or pushing a squeaky shopping cart past your resting place. Second, you look for shade. Even with your air conditioning on full blast in the dog days of summer, it’s almost impossible to get a fitful forty-five minute nap with the sun beating down on your head and face. The final key is safety. It’s very hard to enjoy your nap if you have a nagging suspicion that you’re going to be carjacked, or about to have the Son of Sam put a 44-caliber slug in your head.

My favorite place to snooze is in the parking lot of a local shopping plaza. Because of the slumping economy and high rent, the plaza is three-quarters empty and the parking lot offers the perfect opportunity to catch a quick nap without distractions. After I’ve pulled into the preferred spot, my routine for my daily siesta includes determining if the sun is going to be a factor, quickly scanning the area for any annoying distractions (construction equipment, teenagers with skateboards, lawn mowing crews, just to name a few) and most importantly, putting my car's gearshift in park.

When I first started my journey of lunchtime snoozing, I was amazed to notice that there were other people parking in the fringe-areas of the asphalt lots. Initially, I thought the handful of people that were edging in on my turf were just making a cell phone call or eating their lunch, but after time, I realized that I was wrong.

They were sleepers, too.

At first this freaked me out just a tad bit (almost as if I thought I had become a unique, single subspecies of the human race), but over time I came to accept these tired people as my compatriots. I had no clue who these people were, what they did for a living, or why they didn’t get enough sleep every night to get through their day without a nap. But they seemed like normal people, and most importantly, they never parked closer then two spaces from my car.

After several months we even began to acknowledge one another with a slight wave of the hand or a quick smile. My most consistent companion was a balding gentleman in his mid-fifties who drove an enormous Dodge pickup truck. Another regular that I saw on a weekly basis was a forty-something guy who always wore sun glasses (even on cloudy, stormy days). My partners in slumber were joined on occasion by several other men over the years, however, they tended to show up infrequently, and we regulars looked upon them with suspicion because of their lack of consistency.

It wasn’t until early 2005 that we had a female member join our little group. She just started showing up one day in February (I remember the month because we were forced to park in a smaller area because their was so much damn snow piled up in the lot). She was a pretty brunette, maybe in her early thirties, and she drove a blue Camry. For the first couple of months she was aloof, parking in an adjacent lot that used to be home to an ice cream shop, but after she got used to seeing us several times a week, she eventually took the plunge and joined us in our parking lot neverland.

With the slumping economy shuttering almost every factory in the area that makes anything, we are back to just me and the balding pick-up driver. Mr. Sunglasses stopped napping in the lot last spring and I haven’t seen Miss Camry since September. I assume that they got laid off, or even better, hit the lottery jackpot and are snoozing on some sandy beach in a tropical paradise. As for me, I’m still napping three days a week in the parking lot, my heater turned on high, my mind briefly shutting down and recharging before heading back to the grind of trying to make a living…

The Death Penalty and Mental Illness

Once again the dismal state of Texas has proven why it should still be a part of Mexico, or even better, Saudi Arabia- where you can be executed for renouncing Islam (apostasy). Since 1976, Texas has executed 423 people, despite the fact that the death penalty discriminates against people of color, the poor, and the mentally ill. If the people of Texas could read, analyze data, and had any morals whatsoever, they would understand that every legitimate, academic study has proven that state-sanctioned killing does not reduce the homicide rate.

Now, the morally-challenged Texans are anxiously awaiting the opportunity to execute another mentally ill prisoner, Andre Thomas. In 2004, Mr. Thomas was found competent to stand trial by a Texas court for the heinous murders of his estranged wife, young son and her 13-month-old daughter. Mr. Thomas had a history of mental problems prior to his arrest for the murders, and as if to prove his point, pulled his own eyeball out of the socket and ate it before going to trial. If that’s not a sign of serious mental problems, then my name is Elvis, and I’d like to invite you down to the jungle room tonight to play Pong.

Apparently, Mr. Thomas’s predilection for eating himself was not enough to save him from an indeterminate stay on death row, and on December 9th, 2008, he ripped his other eyeball out the socket and ate it, too. This bizarre, erratic behavior, has still not convinced the Texas appeal courts that Mr. Thomas is insane. If the Texas courts had any common sense or human decency, this man would spend the rest of his life in a mental institution.

Wake up, Texas! It’s time for you to join the rest of the civilized world and abolish the death penalty, or at the very least stop executing the mentally ill who cannot comprehend their actions.

http://www.ncadp.org/

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/state/

History Repeats Itself

How can it be that a scant two years ago the economy was rolling along at a fair pace, and has now collapsed into a morass that economists have to go back to the early eighties to find corresponding numbers of unemployment and financial instability? Forget the high gas prices and the mind-boggling trade treaties that have shipped half of our manufacturing sector overseas. Plain and simple, it was the explosion of the housing bubble, spectacularly flaming down at our feet like the Hindenburg in 1937. Unlike the static spark that might have brought down the behemoth zeppelin, we have a more obvious culprit to our man-made disaster- the greedy, corrupt, mortgage industry.

Thanks in large part to deregulation, a cause championed by the conservative establishment (because it makes them rich), the mortgage industry has been allowed to run amok. This industry has become so greedy and shortsighted in the last decade that we could fill several foreclosed subdivisions with these shysters, and still have need to build more. Net income running a little flat for stockholders? Just come up with a new mortgage ‘product’ that’s adjustable, requires no income verification, and… greatly inflates the value of Joe Schmo’s eighty year-old tin shack.

The horrific irony of our predicament is that just a few years ago the manufactured housing industry was destroyed by the same nefarious game plan. Dozens of mortgage lenders did the exact same thing, and lent money on homes to people they knew would never be able to repay their loans. The result, is a once-thriving industry that provided hard-working Americans with affordable housing, has been driven to its collective knees. Finding a mortgage lender these days for a manufactured home is harder than finding a liberal Democrat in Utah.

Say what you want about the consumer’s culpability in buying in to the American Dream, but these predatory lenders knew that these loans were going to go belly-up. They cared only about one thing, profits, and they wanted their gold and silver right now.

Above the Falls

Side by side, we walk together
in the early morning mist.
He has outgrown my hand,
striding evenly and clear-eyed
up the twisting mountain path.

Beneath his ball cap, red hair,
wild from a short night’s rest,
springs vine-like over ears burned
red by the Tennessee sun.

We walk in humbled silence,
upward past sweet birch and
mimosa, patiently awaiting
that first delicious cascade
of fleeing water.

One last bend along a narrow,
entombed artery, and we stand
on the rocky crown, softly embracing

the cavernous mosaic

of heaven and earth.

Breathing in the fragrance of rushing
water that dies proudly on the rocks
below, he reaches for me, smiling broadly
in the fingers of sunlight
that dance at our feet.

The Best and Worst of 2008

The Best

1. Barack Obama is elected President of the United States.

The first African-American ascends to the highest office in the land, and it only took 219 years! Racism still permeates many layers of our society, but lets hope that Obama’s election sends the ultra conservatives, white supremacy groups, and the morons who fly Confederate flags, to a big comfy igloo at the North Pole. You want everything white? The Arctic has ten gazillion little fluffy white particles that will make you go blind faster than pointing a telescope directly on the sun.

2. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann & Rachel Maddow take on Faux News.

After years of Fox creating “news” and spinning all things to the right, MSNBC finally got their act together and put together a great line-up to battle the least honorable news network of all time. Helped greatly by the universal interest in the competitive Democratic primaries, MSNBC gave independents and liberals an entertaining summer and fall, bashing Bush, McCain/Palin, and the “Worst Persons in the World,” Bill O’Reilly and Rupert Murdoch.

3. Americans finally came to their senses & declared that Bush sucks.

It only took eight years and string of failures that made Neville Chaimberlin look like Nostradamus, but Americans finally woke up and said "Honey, George Bush is the dumbest asshole on the entire planet!" It's to bad the voting public didn't have enough common sense eight years ago to send this yahoo packing back home to Daddy 41 and the brush piles of Crawford, Tx.

4. Watching Tina Fey impersonate Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live.

Thanks to the never-ending election cycle, SNL reconnected with its audience again, in large part because of the brilliance of Tina Fey and the incredible ineptitude of Sara Palin. Fey’s hilarious quip “I can see Russia from my house!” will stay with me until the day I die.

5. Fewer of those stupid Homeland Security “Threat” warnings.

Color-coded, so President Bush could understand that red is “bad” and green is "good," Americans didn’t have to listen so often to Michael Chertoff’s made-up litany of possible terrorist threats. In years past, every time a Muslim cleric in New York City had a bowel movement, the NSA, CIA, and FBI, would run up and down the streets crying “Code Red…Code Red!”

The Worst

1. The collapse of the American economy.

While George Bush slept and Dick Cheney plotted his course for world domination, the economy stumbled, sputtered, and then dropped dead. The house of cards collapsed in large part because of deregulation (which is what happens when lobbyists in Washington write our laws), and while Wall Street cheated working class Americans out of their investments and pension funds, the Bush administration was busy building up the military industrial complex and torturing taxi drivers at Guantanamo Bay.

2. The 2008 Beijing Olympics.

China pollutes the earth at an astronomical pace. China doesn’t allow freedom of speech or any form of dissent. China supplies the capitalist societies from the west with sweatshop labor. China props up the government of Sudan, which commits genocide in Darfur. China occupies Tibet, a sovereign nation founded in the seventh century, B.C., and holds the nation hostage.

China is awarded the honor of hosting the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

3. The return of the pirates.

In a perfect example of why countries need functioning governments, Somalia reintroduced the world to pirates in speedboats and motorized skiffs. Wielding rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, these enterprising crooks have commandeered everything from oil tankers to private yachts, turning the Gulf of Aden into a bad “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.

4. George Bush, Robert Mugabe, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-il.

Bush- The worst President in the history of the United States, and one of the dumbest creatures to ever walk upright. Mugabe- The president/dictator of Zimbabwe. A man who has destroyed nearly everything in this beautiful country in southern Africa. Putin- A man who makes Leonid Brezhnev look like a hippy. Jong-il - Funky, chunky, bug-like dictator, who never grew up and hopes Santa will put a nuclear warhead in his stocking next Christmas.

5. The Middle East.

Will the eternal conflict in the Middle East ever cease, or at least take a little thousand year hiatus? If Jesus was still hanging out in the hills of Palestine and Israel, he would have to wear a flak-jacket and live in a concrete bunker just to hang out with the Disciples.

What a crappy year for mankind. 2009 had better be an improvement or we are all going to be living in caves or the decaying bowels of the world's mega-cities. Happy New Year!