Category Archives: A Story

Apr26

I Coulda Been A Contenda’

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Right about now I should be on the last leg of my homeward trek from Orlando, Fla after completely dominating all comers in the Jeopardy! interview and tournament, thus assuring myself of a chance to show both “Watson” and one Mr. Ken Jennings just who’s the smartest one of all.

But I’m not.

This guy who, speaking for him and his mates, once claimed to “be more famous than Jesus” once said, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” That’s pretty much what happened to my Jeopardy! tryout. My Budge is still a lot dizzy, even though she has returned to work. She cannot possibly drive, nor would I even consider leaving her if she was in less than perfect health.

In the interest of complete transparency, however, I confess that she and I had decided I was not going down to Orlando anyway about three days before she had her run-in with the vertigo gremlin. I actually had emailed the contact in Orlando to let them know I wasn’t coming not too long before Budge called me to her side and proceeded to get so violently sick. Her vertigo was just proof positive to me that I wasn’t meant to be in sunny central Florida today.

The main reason I bowed out of the selection process was a simple one — money, or rather the serious lack thereof. Even before being presented with a preposterous $12,000.oo hospital bill (which will be the subject of an upcoming RANT, believe me) the fuel cost was a big roadblock to the trip. See, Disneytown is somewhere between “that’s a long ride” and “good lord, what was I thinking?” in distance from our home. We had figured it would take three tankfuls of petrol – at minimum – to make the round trip. With the current obscenely greedy speculator driven price of gas hovering around $3.50 a gallon, one tank in my beloved Element costs nigh on $50. Even my mathematically challenged brain can figure out that’s $150, and that’s just gas. By the time we tacked on a hotel room, since Budge and Mama both put the kibosh on me driving down and turning right around to come home, and food — well, it just wasn’t happening.

Then there’s the part about the tryout that the television executives don’t tell you when you pass the online test, but rather wait until you are all pumped about getting on the show. If I had aced the tryout and the interview (and I see no reason why I shouldn’t have) and been invited to the show, I would have been solely responsible for getting myself out to Holly-weird where — per Jeopardy! emails — I would be required to remain for five days WITH NO GUARANTEE of being on the show AT ALL.

Let me run that by you again. I’d have to get to one of the most expensive cities in California and stay for A WEEK paying for a hotel, food, and the occasional excursion to fend off hotel cabin fever to MAYBE get a shot at POSSIBLY being a contestant. So what would have happened if the five days came and went and I didn’t get on the show? I’d have to get back home — somehow.

Gentle readers, if I could afford to get out to LA for a week and come back home, I wouldn’t NEED to be on Jeopardy! because I’d have a boatload of money. I mean, have you SEEN the cost of an airline ticket from South Carolina out to the Left Coast? With the way I hear most people talk about flying, I’d probably have to go to Boston, then Rio, then back to Dallas, and finally get out to California. Apparently, no one ever pointed out to these airline people the whole “shortest distance is a straight line” thing. Oh, and all this is predicated on the fact that I could even get the nerve up to get on a plane. My widebody butt doesn’t belong on a widebody jet.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not afraid of flying. I am, however, mortally terrified of crashing. Of course any time I bring that up, someone wants to blather on about flying being statistically safer than driving a car. That may actually be true, but I would like to point out that I personally know several people, including Budge, Mama, my brother Nick, and even myself who have survived one and sometimes more car crashes.

I don’t know anyone who fell out of the sky in a big flaming aluminum cylinder and lived to tell about it.

Even the Bible speaks warns against flying in an airplane. If it didn’t then why does Scripture say, “and Lo, I am with you always,”? Get that? LOW. Nothing about some 30,000 feet in the air. Who am I to gainsay Holy Writ?

So, I guess the world will just have to wait a while longer before I make my triumphal quiz show debut. Even though I’m certain it would have been glorious, I’ll have to rely on the thought that carried Papa Wham and I through the dismal decade of the 1980s as Atlanta Braves fans, the same thought that has sustained legions of Cubbie faithful since 1903 —

There’s always next year!

Love y’all!

Be good to each other and keep those feet clean.

Apr20

Of Birds, Bees, and Frogs

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Amsterdam, Paris, Vegas . . . they got nothing on the Country Walk Lane Froggy Bordello.

I am a pimp. Not in the “how I dress flamboyantly” sense of the word (but with all my purple, who knows?), but in the “male who handles prostitutes” term. I am running a brothel for frogs. My backyard and pool have become a red-light district for amphibians.

Even as I am typing this, outside my living room window, the sounds of illicit frog romance is filling the night. If I were to gently pad to the back door, ease out onto my deck, pick up my spotlight, then flip it on and point the beam at the pool’s surface, I would witness a veritable tsunami as forty or fifty froggy “johns” dive into the green water to escape the penetrating light of “the authorities.”

I did not intend to be the owner of such a den of amphibian iniquity and vice. Unfortunately, I failed to buy a cover for my above ground pool and its new liner at the end of the last swimming season. I wasn’t overly worried about debris because I don’t have many trees in the back and none of them overhang the pool. All winter, the pool weathered the weather like a champ. Once or twice I took some GI Joes I found in the front yard (courtesy of the hellions next door) and sent them ice skating on the coldest days. (Okay, I’m from a small town in the sticks, it doesn’t take much to entertain me)

Another satisfied customer waiting for the party to crank back up.

Then came the spring. As the weather warmed, the pool greened. Since my deck doesn’t circumnavigate the pool, I cannot clean it with the vacuum until the water warms enough to get in it. Unfortunately, it’s plenty warm enough for the diatoms, euglenas, and algaes long before I feel comfortable subjecting my mammalian nether regions to the water. As a result, I don’t have a pool so much as I have a wonderfully symmetrical pond — probably for the next month or so. Then the fun part starts.

Not only do I have to get the pool chemically balanced, vacuumed, and cleaned out, but I also have to find a way to clean up the Times Square of the anura order. Maybe I can get Rudy Gulliani to come down and “clean up” around here?

Anyway, if you know how to encourage these wonderfully cacaphonic bufoae and anurae to look for love in some other places, please let me know! Otherwise, I’m afraid that the chlorine from the pool cleaning in a few weeks is going to cause a massive infanticide among the nascent tadpole population. Ah, such is life. The parents do all the loose living and the children bear the brunt of the punishment.

Circle of life, indeed!

Love y’all and keep those feet clean!

Apr16

My Beautiful Blue-eyed Baby’s Got the Busy Bouncing Eyeball Blues

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If you need one of these for a post, you can be pretty certain things did not end well.

Normally, I don’t have much of an excuse when I don’t put out content on a regular basis for my one adoring fan, (Hi, Mom!) but this quiet stretch is different. For the last week and a half, I have been helping Budge as she recovers from a blindsiding and vicious attack of vertigo of unknown origin. Here’s how it’s all gone down.

Last Wednesday, she and I were shopping in Target. We were near the Outdoor Living section and it is a very good thing that we were because one second she was fine and we were chatting away like normal and the next second her face went ashen and she informed me she HAD to sit down. She said she was uncontrollably dizzy and felt like she was going to vomit at any minute. We sat for about ten minutes before we managed to slowly and painfully make our way to the checkout. At the checkout line, another wave of dizziness and nausea overcame Budge again so she crept over to the in-store Starbucks and sat down to wait on me.

After another ten minutes of deep breathing and panic, we were able to get to the car and start home. I had to pull over once because she was certain she was going to hurl, but nothing happened and we made it to the house. I put her to bed immediately and went on taking care of the daily chores thinking it was just a bit of nausea and she’d wake up in an hour or two just as well as ever.

I got it HALF right.

Two hours later, Budge woke up in a panic and yelled for me to bring her a bucket. I took one step towards the bathroom to get the requested item when my poor Budge erupted. She tossed up her entire baked spaghetti lunch from her favorite Italian restaurant. Then she tossed up her breakfast bar. Then dinner from the night before. This Krakatoic output continued until she expelled Christmas dinner from 2003 and she finally subsided into a miserable bout of dry heaving.  She and I have been together for sixteen years and we’ve endured more than our fair share of upchucking. We’ve dealt with food poisoning, stomach flu, and good old fashioned nausea bugs, but in all that time, I’d NEVER seen my wife as sick as she was for that restless hour. The strangest symptom was her eyes. They were vibrating from side to side like a bubble level on a rodeo bull. It was disconcerting. I later found out this affliction is called “nystagmus.” I guess that is Latin for “wildly vibrating eyeballs.”

Look at this for about 30 seconds and youll have some idea of what Budges eyes were doing.

It was a lot like this only with more orange, more smell, and sideways.

It took about an hour, but by breathing through my open mouth to blunt the effects of the hideous smell of stomach contents, I was able to get the carpet cleaned up, the bed cleaned up, and the Budge cleaned up. She drifted off into a fitful sleep and I figured she’d miss the next day of school and the bug would run its course and all would be well.

That plan hit the bricks at 3:00 AM when Budge sat bolt upright in bed and groped for the bucket again. After ten unbroken minutes of dry heaving, she weakly asked if we could go to the ER and I was in full agreement. We rolled in to Hillcrest Hospital in Simpsonville at 3:30 AM and immediately got a bay. Then the wheels fell off the wagon. At some point in the dim past, Hillcrest was a good little hospital. I was born there when it still had a baby ward. Several members of my family died there for one reason or another. Of course, that was back when the medical profession was run by doctors and not accountants and the emphasis was on helping people and not making money. Such is not now the case.

I know several doctors, my own physician and psychiatrist among them, who are justifiably proud of graduating in the top five percent of their medical school class. By definition, if a “top five” percent exists, a “bottom five” percent also exists. For years I wondered who would hire such and inept group of doctors. Now I know. The Greenville Hospital System must have held a job fair in the “Just Barely Doctors” dorm at every medical college in country and sent the new hires to the ER at Hillcrest.

We were in the ER for 17 HOURS. Seventeen. SEVENTEEN. HOURS. For twelve of those hours, Budge was the guinea pig for a Yankee woman doctor with a tree trunk sized chip on her shoulder who knows as much about medicine as I know about piloting the space shuttle. My beloved got an MRI, a CAT scan, a full blood panel, and several more tests all involving pointy things jabbing into my wife’s tender flesh. Brunhilda found nothing. Am I relieved that Budge didn’t have anything serious? Yes, very. Do I think she needed to be subjected to every test in the last medical textbook this sawbones read? Not so much. So after hours of fruitless testing, Brunhilda finally realized she had no clue what she was doing and decided to let the adults have a turn.

As a result, Budge was transferred by ambulance to Greenville Memorial Hospital. We stayed from Wednesday night to LATE Saturday night in room 2328 racking up charges only to have a bottom fiver neurologist and a pretty fair ENT look Budge over and say her symptoms were “idiopathic.” That is doctor-ese for “danged if I know what’s wrong but let’s run some more tests because the mark up on supplies is so good!”

I you have been reading this blog for any amount of time, you are well aware that I do not suffer fools gladly and I am quite liberal in my definition of “fool”. With Budge laid up and unable to contain my baser instincts, I very untactfully let a lot of people know what my opinion of their ability to practice medicine was. For example, I told Brunhilda in no uncertain terms exactly what she could do with that stethoscope hanging around her neck. It won’t surprise anyone that, by the time we left on Saturday, the nurses, orderlies, doctors, and security guards were very excited to see me go.

Today marks a week that we have been home. Budge is still suffering from dizziness. We have been to three MORE doctors this week as follow-ups from the hospital debacle and the upshot is we know a ton of things my love DOESN’T have. She missed all of last week at school and with standardized testing coming up, that has here in a tizzy. Next week is Spring Break, and we have a couple more appointments scheduled then. For the moment though, a ton of tests and around $25oo worth of co-pays later, we still don’t know what’s wrong with her. The best we’ve gotten so far is “whatever it is, it’ll run it’s course, probably.”

So keep your feet clean and keep us in your prayers.

Love y’all!

Apr8

Skip Party Aftermath

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When we last left our intrepid hero (that’d be me) he (or rather I) was standing on the front deck of the Overbay hacienda eating one of the first bags of Cool Ranch Doritos to grace the snack shelf at the local Stop ‘n Steal watching my best friend Robby allowing two of our class (drivers license-less) hotties to take his car for a spin. They were on the return trip with KC in the driver’s seat and CC riding shotgun as Robby sat helplessly in the backseat. All had gone well on the trip out and now, one more turn and KC would bring the little Phoenix to a nice safe stop and we’d all go home to supper.

Only she didn’t make it.

Like most families of my childhood friends, the Overbays had that bane of a bicycle-riding child’s existence — a crushed gravel driveway. Inevitably, some of the gravel would travel out onto the black top and create a gravel slick, which could throw and unwary two-wheeler into a serious case of road rash in a skinny minute. Little did we know, it worked for cars just as well as bicycles.

KC hit the gravel slick and the front end of the car got a bit squirrelly. Now an experienced driver would have just backed completely off the gas and waited for the dust to settle. KC was not — as I have mentioned before — an experienced driver. She panicked and stomped BOTH pedals at the same time. The accelerator won out over the brake and the poor Phoenix skidded completely off the driveway to be quite rudely introduced to the sawn off telephone pole that served as the north corner post of the Overbay’s barbed wire fence.

Looked a lot like this, only there were two head prints instead of one. We drove the car to school the next day and had "KC" written over one and "CC" over the other.

As usual in these cases, time seemed to stop as the collective gasp of the party goers caused me to drop my chips and bolt towards the stairs. Once on the ground, I was joined by several other people in a headlong Jack and Jill-esque tumble towards the scene of the accident. What we found was not encouraging.

The front end of the car had wrapped its bumper around the cruel pole in a desperate lover’s embrace . . . and so did the radiator. Simultaneously, KC and CC – seatbeltless, naturally — launched forehead first into the windshield. They didn’t do the classic “shattered glass fly through” but they hit with enough force to make two NICE spiderwebs — one on each side of the glass and raise beautiful raspberry blue goose eggs on both their classically beautiful high foreheads. Meanwhile, Robby, the Phoenix’s erstwhile owner, was tossed into the hatchback where he lay on his back, feet in the air, somewhat dazed like a spring-woken tortoise newly crawled from his winter’s den.

Ignoring all first aid training and advice, we helped the girls and Robby from the car. The girls were a bit unsteady on their feet and might even have had a mild concussion. We would never know because this was a skip party and what happens at the skip party STAYS at the skip party, or at least it did in those pre-cell phone camera days. We certainly weren’t going to call the police and ambulance. At the risk of sounding heartlessly arrogant, we were the cream of the Laurens 55 High School crop (what I was doing there, I still wonder sometimes) and we couldn’t risk the hoopla and resulting brouhaha a police report would generate.

The party disintegrated just as soon as everyone realized that no one was dead or critically injured. This is referred to even to this day as the “Getting the Hell out of Dodge” procedure. Robby took the driver’s seat, I sat shotgun, and Duane folded his lanky frame into the backseat. Hopefully, Robby turned the key and the little Phoenix that could sputtered to life. Against all odds, it backed away from the pole and with the help of a couple of Raider linemen, ended up back on the road and off towards home.

This is a pretty good facsimile of Duane's dad . . . pretty much all the time.

We did have one nasty dilemma. We had to get Duane home under his parent’s radar. They were the most strict parents of our entire group — if by strict one means somewhat Stalinesque. That party I mentioned in the first act of this tragedy resulted in Duane being put on restriction for the rest of his life. He didn’t get to leave the house on the weekend until college. If his dad found out about THIS snafu, Duane would probably end up in a shallow grave somewhere. Luckily, we had always planned for just this kind of eventuality. Duane got out of the car about 200 yards from the schoolbus stop for his house. When his younger brothers got off the bus, he just fell in behind them — no muss no fuss. Duane didn’t even worry about them ratting him out. Those five boys were tight. None of them was going to risk bringing the wrath of Gray Court’s version of The Great Santini down on a sibling.

So with Duane’s continued future assured, Robby and I limped the Phoenix back to his house. He asked me if I wanted to take his motorcycle home and thus avoid the ensuing confrontation with his dad — Bobby. I told him that I’d been with him when the mess started and I wasn’t bailing now. I figured I owed to him as my best buddy to face the music with him. Besides, Bobby T was one of my greatest father figures growing up. He knew how things were with me and Mama and with me and Daddy so he always made sure I had walking around money as well as doing five thousand other little things for me that I’ll never be able to repay him for. Bobby T is a great man and I really looked up to him so I couldn’t run home like a coward and let Robby take the heat alone.

This is what we started with.

We sat across the den from each other waiting for the sound of Bobby’s car in the drive. In that eternal hour, I caught a glimpse of what a condemned man must feel like waiting for the warden and the preacher to come to his cell. Bobby got home and walked in the house all smiles and hellos like always. Robby and I realized instantly that he hadn’t seen the car. Now Bobby was the type of parent who hadn’t forgotten that he hadn’t been a complete angel as a teenager either, so he recognized our guilty looks pretty quickly. We didn’t even BOTHER trying to explain anything; we just led him out to the car. He looked at the damage, then at us, then back at the damage and just shook his head. That head shake was his ultimate mark of disappointment.

Funny though. Duane’s dad would have launched into the stratosphere. I don’t really know WHAT Daddy would have said, but I know I couldn’t write most of it on a family oriented blog. Bobby just shrugged and said, “Don’t plan on going

and 16 hours later we had this.

anywhere Saturday, boys,” and walked in the house.

I spent the night with Robby that Friday and we spent about 16 hours the next day cleaning out Bobby’s three bay garage / workshop. The Augean Stables that Herakles cleaned as his fifth penitential labor were pristine compared to this building and alas, we had neither Alpheus nor Peneus to reroute to our aid. We worked mightily fueled by gratitude and hot dogs until the floor of the shop was FDA approved. It was a learning experience for certain, but it still wasn’t the last skip party we’d have 🙂

Love y’all! Keep those feet clean.

Apr3

Springtime = Skip Party

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The Indigo Girls said it best when they sang “There’s something about the Southland in the springtime!” I was just sitting on the porch looking at the living proof that God Almighty is a University of North Carolina fan — a gorgeous Tarheel Blue sky. The temperature is just about perfect and if trees had a way of reproducing that didn’t involve that fluffy yellow pollen, I could stay outside forever. I know people say that we’d get tired of one continuous type of weather year round, but I promise that if someone could invent a Claritin or Allegra pump similar to the insulin pump some diabetics wear, I’d be willing to test this time of year all year.

Back when I was in high school, a day like this would result in several feverish calls between our group’s houses, and in those days — not THAT long ago — “calling around” meant dodging parents who always answered the phone. We didn’t have cell phones, Facebook, or email. Of course, it’s just as well. I probably wouldn’t have graduated if the Internet had been fully open and operational in the middle ’80s. In any event, we’d be attempting to set up a skip party for the next day.Some people favor playing hooky on Fridays to get an early start on the weekend, but I was always the type to skip on Monday so as to put off the first of the week for as long as possible. Skipping Mondays also had the advantage of less makeup work. In a tradition I was later to continue as a high school teacher myself, Fridays were always quiz and test days. Mondays were just notes and worksheets. My teachers didn’t really care if I made up notes. Tests were mandatory though.

Our parents had differing opinions about skipping. Mama simply required that I let her know if I was planning to come down with a 24 hour bout of “spring fever.” Robby’s dad was pretty much the same. Duane, however, was forbidden to skip school under any circumstances. That meant he had to actually drive to school then walk down Raider Road a bit where one of us could pick him up. For some reason, the girls got to do pretty much whatever they wanted to — and they ALWAYS wanted to skip.

"Honey, does this new vodka taste a little watery to you?"

Skip parties were eclectic affairs. Sometimes, we’d just congregate at someone’s centrally located but somewhat off the road house and sit around running our mouths and eating another set of parents out of house and home. Later on in high school — I think we started our sophomore year — some of the more adventurous souls would score some “adult refreshment” from Mom and Dad’s liquor cabinet. Those of us who were Pentecostal or Southern Baptist usually relied on the Presbyterians or the handful of Episcopalians to take care of the alcohol needs. Pentecostal parents — like Mama — really didn’t drink and the Southern Baptist parents managed to hide their liquor stashes in much more difficult to find locations. One particular young lady who will go nameless, always brought a jar of very nice vodka . . . until she finally learned — the hard way of course — that one can only replace JUST SO MUCH vodka with water before Daddy noticed. Fortunately for her, she had an extremely cool older brother who was a Clemson University student and complete Helion and gave his baby sister carte blanche to throw him under the bus with their parents whenever necessary.

Just as a reflection though, I don’t remember our parties ever getting completely out of hand; well, except for that ONE time at Duane’s when his parents were in Europe for a week and we had a weekend long bash with over 250 people showing up, but other than that, we didn’t go for some of the insanity I’ve seen among high schoolers (and even middle schoolers) of this generation. A little liquor WOULD change the dynamic somewhat, just as it always has since Jesus turned the water to wine in Cana of Galilee, but except for a few fights that produced more bruised feelings than bruises and a strange relationship or twelve, we didn’t get nearly as rowdy as today’s bunch. Of course, our parents probably thought the same thing about THEIR generation since they were certain we were in the grip of the Antichrist.

 

Like this, only LOTS more kids.

I remember two particular incidents from those days quite well. Once, around this time in April of our senior year, a great cloud of us met up at one of the girls’ lakehouses and piled on for a pontoon ride around Lake Greenwood. About ten o’clock in the morning, I noticed Robby counting people. I asked him what in the world he was doing and he said, “look around.” I picked up his drift then. We had around 30 people divided between two pontoons and of those 30, twenty-six were in our second period math class . . . which just happened to be meeting at that very moment back at school — with a grand total of 2 people in it, if they had actually shown up.

 

The second incident was during the spring of our tenth grade year. Robby picked me up and told me we weren’t going to school, which was fine with me. I just ran back in the house and left Mama a note so she’d know what to say when the school called her after she got off third shift. Then we picked Duane up in Laurens as per our SOP and headed to the Overbays. It was a warm enough day to swim if anyone wanted to–unlike yours truly who couldn’t, and still can’t, swim. The four Overbay brothers had an awesome Olympic sized pool with no fence around it. That made one of the more interesting water sports at their house the “water walking contest” where someone would get about twenty yards back from the deep end and take off at a dead sprint right out onto the water to see how many steps he (and it was ALWAYS “he”) could take before getting pulled over by the long arm of the law of gravity.

That wasn’t what made this day special though. THIS day, Robby made the grave mistake of letting people talk him into driving his car. Robby was one of the few of us with night licenses and a car. Unwisely, he started sitting in the back while different folks took the trusty little ’83 Pontiac Phoenix Hatchback out for a spin.

A little browner than this, but a pretty good likeness.

The first ten or fifteen trips actually went quite well and it was getting about time to shut the party down anyway when Robby, in a total lapse of judgment, let Kathryn get behind the wheel with Carolyn riding shotgun.

The trip out was fine. Kathryn guided the little brown car up the gravel driveway and out to the stop sign about a mile away with no problem. She was doing great on the trip back in as well when the car skidded ever so slightly on some loose gravel at the head of the drive.

Now, keep your feet clean for a while and I’ll tell you the Paul Harvey in my next installment.

Love y’all 🙂

Mar18

Are You Talkin’ To Me?!

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Most of us have watched a young Robert De Niro playing cab driver Travis Bickle posing in the mirror with a gun and an attitude while repeating over and over, “You talkin’ to me?” It’s a great scene but it’s just one more way in which we realize dear Travis is a bean or two short of a full bowl of chili.

Now, yesterday, I was walking around in the Garden Tools section of Lowes — or as I like to describe it, Toy R Us for males — when this guy down the aisle a bit from me starts flailing his arms around and screaming and he’s looking dead at me. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, this was not my first rodeo with babbling lunatics involved. I taught high school and middle school — I’m ready for anything. So, I stopped and adopted a good defensive posture to let dude know I wasn’t backing down from his craziness. Oh, and I also reached over and picked up a nice double-faced axe just in case I had to get all Gimli from Lord of the Rings on Rainman here. Luckily (for both of us since nothing adds pounds like “jumpsuit orange”) before I could yell out a cool dwarven war cry and get in touch with my Viko-Celtic roots, the guy turned and I saw it — he had a freaking BLUETOOTH MICROPHONE IN HIS EAR.

This idiotic phenomenon has become a pox, nay a plague, a veritable pestilence on the good graces of our public spaces these days. One can hardly walk around a mall or even a park without coming upon someone babbling incoherently to himself about picking up the milk and cat food or laughing maniacally to herself while continually repeating, “I KNOW, right?” Just about the time we get ready to pull our wives and children close and sprint to the other side of the aisle / sidewalk / track, etc, the goober turns around to reveal the blue blinking light practically embedded in his or her ear.

They have been assimilated.

No, really, watch somebody sporting a Jawbone and tell me she doesn’t look like she forgot to take off some makeup props before she left the Star Trek set where she was trying out for the part of Seven of Nine in the upcoming Broadway release “Star Trek: The Musical”. (They aren’t really making that play . . . at least I don’t think they are but with this Spiderman fiasco, who knows. But I digress). All over the highways and supermarkets of America, people are turning into Borg. I refuse to believe resistance is futile!

Now I admit, I hate cell phones on general principle. I am of the ilk who believe if someone isn’t home when you call, he or she doesn’t want to talk to you right then. Were it not for Budge and Mama’s dual insistence, I wouldn’t have one of the wretched, brain rotting devices. Cell phones are the final straw that is going to usher the barbarians through the gates.

 

Come ON now, Dude! Seriously? Two words: Voice Mail.

When the day has arrived that I cannot rid myself of the dregs of a two bean burritos lunch in Target without hearing a tinny version of MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” coming from the next stall — followed by some fool saying “Hello?”, we are truly on the downhill slide of the slippery slope. You are pooping you fool, you need to concentrate and so do the rest of us!! Besides, do you really want to consider the environment you are placing near your hands, mouth, and ears?

 

Um, EWW!

Then we have the drivers barreling down the road yakking away into their “hands free device.” Apparently, hands free has become a euphemism for “wreckage inducing contraption.” You are theoretically controlling a huge hunk of steel, aluminum, glass and rubber down a stretch of autobahn at well over the posted speed limits, so you need to be concentrating on the predicament at hand, not arguing with your mother over a stupid bunch of bananas she wanted to leave you but you had no need for! For the love of all that’s holy, just TAKE THE BANANAS and HANG UP THE PHONE!

Yes, Brethren and Sistren, the ubiquitous Bluetooth in the ear is the ultimate sign the apocalypse is upon us. Not long ago, if you sat animatedly jabbering to yourself complete with hand waving and hair tugging, the nice kind men in the white coats would come and gently take you to a softly lit comfortable room with lots of padding on the walls where you could wait while being fitted for your cute jacket with the sleeves that tie in the back.

Not anymore. The rabid Bluetooth invasion has made it impossible to tell the disturbed from the merely obnoxious. Just last week, I was having a date night with Budge and watched a man and woman sit two tables across from us, both carrying on extremely animated conversations — just not with each other. All the while, that cute little blue light kept pulsing around both their temples.

Really? You can’t take that ear funk coated spit stained hunk of Bakelite out of your face long enough to talk over a meal to the person IN FRONT OF YOU?

Why, YES, as a matter of fact I AM a raging douchebag!

We are all doomed.

If I owned a restaurant, I’d have a Faraday Cage built into the walls of the building. It’s not that I’m a Luddite or something. I love technology. I just hate that rules of decent behavior and civility haven’t kept pace with the times!

So, in closing, I love y’all, but if you are walking or driving around talking to yourself because of a little chip in your ear, I’m going to make fun of you, laugh at you, and think you are a goober — especially if you cut me off in traffic because you aren’t paying attention!

Til then, keep those feet clean and those Blueteeth put away!

Mar16

Whatta YOU Make of It?

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This'll be a lot clearer once you start reading!

This story comes to me secondhand via The-Closest-Thing-I-Have-On-Earth-To-A-Sister, aka my Girl Child, aka my Mormon Wife, etc. I hope I do it justice because it is entirely too awesome not to be out on the web. The really intriguing fact in my mind is this story is unembellishedly true.

Girl Child has a good friend who works as a bookkeeper at a supermarket in an Upstate city that shall remain nameless. A few weeks ago, she was in early . . . real early. Like 6 AM and she’s already on the job. That means she had to get up at probably 4:30 AM. I didn’t know 4:30 CAME twice a day!

Anyway, she is at her post working when the cashier on duty calls and asks her to “come take a look at this.” Having worked in a supermarket, I can attest to the multitude of meanings that phrase can have. Strange things happen in supermarkets and the smaller the hour, the stranger the things can be.

So bookkeeper girl goes to cashier girl who points out a customer who has just entered the store. The customer was a tall, elegantly attractive lady in complete make-up, with heels, hose, and hair-did. Nothing particularly odd about that, you say and I agree. What is odd, though, is the REST of her outfit consisted of a blue velour bathrobe. That’s it. The woman walked in the store right off the cover of Businesswoman Daily — except she was wearing a power robe instead of a power suit.

Don’t go away, it gets better or weirder depending on your point of view. The woman took a grocery buggy (that’s a “shopping cart” for any Yankees reading along — I’m looking at you, Eric D.) and disappeared down the household goods aisle. Ten minutes later she was back with her buggy filled with one item only. The buggy was level full of boxes of Glad Force Flex 55 gallon Yard and Leaf Waste garbage bags.

Like these. Lots of these.

Level. Full.

Garbage. Bags.

Black. Ones.

The woman paid for her buggy full of trash bags and left without comment.

Now, let’s recap for those late to the party. Woman, impeccably dressed in hair, heels, hose, and a bathrobe. It’s 6:00 AM. The Sun is not up yet. The little old ladies at Hardees are just getting the first biscuits out of the oven. The elegantly dressed bathrobe clad woman bought a buggy load of really big, really strong, really opaque TRASH BAGS.

Why?

I mean, you HAVE to wonder.

Mama, God love her Pollyanna heart, said that maybe something was wrong with the poor woman’s mind. Maybe, but if you are THAT bad off in the head, the nice men in the white coats usually don’t let you out of your custom fit jumpsuit with the sleeves in the back and it’s hard to drive wearing those things unless you happen to be Linda Blair and then you could just levitate or do that creepy spider-walking thing they cut from the original movie.

Some people have suggested maybe she was going to a company picnic and was in charge of cleanup later in the day. I could buy that if the bathrobe had sported a bunny tail and a rabbit head silhouette on the lapel and the robe was covering some of Vickie’s finest Secrets or some hot number from Freddy out in Hollywood. Oh yeah, and she got in a limousine with Hef because the “company picnic” was at The Mansion.

Budge, The Girl Child, and I have another theory that the bookkeeper who originally recounted the story put forth as well. Elegant Bathrobe Lady was getting dressed for a day at the office in some high paying, high-powered executive position. She’d gotten a bad night’s sleep because she was worried about her ne’er-do-well husband / boyfriend / live-in lover . . . whoever. This significant other had called the previous evening to say he’d be “a little late” getting home.

Well, a little late turned out to be 5:00 AM while EBRL was getting gussied up for work. She’s already decided the evening was going to be “tense” when he walks, or more accurately, staggers into the bathroom, clothes askew, reeking of stale cigarettes and booze. That would have been bad enough. After all, she has been keeping his sorry a-, oops, family blog — his sorry HIDE up for over a year now since he “got laid off” from his tasting job at the pie factory and decided to take some time and “find himself.” So she’s already not really happy with him.

BAAAAAD idea, son, REAL bad! Sucks to be you -- or it will in about ten minutes.

BUT THEN, she catches a whiff of something UNDER the bar funk smell. It’s perfume, and, Brothers and Sisters, IT AIN’T HER BRAND.

This will not end well.

At that moment, all the times her mother told her “he’s worthless” come screaming back.

Then she looks closer. LIPSTICK STAIN ON CHEEK.

All the times her girlfriends had tried to warn her about his hound dog ways come surfing the wave of her anger right on in to shore and, to quote the immortal Garth Brooks-before-he-went-blond-and-weird, “The thunder rolls . . . ”

Move over Leatherface, Honey Pie is PISSED!

So, she’s out buying the big, black, strong trash bags to go with the nice new chainsaw she picked up at Lowes as soon as they opened. She has to go by the cleaners to drop off the dress she was going to wear to work and ask them to try to save it even though it’s pretty stained up. It’s one of her very favorite dresses.

Then, she’s going home. She’s already called the office and told them she’ll be a little late.

She’s been meaning to take care of a mess she’s got laying around at home and she just can’t put it off any longer!

What do y’all think?

Me? I was raised by a Mama. I was engaged SIX times. I married Budge. I’m CERTAIN that Hell hath no fury, etc, etc.

In any event, know that I love y’all and keep those feet clean . . . you never know when they may be entered in to evidence!

Feb24

Yes, As A Matter Of Fact, It IS Mine!

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The wallet I carry every day. Why, yes it is a Vera Bradley.

Hello, my name is Shannon and I carry a Vera Bradley Zip-Around Wallet in the “Simply Violet” pattern given to me by my plural wives.

WANNA FIGHT ABOUT IT!?

Apparently, I am single-handedly bringing about the demise of Western culture and the downfall of our civilization because I carry a “woman’s” wallet. Well, I’ve checked both eyes for tears and, finding none, have to assume that the care bears that live in my tear ducts have decided to stay mute on this fashion point.

My favorite pair of Croc Caymans. Color: Grape.

At least once a week, when I take my Vera Bradley out of my left leg cargo pocket of my favorite brown cargo pants to pay for something at a restaurant or store, I get an incredulous look and some smarmy, snarky comment from a salesman or a waiter like “Cute wallet? Does it match your shoes?”  Of course, if I’m wearing my favorite pair of shoes, I point down and say — with as much scorn and vinegar-laced honey as possible — “Only when I’m wearing these, Sugar.”

Budge hates it when I do that.

Now if we are being served by a waitress or checked out by a lady, the comments aren’t nearly as vilely undertoned. It is more of a “That’s a nice wallet there. Is it yours or your wife’s?” I seldom go out in public without Budge or another of my handlers like Mama or Deuce, so one of them is usually close enough to warrant the comment. The sweetness usually turns to apology laced surprise when I unzip my wallet and show her my oft-washed and well-worn wedding dress picture of Budge. Then I’ll usually smile and say, “Do I look like I’d marry someone so vain they would carry around a picture of herself in her own wallet?”

The odd part is, if this same pattern of wallet had a metal zipper and was cast in cowhide or some dull colored canvas instead of cutely stitched cotton, I wouldn’t have this constant questioning. Well, what can I say? I like a little color along with my functionality. Of all the evils foisted upon our collective American psyche by our overly dour and legalistic Puritan forbears, the abhorrence of brightly colored clothing — particularly MALE clothing, is possibly the worst.

The story behind my decision to carry this particular stripe (or paisley as the case may be) of accessory is very practical and simple. I was tired of carrying a regular guy’s billfold in my back pocket. With the ton of loyalty cards, a debit card, a driver’s license, and one or two other sundries, the billfold my wallet replaced was three inches or more thick. Sitting on that monstrosity not only made my right butt cheek sweat too much, but it was also like sitting on a boulder. Added to the fact that my chiropractor warned that sitting on a billfold is a leading cause of spinal misalignment and associated back problems and my choice was clear. I needed a better system.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned cowhide or fine leather “manly looking” wallets cost more than the cow from whence they originated. I fail to see the logic, humor, or even irony in paying so much for a wallet that one has no money left to place therein. Enter Budge.

Budge was changing out her old “Simply Black” Vera Bradley zip around for her new monogrammed clutch. I saw what all she took out of the old wallet and realized I had found my solution. I asked her if I could have her old wallet and she handed it to me with that usual look that says, “You’re going to do something that will embarrass me, aren’t you?” I ignored the look, took the wallet, found it carried all my “stuff” in a much more orderly fashion, and so carried it until it almost fell apart. So for Christmas, Budge and Deuce bought me my new purple wallet. End of story. It’s what I carry.

So I like purple?!

WANNA FIGHT ABOUT IT!

Love y’all and keep those feet clean!

Feb16

But They Were Both Green!

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God's gift to men-children everywhere. For some reason, all mine were green elephants and purple hippos. Coincidence? I think not.

I’ve had some people ask me if I had personal experience as my guide for my last post. To that, I can only answer “Of course!” I am still amazed by the amount of knowledge I lost on January 7, 1995. (That would be the day Budge and I started dating, in case you aren’t keeping up!) For the last ten years, I had been a passable driver, notching only one wreck in that decade. It was a GOOD wreck, but still, it was only one and, to set the record straight, Budge had TWO wrecks in the six months before we met. More importantly, I had managed for the previous 20 years to dress myself in clean and decent fashion. I admit that when I was younger, I benefited from the miracle that was the original Granimals line of clothing, but even after I outgrew my mix and match zoo, I still looked presentable.

In one day, I not only lost the ability to drive, it seems I was no longer competent to dress myself either. Strangely, the only thing different from 1-6-95 to 1-7-95 was that I had become joined at the heart, if not the hip — at first at least, to She-Who-Was-To-Be-Called-Budge. Now, to get everyone just joining us up to speed, Budge was a student where I was a first year teacher. We met. We clicked. We became the worst kept secret in the school district and the fact I didn’t get fired has always warmed my heart because people must have thought I was a good enough man to have a relationship like this without taking advantage of a poor, lovestruck teenage girl.

Yeah, RIGHT! If they ONLY knew!

Anyway, when I started teaching, I was a bit strapped for clothes fit to wear in front of a classroom full of students. Four years of college will do that to a guy’s wardrobe. I did, however, have ONE outfit that I thought was, to use the student vernacular of those days, “Da Bomb!” It was a nice, heavy cloth Duck Head button up shirt that I wore with Duck Head cargo pants.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with Duck Head, you didn’t go to college in the South in the late ’80s or early ’90s. They were a ubiquitous brand of khaki pants and pastel shirts in solids, plaids, and stripes. Some of us called them “the poor man’s Polo” since they were better made but lacked some of the cachet of Mr. Lauren’s little red horsey. They certainly were a great deal more affordable, especially when every dollar one saved on clothing was money that could be put towards paying down student loans! Yeah, I know and you’re right, whatever we saved went to beer, but it’s nice to think about what might have been had we been a bit more responsible.

But I digress.

This is pretty close to what mine looked like. Snazzy, right?

I had this one well-made, well-maintained and — to my eye anyway — STYLISH outfit. Since I am a firm believer in the old adage, “If one guitar string breaks in the middle of the set, play harder on the other six” I wore this particular outfit once per week, every week, from the time I got my job at the school in October until the outfit’s untimely demise six months later. Now, I’ve noted the cut, construction, and origin of this outfit, but what I failed to mention, and what apparently is SUPREMELY important, is that both the shirt and the pants were green. Apparently, that presented somewhat of a problem.

This would be a good time for me to reiterate one fundamental difference between men and women that happens to be most germane to this recollection. Men, to use computer terminology, are 4 bit color depth beings. If you’ve ever hooked up a monitor to your computer that wasn’t quite compatible and it reverted back to the lowest color setting, you’ve seen color through a man’s eye. We have red, blue, green, white, black, grey, and beige (and we’re not to sure about beige.)

Mine were a little lighter, but this is reasonably close. Does anyone else see a problem? I certainly didn't!

Women, however, are 256 XVGA HD 1080 color compatible. They do not have “beige.” They have eggshell, off-white, candlelight, old lace, ecru (which I always though was a bird from Australia), flat champagne, and at least ten other “shades” for what men call “beige” and which no being in possession of less than two X chromosomes could discern a difference between even if held at gunpoint.

So, I thought the shirt was green and the pants were green. No problem. To Budge, however, I discovered that the pants were “olive” and the shirt was “dark lime.” Here I thought I was supposed to wear the clothes and she’s making it sound like I need to eat them. The very first time I brought her home to meet Mama, before I had revealed to Mama that Budge was — in fact — a student which is a story for another time, Budge went into my room — later to be our room — took out my “olive” pants, brought them into the kitchen, and threw them in the trash. She then told me that I could wear THE shirt with jeans and nothing else.

Life would simpler. I might even get to buy my own clothes again!

When I pointed out to her that I had worn that same outfit once a week for six months and she had NEVER said one word about it, she had a ready reply: “I know that, honey, and I told ‘the girls’ when we first started dating that once I found out I was coming over here the first thing on the agenda was to GET RID OF THAT OUTFIT!”

That, beloved, is how I found out that green actually doesn’t “go with” green and from that day to this, I have not bought an item of clothing to be worn in public without my Budge’s express approval.

I want my Granimals back!

Love y’all and keep those feet clean!

Feb14

Three Lessons on Valentines Day

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I’ve been sitting here with Budge as another Valentines Day wends its way to conclusion . . . at least here in the Eastern US Time Zone. Any of y’all who may read this out on the Left Coast still have time to make at least SOME last-minute plans. We’ve never been great fans of Cupid’s Day. Budge worked at a florist shop for a little over a year so if I even mention bringing her a dozen roses, I get the “withering stare.” She took a break from her diet and we had a nice supper together.

Still, not many days evoke the humorous and the serious from my memory quite like Valentines Day. I taught high school English in a rural, blue-collar high school for ten years and Valentines Day always produced a few surprises. I remember one young lad who began coming to school dressed in khakis and button down oxfords instead of his former ratty t-shirts and blue jeans with the dip can ring on the back pocket. I held him after class one day near Valentines and questioned him on the quite noticeable change in his attire. He said, “Coach, it’s the strangest thing. Ever since me and ____ started dating, she’s taken some of her check from her after school job and bought me clothes. She knows my size and everything. Does that mean she’s got it bad for me, Coach?”

Now, as an aside, please remember that this was a rural high school. Graduation was nowhere near assured for many of these students. I had several walk across the stage as first generation diploma bearers during my tenure. Also, college was somewhat of an undreamed of luxury for this hard-working community. That meant that high school romances were quite often precursors to a married life. The girls especially seemed to realize this more than the boys and they would lay claim to the best of the crop of young men by the junior prom. So that meant my young buddy’s question was not unfounded.

I smiled at him and said, “Son, learn something from me right now that’s never going to be on a test. None of those clothes, right down to those nice new ropers you’ve got on has a THING to do with you!” Seeing his quizzical expression, I continued on, “Nope, it’s ALL about her. See, you have become an ‘accessory’ now. You are just like a handbag or a bracelet. It’s your job in life to make sure SHE looks good when y’all walk down the hall or the mall together. You ever been to a jewelry store and seen all the diamonds?” He nodded. “Well, then. Think of yourself as the black velvet cloth her diamond lies on. You make her shine.” That seemed to register with him so I asked him what he’d gotten his new beauette for Valentines Day. His reply was one that would run ice water through any “attached” man’s veins.

He said, “She told me not to get her anything. She’s real easy on me like that.”

I said, “Son, tell me you got her SOMETHING — card, candy, SOMETHING!”

“No, Coach, I told you she told me not to.”

I let him in on the secret. “Son, lesson two for the day. When a girl y’all’s age says, ‘oh, don’t get me anything’ she means she’s not going to TELL you what to get her. This is the test of how well you know her. She’s going to find out now just how well you’ve been paying attention on y’all’s dates and stuff.”

He looked stricken, “But she SAID . . .” I cut him off, “Son, I know what she said and that’s just it. She’s testing you. Now you can take her at face value and not get her anything and pay the price, or you can hit up Wally World and get her a teddy bear and a cute card.”

Nodding, he asked me, “but, Coach, why didn’t she just SAY all that?”

I gave him the last lesson for the day, “Son, she’s a female. Females are smarter than us. That’s all I know.”

He did get the teddy bear and cute card and about four years later I had the pleasure of officiating at their wedding.

It’s the truth, ladies. Y’all are just smarter than us.

Love all y’all and keep those feet clean!