The classics always translate well...
January 6, 2009, (11:53 p.m.)
Thankfully, our little girl likes for us to read her stories during the day and at bedtime. At bedtime, I think she's already figured out that I'm a bit of a sucker for it as a stalling mechanism, although eventually the book must go down and we start the long, arduous process of her deciding that every molecule in the room is just right so she can finally go to sleep.
She goes through phases, but one of her favorites is Goodnight Moon. I'd never read it before having a kid, so the following clip from The Wire always struck me (because just about everything on The Wire, the best TV series ever, was striking), but not in the same way that it does now:
If I were to do the same thing with my girl, I'd have to insert things like "Goodnight chickens. Goodnight well-armed militia neighbors. Goodnight meth labs. Goodnight possums. Goodnight sheriff's deputies who seem to know the way to a nearby mobile home by heart." Doesn't quite have the same poignancy, but you work with what you got.
Two hours of my life I won't get back: Doomsday
January 5, 2009 (10:00 p.m.)
Those who know me know that I have a ridiculous fondness for bad movies. I'm especially prone to subjecting my wife to Sci-Fi Originals (I realize that, during the eventual divorce proceedings for such mental and aesthetic cruelty, I'll have no defense. And that during those proceedings, my daughter will yell out, "I hate Frankenfish! I hate Frankenfish and I hate you!).
Tonight, I was flipping around the movie channels and came across Doomsday. I'd read a few reviews of it -- of the so bad it's ... well, not good, but kinda fun variety -- so I knew I had to watch it. But boy oh boy oh boy was I unprepared for this special bit of nonsense. To be fair, it's obvious that the thing is a very tongue-in-cheek homage to The Road Warrior, 28 Days Later, and Escape From New York all at once, but still...
The premise is pretty straightforward. The deadly Reaper virus hits Scotland, forcing the government to quarantine the infected areas behind a highly defended wall. About thirty years pass and the government and the rest of the world have pretty much forgotten about any survivors behind the wall until ... the Reaper virus strikes again.
There's only one thing to do. Assemble a crack team of paramilitary types (led by a hot chick with a camera instead of an eye) and send them into this no-man's land. From there, it just loses any pretense of sense.
First off, it appears that the only thing that granted anyone any immunity during the initial outbreak was for them to either be at a Renaissance Faire or at an S&M bar on '80s Night. The team quickly gets captured by a band of urban cannibals, all done up in mohawks and leather and piercings and such (They're also apparently cannibals just 'cause it's a rockin' thing to be, since there are countless cows roaming the Scottish countryside)
But it's at one of the following points that you realize that the movie's not slowing down long enough for anyone to go "Hey, waitaminute...":
- A synchronized dance routine courtesy of the cannibal leader and two leather-clad chicks on stripper poles to the sounds of a Fine Young Cannibals song. Yes, the cannibals are whipping themselves into a pre-feast frenzy by dancing to a Fine Young Cannibals song (in fact, I think all of the film's music, from FYC to Adam Ant to Frankie Goes to Hollywood, is from the '80s).
- Yet another synchronized dance routine that immediately follows, full of fairly round men in kilts stomping about on the stage.
- The scene that shows a captured operative being roasted alive and eaten by the cannibals (after the leader's thrown out paper plates to the crowd). (Let it be known that I'm not fan of cannibalism scenes, but in a way you have to admire a movie that doesn't flinch).
- The fact that an escape occurs via a steam engine train. I can hang with the idea of the train making its escape from the station, but after that ... it's on rails. You know where it's going. And it's not even moving that fast. And as we're shown in a later Road Warrior-esque chase scene, the punk rock cannibals don't lack for vehicles draped in the skeletons of their victims.
But that's only the first group of survivors. The operatives are really looking for a guy named Kane who supposedly holds the secret to the survivors' immunity. Well, it turns out he and his Luddite Messiah complex are holed up in some old castle, leading a group of folks who apparently decided that even fibers more complicated than burlap were Familiars of that Great Demon Technology. At this point, I'm not completely convinced they didn't use some stock footage from Army of Darkness or any other movie that shows medieval peasants going about their wretched existence.
From there, it's a fairly ludicrous escape scene followed by a fairly ludicrous chase scene that will make Road Warrior devotees cry in their beers. And the ending. I can't spoil it, but it may be the silliest bit of nonsense I've ever seen packed on top of a whole movie full of nonsense. All of which would be fine if the obvious glee the creators of this film had finding ways to be outrageous actually translated into fun or glee for the viewer. But in my case, it was not to be.
Wonder what's on the Sci-Fi Channel...
Never send an old-school geek to buy a geek toy for a child...
December 25, 2008 (11:56 p.m.)
The mission seemed simple enough: get a Star Wars ship for my nephew.
I should have known it would be trouble, though, from the start. When I asked my wife "Well, does he want a Rebel ship or an Empire ship?" she responded with, "He doesn't have a preference." What? As Stephen Colbert often says, "We're at war, sir. Pick a side!" I'm sure it's just that kind of ambivalence that let the Empire get a foothold to begin with.
When I was my nephew's age, I ordered a Cylon Raider from Sears. Back in those days, if you found something that the local Sears didn't carry, you ordered it from the catalog and a few weeks later, Sears called you to let you know that it had come in, and that you could come pick it up at the depot. My two-year-old, who probably already knows the Amazon-package-carrying UPS man by sight, will never believe that part of the story. I might as well tell her we cured our own hams out in the barn or something!
At any rate, I ordered this Cylon Raider and when the call came, I went to pick it up (or rather, mom drove me). But they had sent me a Colonial Viper instead. I promptly sent it back. A few weeks later, I got the call again, only to go back and find out that not only had they sent a Colonial Viper again, they'd apparently sent the very same one (judging from the dings and scuffs of multiple to-and-fro trips on the box). As I was sending this one back, the guy behind the counter wearily asked me why I couldn't just take the one they'd sent. I don't know what kind of look I gave him at such a ludicrous suggestion, but I knew that I had picked a side -- granted, it was the evil Cylon humanity-destroying side, but maybe subconsciously I knew that the pretty-boy, perfect-hair antics of Dirk Benedict were poison for my young sci-fi soul -- and before even a Centon had passed, I told him that I had to have a Raider. I mean, really, he might as well have asked me to take a pink Barbie car instead of a Dukes of Hazzard General Lee! The noive!
And indeed, I got a Raider the next time -- and if memory serves, it was one that actually fired missiles from its wings, back before the "you'll put your eye out" crew put a stop to unfiltered moments of joy like using your sister for target practice. I played with that thing forever. But anyway...
Back in the present day, I diligently went to the local toy stores, only to be faced with shelves upon shelves of toys that did the Star Wars legacy no favors. Star Wars Transformers? It'd be a hot day on Hoth before I dignified a continuity-wrecking travesty like that with my purchasing dollar. Cutesy-pie ships and figurines that looked like they belonged in the Lego Star Wars games? I could see the appeal to my nephew, who does enjoy a good Lego game, but I wanted to go old school. Where were the X-wing fighters, the Tie Fighters, or, ooh, the Darth Vader Tie Fighter?
Oh, there they were in that same cutesy-pie style. Where were the leaner, meaner toys that looked like they could actually fight a battle? I mean, even after my time as a toy-user was way over in 1995, they were making X-wing fighters covered in burn marks and dings. That's what I was looking for. But instead, I was staring at toys that looked like they'd saunter up to the Death Star (which, if it exists as a current toy, probably looks like the sun from the Teletubbies) and hug it to death. No sharp edges, no clean lines, no sense of purpose. Heck, the X-Wing fighter I was looking at might as well have had a smile on its face like Speed Buggy.
I have to admit, I was faced with a geek crisis. And I wasn't up to the task. I had to go home and think about it. I talked to my wife, who calmly told me, "He probably won't care." I think she understood my dilemma, but she knew it was more important to use a little tough-love to get me through.
And then I went back out, checking out several other stores, and coming to the conclusion that I just wasn't going to have any choice.
So there I was in Toys R Us one final time, staring down the Star Wars toys as the Sounds of the Season filled my ears (this year, it seemed to be some variation of people gritting their teeth and hissing, "I'll be in the car!"). What could I do? I grabbed a stubby little X-Wing Fighter and paid my blood money to the Lucas Empire.
The road does indeed go on forever...
November 11, 2008 (10:19 p.m.)
I'm on the road right now, in a little town just outside of Chicago. It's been a good trip, but travelling is hardly the glorious escape that the commercials would have you believe.
There's the two-hour drive to Charlotte because your local airport is one of the most expensive in the country, and which practically doubles the overall cost of your fare everytime you use it. Then, once you get to the airport you've decided to use in its place, you get crammed like sardines onto a shuttle to get from the long-term parking to the terminal.
Then you get to go through security, which to be quite honest, was better at Charlotte than it's been anywhere else I've flown. However, there was one funny moment.
While we were coming up to present our boarding passes, Companion #1 is told by a security guard to go through the full-body scanner. Companion #2 isn't sure who's she's talking to, so when he asks, she snaps, "You both go!" Thankfully, I didn't have to go through the full-body X-ray thingamajig (although we still have to go through O'Hare on the way back, so who knows what the future holds?). Both of my travelling companions said that it was a very weird experience to walk into this portalway with all kinds of cameras pointing at you. Shudder. It probably has a direct link to YouTube.
For the plane ride, I was crammed into the very back seat, up against the restroom. I was crammed up against the wall of the fusilage in a seat that wouldn't recline, with no legroom, and with no wriggle room because there was a guy my same size sitting right beside me. I swear I must have looked like I was a contortionist in a box. Well, at least the crick in my neck loosened up -- about forty-five minutes after we got off the plane.
Getting out of Chicago was easy enough, although we got to our hotel too late to eat at a local place, so we began what is becoming a saga of bad service. We hit a chain restaurant that night, and were ignored by the waitstaff. We went to a local pizzaria the next night, where it took 45 minutes to get our food. Tonight, we went to a so-so Mexican restaurant where it took us 2 hours to get in and out (and where, for some perverse reason, they were showing The Biggest Loser on the TV as they fed us cheese and sour cream).
I swear it's enough to send me screaming back to my hotel room, except then I'd have to spend half the night listening to my neighbors get it on for hours in the wee hours. I swear, it's like they're making an adult movie over there. A long one, with the speakers pointed right at my wall. I can hear them bumping around in there even as I type this, so I'm probably about to get an encore. If it's anything like last night, I'll probably be rolling with laughter by the end of the night. They're very vocal, and quite decriptive.
And there they go...
One more day, though, and we'll be heading back home. A little Chicago rush hour traffic, some O'Hare security, some cramped flying for a couple of hours, and some more driving, and I'll get back home just in time to go to bed and go to work the next morning.
Dante would be oh so proud
September 21, 2008 (12:25 a.m.)
Of all the commercials that drive me bat-guano insane (and there are many), the Bacardi Mojito ad probably tops the list. It's this one:
I was complaining about it to a friend of mine, and he seemed surprised that I had a problem with the commercial's rampant bootie-shaking. There's nothing wrong with bootie-shaking, I told him, but this commercial seemed to depict a bootie-shakin' realm of eternal punishment, where all of these seemingly happy club-goers have been dancing forever. Whatever their sins were -- and we will never know, for the dead cannot tell what lies on that other side -- they are compelled to shake their moneymakers for all eternity.
The cartilage in their joints has been ground to dust. Bone grinds against bone. And still they dance.
Their thirst is slaked only by mojitos made from their own tears, and still they dance.
Their souls scream from within them, unable to get past the grim rictus of their smiles, and still they dance.
And controlling it all is the bartender, crushing leaves with a mortar and pestle, keeping a fiendish rhythm that would have been considered inhumane on any prisoner-powered slave ship throughout history. He stops for a moment and the crowd stops dancing, for perhaps the first time in eons. They look confused, not realizing their freedom, as if they're chickens that have been raised in a chicken house all their lives and don't know they can go out into the pasture. As the calm settles over them, surely they begin to realize their opportunity. But too late. The bartender smiles, shakes his head at their doe-eyed foolishness, and resumes the beat. On and on and on.
Mojito, thou art the devil's cocktail!
Sloth and Slackness, thy name is Sweet Tea Prohibition
September 20, 2008 (11:32 p.m)
Ay Carumba! Has it really been more than two months since I last posted? I'm afraid it has. That's like a million years in Interwebs time!
Mainly, it's just been a boring -- or rather, unpostworthy period -- consisting of going to work and taking care of the little one. The little one's still a perfect angel, but she's developed an exhausting fear of bedtime. Or rather, a fear of her crib -- any crib.
It started a few weeks ago, when my wife and little girl came back from a trip, both with colds. Punkin' was wanting some coddling, and she got it, but nothing that we haven't done before with no repercussions. But as she got better, she got harder and harder to put to bed. We'd put her in her crib and she'd scream bloody murder. This child had slept perfectly for over a year, really since we'd taken her out of her basinet. What was this crazy new development?
But the routine quickly established itself. We'd put her in her crib, she'd scream, we'd check on her after five or ten minutes. Sometimes she'd lay down and try to go to sleep, and sometimes she'd stand and cry. But even when she lay down, she'd only relax if we were standing right over the crib. We tried all sorts of things over the ensuing weeks, but nothing ever got any better. In fact, one night, it took her five and a half hours to go to sleep! The only thing that changed was our level of exhaustion -- expecially my wife's, since she got up whenever our daughter woke up screaming on a work night.
Gradually, though, we eliminated other possibilities for her neediness. She wasn't sick anymore, she wasn't scared of the dark, she didn't have an ear infection. She just didn't want to get in her crib. We'd heard that babies her age could have nightmares, so we thought maybe she'd had a nightmare about the crib, or maybe she gotten an arm or a leg caught in a crib slat and now associated it with hurt. Whatever the case, she would not go quietly into that crib, or even my mother's completely different crib.
So we started tossing around the idea of getting a toddler bed. It's too early for one, really. Punkin's still young, and she covers a good bit of ground rolling around in her sleep, so we were afraid of her falling out. But we figured with the right kind of positioning and padding, we could minimize that risk. That was when my mother said she could get us all kinds of toddler beds on the cheap.
Let me say right now that my mother's a wonderful mix of Mr. Haney from Green Acres (for all the things she already has stored away) and Walter from The Big Lebowski (rightly famous for his claim of "You want a toe? I can get you a toe."). You don't idly mention that you're looking for something, or you'll find five of them on your back porch. But you know she'll come through. So by the time we got to her house this morning, she already had two toddler beds assembled in the yard waiting for us. They were too big to fit in the car, so she loaded one up in her mini-SUV and brought it over to our house -- picking up, along the way and never one to pass up a yard sale, a most excellent sandbox that we had also been needing.
So we set the toddler bed up and our daughter immediately took to it. No mattress? Fine. She'd sit on the slats like she was in a big rowboat. Mattress? Even better. She'd get on it and bounce around, turning it into her little playground. Bedtime? Even better. She didn't go down immediately, but with a little loving, she went down soon enough and quietly enough. She's much, much more relaxed. Her times waking up tonight have been nothing like the hell of the last three weeks, when she'd wake up in full scream and not go back down for hours. Tonight, she stirred, looked up at me, and couldn't care less that she'd caught me sneaking out of the room. It was awesome.
I'm not going to jinx myself by claiming that we're out of the woods. We're not even out of the first night. But it's a welcome respite from three exhausting weeks that had me, my wife, and my daughter walking around as sleep-deprived zombies who dreaded bedtime.
New day, new quirk
July 09, 2008 (9:51 p.m.)
The little one's developed a taste for blackberries. We have a lot of wild blackberry bushes growing on the back-40, and her sharp-as-a-hawk eyes can see a ripe blackberry from about 100 feet away. Not that she cares if they're ripe, but surely she likes those the best. She's gotten into the habit of taking a handful of them and setting them on top of a stump. The stump's only a little shorter than she is, so she gets a really good view of her prey up close that way. Her favorite thing is to press down on each blackberry with her index finger until it spews juice all over the stump. Within minutes, her chin and hand are covered in blackberry juice. As for the stump, it's looking more and more like an executioner's block every day.
A public service announcement to my sister
July 09, 2008 (9:11 p.m.)
Dear sis,
While I was staying at mom's for the last few days, I enjoyed the following Southern-cooked mommy food:
Monday night: Fried chicken, green beans, fried squash and potatos, fresh-cut tomatoes, fresh-cut cucumbers, and banana pudding. cantaloupe
Tuesday night: Pork chops, squash casserole, tomatoes, cucumber, creamed corn, cantaloupe, banana pudding
Wednesday night: Cube steak, cantaloupe, cucumbers, mashed potatos, banana pudding
I know the meat doesn't interest you, but I thought the rest might work as incentive to come visit<G>.
Our children are meant to replace us. Like any good fighter, they start by working the body...
June 27, 2008 (12:33 a.m.)
My healing from the gall bladder surgery proceeds. For someone with five brand new holes in my torso, I feel pretty darn good!
My 16-month-old daughter, though, has really been listening to that "there's something I shouldn't touch" sixth sense of hers, however, and is really finding ways to send shots of pain through me. Some choices are just impish. The other day, she walked around the corner holding a kitchen whisk, and promptly whacked me in the midsection, nearly sending me to my knees. This, of course, delighted her immensely. I'm surprised she didn't close in on me, hammering me with that whisk -- ratatatatat -- like I was a pinata full of cheese (She really likes cheese. So do I. So, in a way, I guess I am a pinata full of cheese!)
Other methods are just sweet. I can't pick her up right now, and won't be able to for several weeks. So I sit on the edge of the couch so she can get close to me. She likes to run up to me and slam her head into my midsection so she can hug me. This makes contact with about two sets of stitches. It's not something I want to discourage, though, my daughter running up to me full-throttle to give me a hug. I just wince inside as she gains steam, hissing and wheezing like a freight train full of Sleestaks, and I take one for the team.
Thinking I'd find a way around this, I started sitting on the floor with my legs out in front of me. This not only made it easier to hit those stitches with her whole body instead of with just her punkinhead, but it also gave her the added bonus of stomping all over my groin as she climbed me. Not a good idea. A rookie mistake.
Much more of this, and I'll be sneaking around the house like Inspector Clouseau does when he comes home, knowing the manservant is waiting to pounce on him. I won't think to look down, though, as my daughter slides open the lowest door on the bookshelf, slices my Achilles tendon with a Fisher Price broadsword, and then starts hammering me in my midsection with a whiffle bat once I hit the floor.
She doesn't treat her mother like this. She obviously recognizes a more formidable foe, and will surely wage a sustained, more complex psychological war on that front over the years.
Gall bladder, I hardly knew ye...
June 21, 2008 (8:23 p.m.)
Well, the gall bladder is gone. I'm now the proud owner of five brand new holes in my torso. It was apparently a routine surgery. I was certainly impressed by the redundancy checks they had built into my stay. I must have had a half dozen nurses come in and verify my name, birthdate, and reason for being there. So there was either something about my story they weren't buying -- and they were trying to trick me! -- or everything was actually pretty routine.
Well, apart from the hideous shape that my gall bladder was in. My doctor, who had seemed so jaded about the whole thing when outlining the surgery for me ahead of time, was apparently struggling for words to describe my gall bladder to my wife. It was "like wood," he decided, after looking around the room for any hard surface that would make a good comparison. "They should be soft, but it was like wood." They'd had to chip it apart to get it out of there.
So maybe that's why I hurt so badly the day after the surgery -- apart from the fact that I had five holes in my torso. Maybe they had to jiggle me around a little bit extra to get everything out. I know I wasn't ready for the anaesthesia to be coursing through my body for two full days. I may have been awake a grand total of six hours over a 36-hour span.
I'd also forgotten that, every time I sleep while heavily medicated, I have my David Bowie dream. It's a really bizarre dream that starts off like some black-and-white European art film, like a Bergman film at its most severe, full of shadows and angular architecture. There's a man and a woman, and the man is trying to get the woman killed as they make their way through some weird concrete structure. Ultimately, it's up to David Bowie -- the suave, debonaire '80s David Bowie -- to come in and do the deed.
The man swears to David Bowie that he'll be silent, that he won't betray David Bowie. David Bowie agrees that, yes, the man will indeed be silent about everything he's seen.
They go outside, and it turns out that the whole thing's been taking place on an isolated outcropping of rock in the Mediterranean. At the top of the rock is the building that the first part of the dream took place in. At the bottom of the rock is this hidden grotto, where David Bowie's true evil resides. The grotto's full of some Rube Goldberg contraption that has a lot of mummified bodies and skeletons hanging like windchimes. When David Bowie starts turning this giant crank, a great wind courses through the grotto and through the bodies, making this keening sound that I imagine is what the sirens from Greek mythology must have sounded like. My dream always ends with the man in a rowboat trying to get away for all he's worth -- for he now knows that there's only one way David Bowie can guarantee his silence. But as the sound of the wind through the bodies makes its way across the waves, you know he'll never escape.
And yes, I'm quite aware that David Bowie is the head of the Guild of Calamitous Intent in the-brilliant-you-oughta-be-watching-cartoon The Venture Brothers. I'm sure that's influenced me in some way. But I'm pretty sure I started having this dream before The Venture Brothers started, so maybe Bowie's many phases scarred us more than we knew...
The Venture Brothers' David Bowie, with his "Diamond Dogs" (Iggy Pop and Klaus Nomi)
The worst part about that dream is that when you wake up from it, it's a hard waking. You don't just have the hazy sense that David Bowie was performing some kind of necromancy in a harsh avante-garde landscape, and then turn over and go back to sleep. You just kinda have to walk around the house for a few minutes letting your brain settle back down.
Given half a chance, that tree would kill you and everyone you care about
June 13, 2008
Overheard a few days ago: "People who are trying to protect forests are hurting the environment."
What?
Actually, I know the context for that statement. It comes from recent articles that talk about the massive potential for vast, unlogged Canadian forests to give off stored carbon as the trees die natural deaths and decompose. Admittedly, the reports are a little more complicated than that, getting into things like treelines moving northward too fast for the trees to adapt, etc. But anyway...
There's a few things wrong with taking that and interpreting it as a mandate to pave Canada while its citizens have their backs turned watching hockey or cooking bacon:
- I'm pretty sure, if I remember my grade-school biology correctly, that trees spend a good part of their lives giving off oxygen. Which sounds pretty useful. Probably balances out that whole carbon thing on its own.
- Trees provide habitat for deer, birds, squirrels, sasquatches, Jersey Devils, and other sundry critters.
- Trees provide shade and reduce temperatures. We have a lot of tall oaks and hickory trees providing shade around our house. It's quite nice when the temps get into the triple digits, as they did this past week.
- Decomposing trees and their leaves produce very nice dirt. The cleared part of our acreage was cleared only about thirty years ago. It has tremendous, deep topsoil. And any time I need some more, I can just go into the woods, root around under about six inches of leaves, and there you go...
- Trees have nice attitudes. Well, most of them. Not the Bradford Pears. They're the insufferable fops of the tree world.
So there. I haven't checked my science, to make sure my facts are exactly right (which, admittedly, makes me a bad academic, even if I am an English major). But I'm pretty sure we're better off with trees, and with letting trees do their own natural thing.
The gall bladder: apparently it's the Shemp of the human body
June 01, 1:06 a.m.
I've been experiencing a lot of abdominal pain lately. Intermittently, I'd be hit by nausea, intense pain right under my rib cage, and searing pain that laced all the way down my back. It sent me to the emergency room, where the doctors found nothing. Later, another attack got me to go to my family doctor, and he ordered some tests. Some CT scans, an ultrasound, and some visits with my gastroenterologist later, and it's official.
They're going to take my gall bladder out.
I'm surprisingly neutral about this. On the one hand, I don't want them to take out any part of my body, but at the same time, I'm glad they found the answer. It's only been recently that I realized that I'm in a fair amount of discomfort every single day. Some would call it pain, but I've gotten used to it. And besides, real pain came in those episodes where I was writhing around on the floor for hours, praying to throw up, praying I'd get exhausted enough to simply fall asleep. That's no fun at all. Looking back, I can connect the current episodes to a continuum of random nausea that stretches back a few years.
So in a couple of weeks, I'll go under the knife of a fresh-faced Doogie Howser doctor who says he does hundreds of these procedures a year. He didn't come off cocky, but I can just imagine him putting on a blindfold and attempting the procedure by memory alone, in the same way that Michael Jordan occasionally attempted left-handed free throws with his eyes closed. Hopefully, my local hospital isn't one of those where the doctors make bets over who can perform routine procedures the fastest.
But I'm left to wonder what I'll do with this empty space in my body. Granted it'll be small, but I feel I should take advantage of it in some way, such as:
- Rent it out to Baba Yaga, so she can store an egg containing some poor sap's soul. Of course, the devil's in the details on a deal like that. I'd have to be sure not to let it be an egg inside of a duck inside of a goat or something like that before it got into me. Shades of Homer Simpson wishing for a turkey sandwich ("I wish for a turkey sandwich on rye bread with lettuce and mustard. And... and I don't want any zombie turkeys, I don't want to turn into a turkey myself, and I don't want any other weird surprises, you got it?")!
- Travel to various martial arts dojos and hustle the senseis for money, betting them that I can withstand their awesome Eagle Claw Gall Bladder Nerve Pinches.
- Become a drug mule. Not with one of the bad drugs, of course. But maybe I could smuggle cheap Canadian Viagra into the local nursing homes. I'd make a fortune in Social Security money and long, rambling stories.
- Concoct some perverse moral lesson for my daughter, in which I tell her that I misbehaved in some way as a child (say, for leaving my toys on the floor) and that the Devil came and took my gall bladder as punishment. And that for something really big, there's no telling what he'll take. Of course, then she'd look in my office, at all of MY toys on the floor, and see that I and most of my organs are still here, and call BS on me.
Oh, the possibilities are endless. But for now, I guess I should just stick with hoping that they can indeed do the procedure the new, less invasive way, rather than resorting to the old method that leaves a massive scar across your midsection.
I looked into the future, and renewed my promise to build an isolated, sarcasm-proof man-shed in the backyard.
May 01, 11:09 p.m.
The wee one's a total hoot these days, causing nary a blip of trouble. But I know full well that she will eventually be called upon by the Dark Powers to become a teenage girl. Then it will be left to my wife to fight the emotionally-charged Good Fight, as I cower in fear, contemplating the Dad-Guild-issued last-resort coma pill that would put me to sleep until after the checks are written for my daughter's wedding (Punkin', if you're reading this, think about eloping! All the cool kids are doing it!).
I thought of those dire days ahead as I overheard the following between a teenager and her mother:
Mother: So what did you say was wrong with your phone?
Daughter: It quit working. I need a new one.
Mother: Well, it's not the phone. I tried it with your sister's battery and it worked
fine...
Daughter: What? No! It's the phone! Mooommmmm...
Mother: Your phone's fine. I'm not buying you a new one. We'll just get you a new
battery...
Daughther: It's old and broken!
Mother: No, it's not...
Daughter (exasperated, rolling her eyes): God! Stop talking!
The daughter's obvious ploy to scam her mom out of a new cell phone crashing and burning around her, she then descended into sullen silence.
My little girl's only got about twelve years to go. It's gonna be great.
They say that when Mozart debuted his Maccaroni-and-cheese suite, fans rioted in the streets.
May 01, 10:34 p.m.
Vacation was a lot of fun. Once a year, usually around our anniversary, we go down to this inn/bed-and-breakfast at the beach and totally vegetate for days at a time. There's always an interesting crowd there. Since the place has no TVs or Internet connections, and frowns on cell phones, I guess you could say it usually gets either older folks or folks who are younger but a bit granola. It's not uncommon to see a mother bathed in SPF 50, trailed by ghostly, translucent, freakishly well-behaved children who probably speak better English than I demonstrated in my Master's thesis. You're also likely to hear a vacationing professor say something cringe-inducing like, "It's so Zen here..."
Listening to other people is half the fun, though, especially at meals. My wife and I have decided -- well, we decided long ago, when people stood in line for days when a Denny's opened here -- that no one cooks anymore. Granted, the food at our vacation spot is outstanding, but it's basically the same food that we both grew up on. Fried chicken, casseroles, bacon and eggs, pancakes, pulled pork BBQ, porkchops, corn on the cob -- that's pretty standard fare for us, blessed as we are to have grown up with strong southern cooks for mothers. To most, people, however, a sweet potato is the most exotic of the earth's treasure's. Never mind that my father-in-law has a whole box of them on the back porch. To hear our fellow diners talk, a sweet potato must surely be some extinct delicacy, smuggled across the border from dusty vaults that once belonged to the Medicis. And a sweet potato casserole?! Don't even get me started on the way their eyes glazed over, as if something so exotic and scintillating was surely not meant for mortal tongues. Heck, that's probably what kicks off the new Indiana Jones and Hellboy movies: some Nazis trying to construct a massive sweet potato casserole to fuel Hitler's occult research.
I may sound like I'm exaggerating, but after three consecutive mornings of hearing people asking the cooks, "What are grits?," it was clear that people need to get refamiliarized with the kitchen table. Or at the very least, that our little inn needs to print up laminated placemats that detail the history and varieties of the noble grit.
I'm outta here...
April 16, 1:28 a.m.
No, not in the sense that I'm abandoning the blog (although some might wish that were the case). And indeed, it might look like I have, since I haven't updated in over a month.
Life just gets in the way sometimes, and I guess the double-edged sword of domestication is that you don't have as many thrilling stories to tell (unless you really want to hear of my daily angst as I stare at the snack table at work each day).
Anywho, I'm gonna go on vacation for a week. Gonna nap, read, write, nap some more, drink a fair number of beers as I do all of those things, and eat a ton of home-cooked Southern food. I expect to come back fully refreshed.
Y'all have fun.
The first mile went pretty smoothly, but there's still plenty of road left to travel...
March 2, 12:42 a.m.
We recently celebrated the little one's first birthday. Our tall stringbean of a girl (98th percentile on height/19th percentile on weight) made it through her first year with no major incidents. Plenty of bumps on the head once she started standing and toddling around, three teeth, and a head of hair that somehow forms its own mohawk when we put her to bed after a bath. She looks less like me and more like her mother with every passing week, and she has an appetite for food -- any food -- to rival a professional eating champion. Her vocabulary consists of "mama", "dada" (rarely used as she's attached to mom's hip these days), "nana" (banana), and an all-purpose "ba!" that means things are going swell.
She's been an absolute blast and, rookies though we are, I don't think we made any signifiant mistakes in Year One.
The thing we were most proud of was the fact that, apart from a quick episode of the sniffles, she didn't get sick during her first year. We're all in favor of kids getting viruses from that it-helps-build-their-immune-system sort of way, and we certainly weren't germaphobes. Heck, looking back, it's startling how quickly we eased into "Eh, she's a baby. Babies are going to [strange and possibly unsanitary act]."
But still, we were pretty pleased with ourselves, and patted ourselves on the backs for our irrational fear of day cares and church nurseries (which a pediatrician once described as "the perfect storm" of childhood viruses, for the way they collected all the strains from each day care every Sunday morning).
Pride goeth before the fall, though, and she promptly got sick this week. Nothing serious -- a case of roseola. We have absolutely no idea where she picked that up. It consisted of a fever for a few days and a rash, a pretty textbook case, and thankfully one with none of the more severe manifestations that the infection can take
She's already come out the other end of it. The fever has passed, the rash is on its last legs, and now she's onto the fussiness and fitful sleeping that comes from her fourth tooth cutting through. It was pretty pitiful watching her sit around in a daze for three days, though.
We're also engaging in a little project to make her a mix tape/CD/implantable-chip-or-whatever-the-kids-use-in-the-future for each year of her life. In the future, we plan to make them thematic. For the first year, though, we just went with what we thought were some of the best songs from Year One (none of which she will probably like until well into adulthood, if even then):
01) Raising Arizona sound clip -- "I'll Take these Huggies..."
02) Sharon Jones - 100 Days, 100 Nights
03) Feist - My Moon, My Man
04) Sea Wolf - You're a Wolf
05) Bright Eyes - Four Winds
06) Sarah Borges - The Day We Met
07) Magnolia Electric Co. - What Comes After the Blues
08) Andrew Bird - Imitosis
09) M Ward - Chinese Translation
10) Iron and Wine - Boy With a Coin
11) Band of Bees - Listening Man
12) Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
13) Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Gone Gone Gone
14) Drive-by Truckers - A Ghost to Most
15) Spoon - Rhythm & Soul
16) Band of Horses - Marry Song
17) Wilco - Impossible Germany
18) Josh Ritter - The Temptation of Adam
19) Augie March - One Crowded Hour
20) Loudon Wainwright III - Daughter
Joy Division's contributions to Mattel's "Lil' Goth Club" playset, however, are stone-cold classics
February 2, 10:19 p.m.
Oh, it's on, now! I finally hooked up the turntable and took to spinning a little vinyl. I decided to start off with some of the stuff from my '80s heyday (Yes, I have indeed been on eBay. Just ask my wife, who's confronted with my Watched Auctions page every time she gets on the computer). I'd like to pretend that I started off with the indie-cred of R.E.M.'s Reckoning, but I actually christened the turntable with INXS's Listen Like Thieves. It takes me back to the days of playing backyard ball with the cousins, when Thieves played from a boombox while we drank beer between games (Even in the middle of 100 degree Southern summers -- you'd think we didn't know what water was. We obviously didn't have a sense of our own mortality).
It didn't take me long to adopt the time-honored stealthy walk that you always need when playing records, so that the needle doesn't skip as you move around. Who knew that playing vinyl records would contribute to my ninja skills?
Earlier in the evening, I was thumbing through the music channels that come with our cable TV. We usually listen to the Americana station, but have gotten tired of hearing the same songs six times a day. So I put it on the station that plays post-punk and New Wave music (the Alarm, Howard Jones, Timbuk 3, Gary Numan, that kind of thing). Our daughter, who usually pays no attention to the "real music" that we play, suddenly starts dancing along! It was really, really cute, but it does make me wonder what it says about my fondly-remembered '80s music if it gets the same reaction from a 1-year-old as the music that comes out of her Fisher-Price kitchen...
An open letter to the makers of my daughter's toys
January 25, 1:00 a.m.
Hi, I know you're busy, what with your recalls of lead-laced toys and your apologies to the Chinese manufacturers (but not to the American people and their children ... odd ... but anyway). And I know when you're done with that, you'll go back to your mansions, with your foyers containing large oil paintings of you being held aloft by smiling toddlers wading through a sea of money. I'm sure it's very nice.
But you see, we have a couple of your toys. Our daughter loves them. Looooves them. Plays with them all the time. When my wife opens her mouth, I'm surprised when I don't hear the the sing-song voice of that lady you must keep chained in a basement somewhere, the one you force to sing all these high-pitched, chipper songs that emanate from your toys day and night.
But I'm not sure of the messages they're teaching.
I mean, the kitchen playset is great. Plenty of lights and stickers and it's the perfect height for my daughter's wobbly attempts at standing on her own. And it's got an infrared motion-sensitive thingie that kicks off all kinds of songs when she moves in front of it. A motion sensor! I mean, when I was a kid, the closest thing we had to any kind of motion sensors on our toys was when my sister pitched a hissy fit and told on me for taking her blocks. Heck, to get that kind of technology as a young adult, I would have had to join the Army. So kudos for pushing the technological envelope and getting my daughter all desensitized to the omni-surveillant Big Brother society that surely lays in her future.
But the refrigerator door, the one that, when it's open, sings the song about looking in the refrigerator just to see what's in there? Cut it out. It took me until my mid-twenties to totally kick that habit -- just ask my long-suffering Mom -- and I still catch myself doing it. My electric bill can't stand the both of us doing it. Plus, I was just in the kitchen, pondering snack combinations that would make Dagwood hurl. Do you really want those kinds of horrible gastronomic thoughts going through a toddler's mind -- especially one who's probably inherited my family's digestive genetics?
And the playset's sink. You've constructed it so that she can chunk these plastic balls into the sink, and they'll land in a little tray at the bottom. She's addicted to this: picking up the balls, throwing them in the sink, getting the balls, throwing them in the sink, repeat. I'm not sure what bothers me the most about this. Is it the certain knowledge that I'm one day going to be unwedging a golf ball from the trap of a real sink? Or is it her tendency to reach straight down the sink pipe in an attempt to get at the balls? We don't have a garbage disposal -- unless you count a dog who's half billy-goat/half vulture -- but I think you can see where I'm going with that one.
And then there's this other toy, the magnetic barnyard that goes on the refrigerator. If you put the magnet that represents the front of the animal in the right place, and the magnet that represents the back of the animal in the right place, you get a little song about that animal, and maybe even a bit of trivia. But if you mix and match? You get songs about cow-pigs and pig-sheep and man-bear-pigs and compassionate conservatives and Lord only knows what other terrors of spliced genetics. Like it's perfectly natural, and not some horrid Frankensteinian perversion of God's natural order. Mark my words, when I come home one day and see a bloody hacksaw in the driveway, I won't be surprised when I turn the corner and see my smiling daughter stitching together the back end of a cat to the front end of the dog. Heck, I might as well start getting the neighbor's dead chickens, renting her a copy of Frankenstein, and telling her to get to work the next time we have a good lightning storm.
And don't even get me started on her freakish little plush cell phone that looks it's had a caterpillar grafted to it. I mean, William S. Burroughs needed some serious drugs to come up with those creepy living typewriters in Naked Lunch. So I guess I should at least be thankful my daughter doesn't have to go that route to see nightmarish images left and right.
(Note: The above is in jest, in case anyone's uncertain. Although I bet you do have that singing lady chained up somewhere...)
Hate-mailers, start your emails!
January 21, 8:12 p.m.
New column's up today, where I go up against the conventional wisdom that Springsteen's Magic is as great as everyone says. But it's to argue a larger point: that Springsteen consciously holds back a bit of his songwriting for the E-Street records. Already one negative comment. How many more can I get?
I was hesitant to write this one, only because I knew I'd get a reaction. Back when I wrote a piece that got me about 50 angry emails, I kind of swore off the strange opinions. But the heck with it, it's what I think.
It's only a matter of time before we're calling the Sheriff's Department over something he brings out of the woods...
January 19, 2008 (12:09 a.m.)
One of the nice things about living in the country is that you're pretty much left to do your own thing. We've been here about three years now, and have yet to meet the neighbors, which is probably a double-edged sword. And since they live in the country, they pretty much do their own thing as well.
The neighbors to one side of us are raising chickens and roosters -- dozens of them -- and the noise isn't so bad once you get used to it. It's hardly a big, professional operation, just a bunch of cages out behind the trailer. Occasionally, they get loose and we'll see them scooting across our back 40, headed of to who knows where.
These neighbors, though, are apparently disposing of their dead birds by just chucking them over the fence. Twice now, our dog -- who'd chew on a skunk even as he was getting sprayed, given half the chance -- has brought some dead roosters into the yard. Well, one and a half dead roosters. The first one was the full carcass of a very pretty bird. The second was the half-carcass of a rooster, and it may be the nastiest thing that dog's ever brought out of the woods. It had definitely been out a while before he found it.
I say "may be" because those rooster carcasses have steep competition. I haven't figured out from which direction these things are coming, but another neighbor is apparently dressing his game in his back yard and throwing the remains in an offal pit somewhere nearby. The dog's come back with one unrecognizable pelt that may have been a rabbit, a deer hoof, a foot-long section of a deer's leg, and another recognizable pelt that looks for all the world like it was a fox, although that makes no sense at all.
Every so often, I grab the gloves and a trash bag and make the rounds of the property, taking away all of the dog's finds. He doesn't appreciate it, but that lasts about five seconds, until he sees something shiny or realizes he can come running up behind me and nearly tackle me with the force of his playing. That's fine, as long as he's not licking me in the face with that carrion mouth of his.
Your OCD traits will serve you well, young Jedi...
January 8, 11:29 p.m.
I got a turntable for Christmas, and couldn't have been happier. I used to have a really good one, but never figured out what happened to it (a casualty of multiple moves, I suppose). So about five minutes after I got it, I started feeling the ol' vinyl fever again: buying some cheap vinyl off of eBay, haunting the used vinyl shelves at the local mom n' pop stores. It's been heaven.
I was going through what little vinyl I had left at the house (after selling off tons of it when I had a small record store), and realized that a lot of stuff was missing that I just don't think I would have sold. Besides, who around here would have bought all those Kate Bush picture discs? I might be the only Kate Bush fan within 100 miles of this place.
Well, out of the blue, my mother tells me that she found a box of my old records in her closet. I have no idea what she was doing with them, but there they were. I grabbed them and brought them home and immediately started going through them. There were the Kate Bush discs, my old classic rock stuff, some of my old vinyl boots. Sweet!
I was amazed at the excellent condition they were in. I mean, back in the day, I played some of these records -- Led Zeppelin IV, the Stones' Made in the Shade, all those classic U2 albums -- into the ground. And here they were in the present day, and the vinyl on them looked nearly new.
I can remember as a small boy wrecking my parents' Beatles records (a sin for which I'm sure the forces of karma are still formulating a revenge; maybe I shouldn't be shelving my vinyl where my own child can get to it). Maybe that bad feeling stayed with me, or maybe it was the early exposure to friends who took care of their records, but I got really OCD about my vinyl. There wasn't any of that just-drop-the-needle-on-the-record nonsense. And I kept them clean.
But I'd forgotten all of that, convinced in my adult mind that I'd been like every other teenager with a rock 'n' roll record collection: using the jackets as coasters for my Pepsi, thumbtacking the album covers to the walls, etc.
Not big in the grand scheme of things, but it's been a real treat going through that stuff. My taste apparently wasn't so strong when it came to the 45s, though. Phil Collins? Lionel Richie? The Miami Vice Theme? I can still remember buying those things when I was a mere whelp, when the local record store's owner (who I later worked for and became good friends with) watched me like a hawk because he thought I was a scheming shoplifting kid. He should have been intervening, handing me Elvis Costello 45s instead. :)
Better late than never: My favorite records of 2007
January 5, 12:06 a.m.
My little ol' list here, on the Listening page.
My year-end Americana wrapup for PopMatters.
My "Good German" moment for today
December 26, 3:50 p.m.
I have the day off today, all to my lonesome. I've puttered around the house, walked in the yard, done some busywork. But I decided it was time to eat, and left to my own devices, that usually means I'll be bad. So off to a Mexican restaurant I went to enjoy myself some tasty fajitas (the current nutrition plan I'm on allows this as long as I avoid the succulent sour cream, the butter that bastes your very soul in a golden glow, and the scintillating cheese that pours like ambrosia at any good Mexican restaurant).
However, I was seated in the booth next to this family, and quite honestly, I never knew what to make of what I heard -- for there were three people in the booth, but I swear there must have been at least five distinct personalities. The little girl might have been the only normal one there, and her days of psychological health are probably numbered.
It was very strange. The father was alternately scornful and doting on his daughter, openly scornful of his wife, and the wife seemed openly scornful of the whole family unit. But then they would switch on a dime, seeming like a healthy family unit. These moments were usually fleeting, however, and they'd go right on back to being disturbing.
The little girl was apparently a fan of condiments, which drew her father's ire when she made a mess with it, but he also stood on her side in defense against the mother, who seemed offended by the little girl's action of putting sour cream in her beans.
They also had this exchange:
Father: You want another kid? You think you'll get it right this time?
Mother: We've talked about having another one, and I want to.
Father: We already did it once and got it wrong. When they entertain each other,
they might be fine, but when they're not, they'll be driving you crazy.
Little girl: Daddy, I'm still here.
Father (in a playful sing-song voice): I know you're still here baby, and you're
making a mess.
This was followed later by the daughter making some noise, and the father telling her, "You know how good girls act, don't you? You're not one, but you know how they act..."
And then later, after the father received a phone call (during which he asked of
his own father, "Has he been drinking?"):
Little Girl: Daddy, why do you have my picture in your phone?
Father: So I see it whenever I open my phone.
Little Girl: But why?
Father: So I can show off my baby.
It was really strange and decidedly not healthy, listening to this married couple snipe at each other (the father at one point telling the mother that whenever she looked at her daughter, that she looked like Cruella Deville) and use their daughter as a pawn in the battle.
I wish I could say that I said something, and believe me, I've had about twenty conversations/confrontations in my head since then (most of them involving very satisfying punches to the mother and father's heads). But I still haven't been able to figure out what it would have accomplished other than making myself feel better. Admittedly, it may have been an act of cowardice not to have said something, a misplaced nod to the notion that you don't stick your nose into other familys' doings (within reason: if one of them had ever slapped the child, I would have been the first to drag someone outside). I mean, my God, what kind of father doesn't hear "I'm still here" as a giant, flashing warning sign? The overriding thought/lame justification that goes through my head is that the little girl is pretty much pscyhologically screwed six ways to Sunday already, and there's not much one stranger can do about that in passing. I don't know -- it'll haunt me, I'm sure. I can only hope and pray that the little girl has a great teacher or a sane relative to offset her parents' damage. 'Cause if there was anything I could have done, I certainly fell down on the job.
At the very least, I can hope she rebels against her parents in the most damning way possible, by being a good parent herself down the line.
God bless us, everyone.
But what's their fancy marketing term for when I eat their food and it feels like my colon's going to drop out of my body like a rusted out muffler?
December 26, 3:46 p.m.
In my travels over the holidays, I've noticed that the instore marketing materials for several restaurants have dropped the term "fast food" in favor of "quick service." Please note this and use it where applicable in all conversation and correspondence.
Example: "I could have fixed a 1200 calorie, 65 fat gram-laden burger at home, but I think this quick service environment gives it that special something. Good thing I'm not eating fast food!"
That, of course, was filmed when Tinky Winky and La La were young and needed the money...
December 17, 2007
Our daughter's in the crawling-and-pulling-up stage, so she's getting into all sorts of things. Her favorite activity is pulling low-hanging ornaments off of the Christmas tree (this tempation might be what got her crawling in the first place).
She also likes the remote control a lot. We don't let her watch TV, but we do keep it on the Music Choice channels a lot, figuring their static images aren't doing much harm.
She grabbed the remote today and started mashing on it. She managed to randomly turn the TV to the football game, and we laughed. You could see, though, that she might be putting cause-and-effect together, and mashed the remote some more.
I joked, "I'd better take that away from her before she accidentally orders an adult movie."
No sooner had I said it than suddenly the screen's filled with the order form for something called "Filthy Amateurs." Yikes! You've never seen me grab a remote so fast.
Not long after, my wife came across the manual for the remote, planning on throwing it away. But then she saw the section on setting filters and parental controls. Might want to hang on to that...
Here's hoping they never put a "Hammer of the Gods" filter on the Internet
December 15, 11:19 p.m.
I can still remember the first time I heard Led Zeppelin. I was about twelve, a KISS fanatic, and a friend had picked up Led Zeppelin IV at the local record store. Back at my house, we put it on. A third friend, who was already leaning toward more mellow fare, wasn't impressed. The friend who bought the record obviously was; he'd heard of them before and knew what he was getting. Me? I was challenged and intrigued.
It might seem strange to think of it now, since Led Zeppelin casts such a long shadow over rock and roll and their sound seems like something you were probably hearing in the womb due to its familiarity, but they can actually ask quite a bit of the listener.
I mean, there I was, with the most adventurous riff I'd ever heard probably being Ace Frehley's still-catchy guitar intro to "Shock Me", and I'm supposed to suddenly cope with the twisting blasts of guitar that run through "Black Dog"? No way. That kind of thing takes some adjustment.
But I caught on fast, and Zeppelin became my all-time favorite band (they still are, although there are some current bands who have the potential -- if they pan out -- to possibly take their place). I bought all the discs. I tracked down plenty of boots. I even bought the first disc by Kingdom Come, for God's sake, telling the record store clerk, "Well, if Zeppelin won't reunite for me, this will have to do."
But reunite they did on occasion, and they never justified the mystique. Live Aid, the Atlantic Records anniversary show, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction -- they all showed a band struggling to find its swagger. So it was with a lot of skepticism that I greeted the news of the recent reunion in London.
The night of the show, I logged on to a few sites looking for news of the show. Was Plant avoiding the high notes? Was Page flubbing the solos? Was downtown London sinking into the sea from the collective weight of the assembled groupies?
There were few coherent accounts, but a surprising number of video clips, most of them taken from cell phones. They were a bit muddy, but they showed the band actually getting the job done. I found clip after clip -- apparently people were posting them just a little bit faster than the video sites could take them down. What a blast, spending about a half hour roaming the Internet, following links to video clips ranging from 30 seconds to a few minutes. And then getting links emailed to me from a couple of friends who were apparently doing the same thing. All of us just a little bit irrational in our pure enjoyment of some good old-fashioned rock 'n' roll..
It was just a lot of fun. As much as I listen to music, it's rare that anything I listen to -- especially anything new -- makes me remember why I got hooked in the first place.
You should hear her when they trot out a low-fat ingredient
December 15, 10:44 p.m.
I realized today that my wife watches cooking shows like many men watch football games. Sample moment while she was watching the Food Network: "Good lord, woman! That's not a cup! No wonder you can't bake!"