Saturday, May 31, 2014

Sing Your Song

I know why the caged bird sings. The answer is pretty obvious, now that it has been pointed out to us. When we look at a situation like this whether it is metaphorically or literally, we can't help but see the truth in it. What else would you do, if you were a caged bird?
There are plenty of potentially caged birds who would say that they would never sing because they don't want to give their captors the satisfaction of sitting on a perch, behind bars, and acting like they had nothing but wide open space around them. Still other birds would insist that they would screech and squawk, making those who kept them in a cage regret that they had made such a foolish mistake. Then there are those birds who would say that they would sit in silence, not making any sound.
I know why the caged bird sings. Don't you? If you didn't sing, you would be denying what you are, locked up or not. If you screeched and squawked you would only give the cage more strength. Singing is freedom, even if it is from that perch inside a cage. Once you have made your song, you have a voice.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The irony of this quote from Maya Angelou is that I remember it. It was part of her song. She gave the world her voice and anyone who took the time to listen couldn't help but remember it. She was an inspiration to generations. If you could just take the wisdom she had within her and spread it out over the globe, there would never be a need for another commencement address. “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
And now that voice is stilled. Thanks to Maya Angelou, I know why the caged bird sings, and I learned that the important thing is not the cage, but the song. Aloha, Maya. You stomped on the Terra. 

Friday, May 30, 2014

The View From Back Here

The story around my house goes like this: We used to be able, the three of us, to walk past ice cream stores without having to stop. When my son would ask my wife and I what that sign says, we would simply explain that it read, "Poisonous Gas - Keep Moving." And that's what we did. This worked well enough until we taught him how to read. Then we started to get all kinds of questions that we hadn't been getting before he got all literate on us. Suddenly we were stopping at ice cream shops, comic book and video game stores, yogurt stands and anything else that happened to catch my son's beginning reader's eye.To say that our progress down the avenue was slowed would be a gross understatement.
We eventually relaxed into the reality of having another person in the family who could decode the mystic runes that surrounded us. It had some very practical applications, allowing our son to become involved in finding those ice cream shops and toy stores that we might have carelessly glossed over. The more words he learned, the more useful this skill became. Soon he was bringing home new information for us by the bookful. Suddenly, my wife and I were learning new things even though I had sworn off reading for ourselves years before.
This was very similar to the path we took when it came time for my son to learn how to drive. I had effectively given up driving some time ago, and as terrifying a thought as having my teenage son behind the wheel of a large automobile, the eventual relief I found from not having to drive all the way to Anaheim from Oakland was gratifying. Since I have long-haul responsibility in my family, it was a treat to be able to sit in the back seat from time to time. The view from there is very interesting, and gives one a glimpse of just exactly what the driver is doing. This also affords one the opportunity to make comments and discuss openly the challenges and limitations of the person operating the motor vehicle. I know because I have used that position to direct and correct problems I have seen in my son's technique. I did this right up until I found myself with our positions reversed, and now he was looking at my skills. He knows when the light is red that it means stop. He knows what that double yellow line means. I can't just shine him on anymore.
That's why I'm going to let him drive to the ice cream shop from now on.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Yum Yum

You know how some things are good in moderation? My wife insists that her grandmother, or was it her aunt, used to insist that you had to eat a pound of dirt a year. That turns out to be just a little more than an ounce a month. You don't probably need to run around with a dustpan and a broom to keep up with that average.
This brings to mind the five-second rule. You know the one: where if a cookie or a bit of salami falls on the floor, and you're able to snap it up before those dreaded five seconds elapse, you're still sitting pretty with an extra piece of salami or cookie that could have just been so much detritus. Germs and bacteria are notoriously lazy and slow on the uptake, especially when matters of gravity are concerned. An object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted on my an outside force, and as long as that object happens to be a particularly quiet piece of chocolate cake, all those microorganisms will just lay there. Single cell organisms lack motivation. That's why you've got that five second cushion. Or maybe I don't understand the science the way I should. The Mythbusters guys explain it best. Even though they busted that myth, it gave Jamie and Adam a chance to get their pound of dirt. Good for them.
As long as you remember to wash your hands before you eat that pound of dirt, you'll be fine. Just don't use antibacterial soap. It turns out that Triclosan, a chemical found in antibacterial soap has been shown in studies to cause hormonal imbalance in animals. That's worse than a little dirt, right? It also turns out that Triclosan may also be contributing to the rise of deadly, antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Superbugs? They won't just jump on that dropped potato chip, they're going to climb up into the cupboard, tear that bag of Lay's open with their genetically engineered razor sharp teeth and then go looking for some dip. 
Better to just go ahead and take your chances with a little bit of dirt. Nice, gritty, healthy dirt. 

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

There Oughta Be A Law

Amid all the noise and chatter surrounding the killings in Santa Barbara last Friday there was a voice: "Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA. They talk about gun rights, what about Chris' right to live?" he continued. "When will this insanity stop?" he said. "When will enough people say, stop this madness, we don't have to live like this? Too many have died. We should say to ourselves. Not one more." It was the father of one of the victims, Richard Martinez.
This raised the requisite number of gun-rights discussions, rants and raves, filling comment boards with the usual rhetoric, most of it centering on the question of what methods the deranged nitwit used to dispense his twisted vision of justice. His first three victims were stabbed to death. "I guess we should outlaw knives," insisted a number of posts. Still more suggested that we outlaw cars, since a number of people were wounded when the nitwit's BMW careened through the streets of Santa Barbara. That's when I got snarky myself: "I would be fine with a Constitutional Ban on BMWs," I posted just below the snark of my fellow members of the Internation. 
I was kidding, but that's my response to the horror these days. Here's the thing, for me anyway: I wouldn't really ask Congress to promote or consider a law outlawing expensive foreign cars, or cutlery for that matter. If somebody wants to kill someone, a car or a knife or a hammer or their bare hands will do the job just as effectively as a gun. The right to own a BMW or steak knives are not protected by our Constitution. I looked it up. 
That was me being snarky again.
Two semi-automatic handguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition don't make this a gun issue. It's a human issue. If someone who is an advocate for guns can explain to me how we can live together in a world that has this much anger, pain and mental illness in it without adding more weapons of any sort to the mix, I'm all ears. If you think we should throw the Second Amendment out with Slavery and Prohibition, please explain how we get all that evil back into Pandora's Box. I'm fresh out of ideas.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Restless Sleep

The phone rang at seven in the morning. Saturday morning. My wife looked at the caller ID. "New York," she mumbled. I asked her to pass the phone to me. When I put the phone to my ear, a polite but automated voice was informing me that someone had recommended that I receive a free medical alert system. Everything was paid for, and shipping had been arranged, all I had to do was press "one" and speak to a representative. Which is what I did.
The representative's name, or at least the one she gave me, was Daphne. Daphne asked how I was feeling today.
In a very frail voice I replied, "I'm tired."
Daphne said she was sorry to hear that. She went on to reassert that someone had recommended me for this gift of a medical alert system, to which I asked in that same weak voice, "Who recommended me? Was it my doctor?"
Daphne told me she didn't know, but she did know a lot about the medical alert system. It came with a bracelet that had a microphone, and a base that could be easily connected.
"What does it connect to?" I fretted.
Daphne assured me that it would be simple enough once I received the machine and started paying the thirty-four ninety-five a month for the service that would keep the system running. I wanted to know what the machine would connect to. Daphne let me know that I shouldn't worry, and did I have any questions. I wanted to know what the thirty-four ninety-five was for and Daphne assured me that it was the service that made the free machine I was getting work. Did I have any more questions, Daphne asked.
"Just one," I said with my voice finally filling out into full-throated indignation. "How do you sleep at night?"
What sort of vile enterprise was this, preying on the fears and sympathies of anyone dull or scared enough to give up their name and address to a company that would send their On-Star tracking system for the elderly and infirm because "someone" recommended that they should. Or maybe they won't send the electronics at all. They'll just get the personal information, credit card number included, and that will be that.
How do they sleep at night?

Monday, May 26, 2014

Mile Marker

Well it took me years to get those souvenirs 
And I don't know how they slipped away from me. - "Souvenirs" by John Prine

It's been decades since I ran with my father. The last time we were together, we went for a run. Well, the last time we were together and he wasn't in a bed in a burn ward.
Sorry for that juxtaposition, folks, but it's the one that gets stuck in my head every Memorial Day. My dad was the active one. He's the one who talked me into running my first race: The Bolder Boulder. I still have the shirt from that one. It was the fanciest shirt I ever got from a race: all maroon nylon on top and a white mesh on the lower half. It's not one that I wear much since it seems every bit as dated as those short-shorts I used to wear back in the day. But it's still in the drawer because it reminds me of that time and place.
I carry a picture in my wallet of my father and I crossing the finish line together. We ran that race for a lot of years, but only once did we manage to finish at the same time. It was so long ago that when we received the proof for the photo, it wasn't a digital thumbnail attached to an e-mail. It was a wallet-sized real-life picture that wasn't suitable for framing, but was completely acceptable for carrying around in a wallet. For a few decades. For a few hundred miles. I've worn out more shoes than I can count. I've retired a good many shirts, but I've got that one in reserve. 
All that running made it hard to look at my father, or the shell that had been my father, lying in that hospital bed. It's not that all of the memories of I have of my father are him in motion. He was a champion sleeper. But he snored like a buzzsaw. My father could be still, but he really couldn't be quiet. On Memorial Day, I think about all the running and snoring and how I miss them. Sometimes I snore now, just to keep up. 
I still go running with my dad. These days we almost always cross the finish line together.

Sunday, May 25, 2014


I heard the helicopters overhead. Once again they were making slow circles in the air over my school. The good news was that most of our students had gone home for the day, but our afterschool program was still going on and those kids were looking up to the sky, trying to discern what the threat level was. If they had been listening, it would have been obvious.
Through a loudspeaker hovering above us, the police were telling a group of young men that the dirt bikes they were riding up and down the streets around our school were not legal. "Get off the bikes and park them," barked the voice from the sky. The nasal whine of the motorcycle engines continued as they raced up and back, seemingly oblivious to the commands they were being sent from on high.
That's when I thought: If I were sixteen, riding my dirt bike up and down the streets near my house, would I stop just because some guy was yelling at me from a helicopter? Even if it was a police helicopter? Why don't they come down and make me?
When I used to race my Kawasaki dirt bike up and down the streets in front of my house, they weren't streets. They were dirt roads, and my house was a mountain cabin. And if there was a helicopter in use by any law enforcement agency anywhere near my location, it was being used to spot forest fires, not to spot the periodic teenager on a motor bike. Now I wonder which times and situation are more enlightened.
My youthful rides were probably no less annoying to the people who lived in our vicinity. Probably even more disturbing, since I was providing a near constant barrage of engine noise in an otherwise pristine setting. Who is going to notice a couple of dirt bike engines above the din of your standard Oakland afternoon din? Above the roar of the helicopter's rotors? And that loudspeaker?
Eventually, the dirt bikes stopped, and the helicopter went away. I knew they would be back, but the voice from the sky had won that round. Thanks for keeping us safe and sound, but not necessarily safe from the sound.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Coming Soon

I like getting to movies earlier rather than later, primarily because I can find a seat but also because one of my favorite things in the world is watching the little movies that they show before the big movie: the trailers. I now live in a world where I can dial up trailers for movies past, present and future, but there is still something sublime about sitting, hunkered down in the dark in front of that great big screen and watching the coming attractions with the rest of the crowd.
This was my one and only disappointment about my first viewing of the trailer for "Friends You Haven't Met Yet." This is the documentary that I participated in way back a year ago, when a computer scientist came to my house to find out why I have been yammering on about myself for the past eight years. In that year, a lot of water has passed metaphorically under the bridge, and now that it's been nine years, I was pleased and happy to find out that I hadn't just been shouting down a well. There is a movie. A movie that will be shown in a theater, even though the first time I saw bits of it they came as a link in an e-mail.
But I suppose that makes sense, really. That's how this whole thing started. In a quiet little corner of Al Gore's Internet, there was no blog. Now there is this towering virtual edifice of thoughts and words informed by whatever it is that happens to cross my mind as I sit down at the keyboard that morning. As Tom Petty likes to remind us, "some days are diamonds, some days are rocks." Over the past decade, a distinction I feel comfortable tossing around, there have been a few gems, but I should remind everyone that I am not being recognized here for my clever wit or keen insight. The reason they came to talk to me was because of my odd insistence that what I had to say was worth sitting down once a day and committing it to the ether into which I am typing this. It is my special award for being consistent.
Prior to this, on the ninth anniversary of this blog, my wife and a couple of our friends went out to dinner and a hot tub. I was presented with a Spider Man flash drive and a pair of very chocolaty cupcakes. When we went to take our tub, happy to be together and reminiscing, we were admonished by the management to keep it down. "Number five," came the harsh whisper from the other side of the door, "please lower your voices. You are disturbing the people next to you." This had the effect of simultaneously diminishing our joy, but reaffirming our bond. We were number five, and we were troublemakers. We were never asked to leave the premises, but in our own middle-aged way, I think we pressed the bounds of acceptable behavior.
Which gave me another story to tell. This may necessitate a sequel.
For now, I'm taking a moment to revel in my leap to the big time. A major motion picture will soon premiere in Hollywood featuring the whimsical notions of yours truly. And nobody told me to "keep it down."

Friday, May 23, 2014

Pennies From Elsewhere

There are some things that are ineffable. The Holy Trinity comes to mind. So does a bowl of Cap'n Crunch with Crunch Berries. These are mysteries and pleasures that defy explanation. Into this category I will add finding change on the street. I've been picking up pennies, nickels, dimes and the occasional quarter for years off the sidewalk, in parking lots, and even my own driveway. The place I find coins most often, however, on the city streets. I have access to these bits of money primarily because I ride a bike and when I'm not staring off into the mid-distance to look for intermittent oncoming car, I'm looking down. I do this partly because it's a city street and I am constantly aware of the potential hazards to my inner tubes. The debris that exists on my path to and from work is a constant source of amazement to me: broken glass, a razor blade, and even a syringe from time to time. While dodging those pointy things, I confess I also have my eyes open for shiny things.
For as many years as I have been stooping low to pick up the change from the street, I have wondered from whence it came. Sometimes I make up stories about how it's the extra change that was tossed from a wallet that had just been stolen. What self-respecting bad guy would tell his cronies that he just ripped off "twenty-five dollars and seventeen cents?" Or maybe it's the leftover bits from somebody's tip jar that didn't make it into their pocket at the end of a busy night on the late shift. Since I tend to find a lot of coins, mostly pennies, that appear to have been smashed and scraped, I wonder how they got that way. Are street racers dropping them off in advance of their return to peel out on top of them, spraying the neighborhood with clanky bits of copper? Perhaps these are tributes of some sort, left by mourning gang members as testament to their homies. Maybe it's a mixture of all of these, and I should stop trying to figure it out.
It's a gift from the universe, not unlike that bowl of crunch berries. Of course I don't have to take the time later to count and roll them. It's a mystery.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Straight Shooter

I have this message for my friends living in Arizona: When it gets dark, sneak out. There are plenty of other places to go that will offer you sanctuary. Admittedly, some of them have their own peculiarities and challenges in terms of getting along with others, but not in the same pointed way that the Grand Canyon State offers. Like the rancher and Republican congressional candidate who said during a primary debate Saturday that the vast majority of mass shootings in the United States are committed by Democrats. “If you look at all the fiascos that have occurred, ninety-nine percent of them have been by Democrats pulling their guns out and shooting people,” said Gary Kiehne, who is running for the state's First U.S. Congressional District, said during Saturday's GOP primary in Florence, Arizona. “So I don’t think you have a problem with the Republicans.”
Of course not. Gary believes that "everyone should own a gun." He further asserted that he probably owns more guns and ammunition than any of his fellow candidates: "I'm from the country. It's a long ways to town to buy ammo." I'm not sure, but he probably has a sticker on the back of his truck that reads: "Gun Control Means I Hold My Gun With Both Hands." It's funny. Get it?
Luckily for Mister Kiehne, Arizona's First Congressional District, the largest in the state, does not include Tucson, where in 2011 a gunman opened fire, killing six people and wounding thirteen others, including then-Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords. The Democratic congresswoman suffered a gunshot wound to the head in what prosecutors say was an assassination attempt. The guy who shot Miss Giffords, Jared Lee Loughner, was not affiliated with any particular party. Unless that party was the one that believed NASA was faking their missions to space.
Of course, even now there are Republican strategists trying to find figures that will back up a claim made popular by conservative radio talk show host, Roger Hedgecock. Roger hails from San Diego, so if you're an Arizonan looking for a spot to land, maybe Southern California isn't the spot for you either.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Now Appearning

Where in the world's the forgotten?
They're lost inside your memory
You're dragging on, your heart's been broken
As we all go down in history
- "The Forgotten" by Green Day

These are the opening lyrics tot he piece that my son played at his piano recital this past weekend. It was a poignant time, since his mother and I were lost in our own reminiscences of the times we have sat in the crowd with all those other parents, listening to the songs and trying not to flinch at the occasional missed note or cracked chord. We remembered listening to "Under The Sea" and "Top Cat" before he progressed to a point where he could pick and choose his own music. Artists like Green Day and LInkin Park. His ability to take the music of his youth and channel it through his fingers into the piano is a constant source of amazement for me. I tried to play "Pinball Wizard" just like Elton John and "American Pie" like Don McLean, but always came up short. At recitals, I usually ended up playing a sonatina by Mozart or something with which no one would be tempted to sing along. 
This weekend I marveled once again at the confidence my son showed, walking up on stage, sitting down, and playing. I made note of how he has slowly slid from the beginning of the program, where the plink and plunkers start to the latter half of the list where the more practiced and veteran performers show up. I have not sat in the stands and watched my son pitch a no-hitter, nor have I watched him earn an Eagle Scout badge. He's working out his own path. This one has music and art and film. It's not a surprise, considering who his parents are, but at the same time I wonder where he gets the calm center. He's not a prodigy. That ship has sailed and it would take far too much practice and commitment to keep that strain up. Instead, he plays from the heart the songs he knows. I hope that this won't be forgotten. 

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Near Miss

My son has a girlfriend. I'm a little jealous. Not that he has one, but that he accomplished this task in his junior year of high school. When I was a junior, I was busy stalking the cheerleader who had been a flag girl with the band in the previous year. I had taken the words she had written in the back of my sophomore annual "stay in touch" as some sort of invitation to chase after her. That's why I invited her to the Homecoming Dance the next Fall. When she accepted, I figured I was on the right path. I wasn't. She had no real interest in me beyond being "just good friends." It was a refrain with which I had become familiar. I might have taken my lumps and simply moved on, but I remained persistent.
I talked to her friends. I sent her notes. I sent her friends notes. I had my friends talk to her. I sent my friends notes to try to get them to talk to her friends. All of this pamphleteering had no effect. Well, it did have the effect of putting my friends, her friends and her off me for a good long time. All these people got very tired of me whining and moaning about the situation. I got tired of hearing myself whining and moaning about the situation. Eventually. That's when I decided to move on. "There are plenty of fish in the sea," was the wisdom that was shoveled my way. That's the way I tried to envision my world: plenty of fish. Those fish, I inferred, were girls. All I had to do was keep casting my line and sooner or later I was going to snag one of them. A girl, not a fish.
That's what I did for what seemed like forever. Another year passed. That's forever when you're in high school. And you don't have a girlfriend. When my son started down that familiar path starting in his ninth grade I looked at this as a potential bonding opportunity. "Women, right? Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em." Except he really could live without them. He did pine a little from time to time, mostly when his friends started to pair off with their own love interests and started to give him grief. He had his share of near misses. That's a little joke. He rolled with the "just good friends" speech, and stayed positive. In that first week of May, before his junior year was out, he got a girlfriend.
And now the next phase: Keeping the girlfriend. Stay tuned.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Big Deal

When we were kids, playing in my friend's back yard, we used to pretend to be fighting off whatever monster we happened to have watched that Saturday afternoon on Science Fiction Theater. We aimed our plastic guns at the approaching onslaught and prepared to be heroes. It was usually about that time that my friend would make a suggestion like, "Let's say instead of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, it's a Creature from the Black Lagoon that's forty feet tall." This was driven, primarily, by our youthful conviction that bigger is always better, or in this case: worse.
We raised our rifles to the sky and began firing away. Pow. Pow. Kaching. Pew. Pew. Kew. Bam. Of course, our bullets were no earthly use against such a beast. Whether it was the Creature or a Praying Mantis or a Mummy, forty feet of anything was just too much for our conventional (plastic) weapons. This is why many of us met our maker in ghastly ways on those weekend afternoons. My friend generally went with some guttural cry of "Jones!" perhaps because he was calling out for some fallen comrade, or maybe because his imagination had already been taxed by coming up with the forty-foot-tall thing and character names were beyond him at that point.
I do wonder if that same friend didn't change his name when he moved to Hollywood. I might not recognize him as Michael Bay or Joel Silver. Or maybe it's something that our country has always been fascinated with and we will continue to seek out giant robots, aliens, apes and lizards for our fascination. I understand that by buying tickets to see the remake of King Kong and the umpteenth iteration of Godzilla that I am only feeding the beast. Literally. The bigger the better. But I know the secret. The real King Kong was only eighteen inches tall. And Alan Ladd was only five feet six inches tall. But it would have been much cooler is Shane was forty feet tall.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Three's Company

One of the first lessons one can get about cohabitation comes in the form of sharing a locker. I had locker partners throughout high school, and in my senior year my good friend with whom I had arranged in the spring of our junior year to snag a spot in the area closest to the band room where we would spend most, if not all, of our spare time. This was accomplished, and then just before school started, he asked me if I would mind too terribly much having his new girlfriend move in with us.
I confess I didn't know exactly how to react. First of all, what was he doing with a girlfriend? Hadn't we agreed somewhere along the line that we would be frustrated celibates for the foreseeable future? That's what gave us our cynical edge. Or at least that's what I believed. The other hanging chad in this negotiation was that his new girlfriend was a recent emigrant from our crosstown rival, Fairview. Fairfield. The evil empire. The bad guys. I, the newly appointed Pep Band president of the purple and gold Panthers, was supposed to give up one third of my luxuriously appointed metal box to a red and white Knight?
Okay. But I get the top shelf.
For a full two months this arrangement remained a happy one. This girl lived just a mile from my house, so I got into the habit of driving her to school most mornings. Like all happy arrangements, it couldn't last forever. Right around Halloween, my friend and his girlfriend broke up. I already had this habit built in for giving her a ride. And we had become friends. As high school students, we imagined ourselves impossibly mature and decided to deal with the circumstances by remaining cordial to one another, but all the while masking our insecurities and animosities. I tried not to take sides between my old friend and this new one. I tried to remain above the fray as she started to date another guy, and I watched my friend die just a little inside. But we remained locker partners.
Christmas came, and by this time some of those wounds had begun to scab over. The three of us were locker partners, and we didn't have to be best friends, we just had to get out of the way when that binder fell off the top shelf. I watched my other good friends begin to pair off. Some of the guys I knew were even breaking up with their locker partners and merging their textbooks in with their new girlfriends'. It was a crazy time.
It was about that time that I got my first girlfriend. She just happened to be my locker partner and the ex of my best friend. What could be more simple? Calculus. Finding a cure for cancer. Being a cynical, celibate high school senior boy.
And so it went, on into the spring and eventually our graduation. The romance between my best friend's girl blossomed and became the love of my life. Or at least for a certain portion of my life. It was my first experience with community property. It helped shape me into the man I am today: the kind that doesn't like to share a locker with anybody.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Written On The Wind

I'm old school. Ask any of the kids I teach. Ask my son. Ask a stranger on the street. On second thought, just ask me. I will tell you: I like things simple. That's probably at the heart of why I eschew semicolons, but that's a matter for deeper discussion at another time. I am a writer. This blog that you are currently reading is testament to that fact. I am also a late adopter to much of the technology that I have curiously ended up being surrounded.
How I yearn for that Bic stick. So much of my earliest work was scrawled in ballpoint pen in cramped little lines on a legal pad. It wasn't until my freshman year in college that I started using an electric typewriter. Before that, I was tapping out my best efforts on a very dated Royal manual that tended to bounce around my desk as I worked to transpose my chicken scratches into the magnificent prose that would eventually be copied by a machine at my father's office. The notion that there were machines that were capable of performing both of those operations without the wear and tear on my furniture was still years in the future.
And even when that future came, I resisted. I used to complain bitterly about how soulless the words were that came from a dot matrix printer. It wasn't until I found the video store I managed closing around me that I admitted that I had a problem. Adapt or die. I submitted myself to some basic computer skill training that included the use of a funky little program called "Wordstar." It sounded like the future. It looked like the future. Its glowing characters and tricky keyboard commands. It was like piloting my own (word)starship. Slowly I moved from composing with pen and paper to the keyboard. Eventually I lost that little callus that had built up under my right thumb from bearing down so ferociously on that Bic. These days it feels a bit foreign to have to write much more than my signature with a pen.
I was gratified to see that George R.R. Martin still uses his Wordstar. That's where "Game of Thrones" originates. Of course, if he were really true to his art he'd be using dragon's blood and a quill for his next draft.

Friday, May 16, 2014

There Is No Substitute

The widow of Roger W. Rodas, who was driving a Porsche sports car that crashed and killed actor Paul Walker sued the automaker on Monday, claiming design flaws caused both men to die in a fiery crash in November. The wrongful death lawsuit by Kristine M. Rodas says her husband was driving at fifty-five miles per hour. Not at unsafe speeds as law enforcement investigators determined before it crashed last year killing her spouse and the star of the Fast and Furious. Mister Rodas was driving a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT, which is capable of doing more than two hundred miles per hour, but his wife's lawsuit says the vehicle lacked a proper crash cage and safety features in the gas tank that would have saved both men's lives.The suit also insists that a failure in the car's suspension system forced it to careen out of control and strike three trees while driving down a street in Santa Clarita.
Okay. Let's start with that last little bit. "Driving down a street in Santa Clarita." While it is the third largest city in Los Angeles County, the posted speed limits inside the city limits is under fifty-five miles per hour. Even though city officials raised the limit on that particular stretch of Hercules Street from thirty-five to forty-five miles per hour last year, Rodas and Walker were traveling in excess of that. “It’s a great road for racing your car up and down because it’s a sweeping curve," a resident of the area said. "If you come up here at ten or eleven at night, you’ll hear the performance cars racing in the area.”
Add to that the results of an investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and California Highway Patrol released in March that concluded it was unsafe speed and not mechanical problems that caused the crash. But subtract that this investigation was aided by engineers from Porsche, who evaluated the wreckage of the rare car. That rare car in all its many pieces
I know this one by heart. When my son plays his racing games on his Xbox, and he rolls his virtual Carrera off the side of the highway, he looks down in disgust in his controller. He doesn't blame his hands. He blames the machine. 

Thursday, May 15, 2014


That acronym used to stand for "personal digital assistant." Who remembers Palm Pilots? We don't have a lot of use for those anymore, or rather they have become so ubiquitous that most of the fourth graders at my school have a smart phone and the idea that they are somehow connected to that antiquated electronic device seems almost ridiculous. More on those smart phones in just a moment.
Another three word combination that matches those initials would be "public display of affection." You know what I mean. The kind of smoochy, lovey-dovey moment that cause passersby to squirm. Some might even call out, "Hey, get a room already." It tends to really annoy those who lack a significant other with whom they too might engage in a little display of affection, whether in public or not. It can make some people more than a little uncomfortable.
That's what happened when Missouri's Michael Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams. So overcome with emotion, he leaned down and kissed his sweetheart. Right on the mouth. No big deal, right? That sort of thing happens all the time in collegiate and professional sports. Caught up in the moment, the guy reaches out to his loved ones to share in the moment. If it's a cheerleader or mom, somebody of the opposite sex, it's probably not going to make much of a stir. Michael Sam kissed his boyfriend. And, to paraphrase Katy Perry, he liked. it. The same could not be said of the Miami Dolphins' Don Jones.
Don used his PDA to register his opinion of Sam's PDA. "Horrible," he tweeted. That was enough to get him a fine and excused from team activities until he completes a training in sensitivity that his team hopes will improve his outlook on things. Michael Sam is the first openly gay man to play professional football, and so we can only expect that there will be more PDA, or "public displays of aggression" directed at him and the things that he does over the next several months. This would include the eight thousand or so faceless folks with access to a keyboard who lined up to express their displeasure with Sam and their support of Jones on the comment boards located in and around Al Gore's Internet.
Lots of rage about the First Amendment, and God's Holy Word. That word, according to most posters was "abomination." The fact that it came into the homes of many healthy, hetero football fans via such manly outlets as ESPN and the NFL Network just made it all the more painful. Well, since we know that ESPN is owned by Disney, we know what their agenda is. Where can a guy go that he doesn't have to be subjected to all that queerness? All that fanny slapping and head-butting is one thing, but a kiss on the lips? Forget about it. If you want to affirm your manliness, you're going to have to switch on over to Duck Dynasty. Of course, they suspended Phil Robertson too. Because he was an employee of a television network. Don Jones is an employee of the National Football League. That's how he got in trouble. Free Speech? God's Word? Just more PDA: Panicked Distress Alert. He's here. He's queer. So what?

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Date Of Birth: Today

There are a lot of people who start a blog when they start a family. There is no hidden agenda. There are no angry rants about the new television season. What you find are a lot of very cute pictures of very sweet babies doing exactly what you might expect them to do: sit there and be cute. Some of them even come with charming anecdotes about how little Timmy "helped" paint the guest room with his wee little hands. Or maybe the time when Sharon connected the dots on her sister's chicken pox. Maybe I'm just having Family Circus flashbacks, but I don't think I'm making this up.
I could have done that. Way back when I started, I had an eight year old boy who had already done more than his share of cute and clever things. Heaven knows we could have spread some of those pictures around Al Gore's Internet and still had some to spare for the Family Album, but that wasn't the direction I went.
Instead, once a year I make a conscious effort to get back to making specific comment on how my ever-present son is connecting up with his world. That doesn't mean that I don't find time to comment on his meandering path toward adulthood. I do. These entries are interspersed with a lot of whatever else is going on in my mind, including that report on fracking or the memories I have of my own youth.
Here's the deal: Having a son has flavored everything else in my life, and if it weren't for him, I might not still be hammering away on this or that topic. Even if I was, I am certain that my view of the world has been changed forever because of his presence. This is a boy who came into the world to the strains of Beethoven and Bruce Springsteen. As much as I have tried to impress my world upon him, I know that world has been forever changed by what he has given me.
Today is his birthday, and as he continues to reach for that next rung on the ladder, I find myself hesitating only slightly to reach up to help. I want him to go as high as he wants, but I worry about what will happen if he falls. That last sentence almost came out "what will happen when he falls." That's what I have to keep in mind. He will slip and fall. I won't always be there to watch helplessly as he does so. That's the hardest part about this parent gig. I have just become accustomed to doing everything for this nascent life form, and now it's time to start unplugging from the main circuits. That doesn't mean I won't maintain some sort of wi-fi contact for the foreseeable future. I plan on keeping my nose in his business as long as possible from this plane, and the next if they let me. I'm really enjoying this particular show, and I don't want it to end.
That's why it seems to come up so frequently 'round here. It's not just his birthday, but today is, so Happy Birthday, son. Thanks for the memories.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Muddle East

What if the held a Senate Subcommittee and nobody came? They'll be showing up for the Benghazi panel, that much is certain. John Boehner, who is not the guy who played Sergeant Schutz, will make certain of that. He's assembled a crack team of investigators and litigators who just happen to be Republicans.  They want the truth. I just hope we can handle the truth.
Like the truth behind our invasion of Iraq. Why were we there? We were looking for terrorists, right? Or was it the Weapons of Mass Destruction? Perhaps it was the oil? Well, as it turned out, we didn't get any terrorists, WMD, or oil out of the deal. What we lost, was a little more plain: more than four thousand American soldiers. That doesn't include the two thousand plus casualties in Afghanistan. That's where we were really hunting terrorists. The real bad guys and their leader. Not Saddam Hussein, but the real bad guy, Osama bin Laden. Who just happened to be hanging out in Pakistan, a country in the region we hadn't made arrangements to invade. We were far too busy poking around in all those other despot-ridden countries to notice.
Now we're trying to figure out how to deal with the mess that we made by going over there in the first place. Where did all those records about claims and benefits for the veterans of those foreign wars go, for example? We don't apparently need the oil so much, and now that the bad guys are dead, we have to figure out a new reason to keep our noses in there just in case we need the oil after all.
We, or the United States, have embassies that keep opening and closing all the time over there in the Middle East. Like the time that bad guys took over our embassy in Iran and held the diplomatic personnel there long enough to give Ted Koppel his own show until Ben Affleck went over there to rescue them. Or something like that. But ever since then, we've been opening and closing our embassies as a precaution, just in case something bad like that might happen again and Ben was busy being Batman or counting cards at the Hard Rock Casino. One of those was probably the case when bad guys overran the embassy in Benghazi.
It's not funny that people died. Four or four thousand, but now, shortly before the next flurry of elections we will hold to try and figure out who will eventually become members of a subcommittee that will look into how we handled or mishandled our latest misstep in the Middle East. It's not funny "ha ha." It's funny "historical irony." Or something like that.

Monday, May 12, 2014


That's one of the things the Grinch, who eventually stole and (spoiler alert) then returned Christmas, couldn't stand in the least: Noise. I'm a teacher, and I get that. Not so much the whole Christmas thing, but the noise part. I spend a good portion of every single day asking, cajoling, begging and pleading children to be quiet. This is in spite of all the research I have read as well as all the anecdotal experience I have had that tells me that a happy classroom is a productive classroom. And sometimes that happiness spills out in peals of childish laughter. This is no coincidence, since the pealing is coming from children who are in my room. When things are going really well, I might even laugh along with them.
Still, I spend an awful lot of time saying the words, "Be Quiet." I try to throw in a "please" and will often toss out a "thank you" when I get the volume level where I hoped it would be. Blessed with what my wife refers to as "teacher voice," sometimes that level is a little louder than that which most people would find conversational, but that's not the point at which I am aiming. I just want them to hear the directions. After that, since they are in the computer lab, they are swallowed up by their headphones and immersed in whatever is going on in the cyberworld in front of them. For thirty of the fifty minutes they are with me, my students don't need me to remind them about noise level.
Maybe this explains the fascination these days with "distance learning." We have just finished a two-week trial of online testing for our grades three through five. Whenever we did our state testing in the past, we were virtually assured of a quiet time. Kids would be hunched over their test booklets, furiously filling in their bubbles, with the earliest finishers turning that same fierce attention to their word searches or the latest installment of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series. This year was just a little more intense. All one could hear was the periodic click of a mouse or the pitter patter of tiny fingers across keyboards. It was eerie. It was relaxing.
But not enough to make me want to do that all the time. Kids need to interact with each other and the world around them in a more impactful way than simply pointing and clicking. There should be no kicking or spitting, but the occasional hoot or holler might mean they're getting some usable input. And if the output is noisy, it just means they're alive.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Mom Genes

Probably the most embarrassing thing about having my most recent struggle with a kidney stone was the number of people who likened the experience to that of childbirth. This sort of comparison provided me with a wave of much-needed compassion and gold stars for bedside manner for them, but it only takes a moment or two to spot all the ways in which they really are not the same. Chief among these is the fact that I will not spend the next eighteen to sixty years worrying about where my kidney stone is on a Friday night. Or any other night, for that matter.
No, kidney stones pass. Eventually. Children have a tendency to stick around. That is why childbirth is such an awesome feat. That is also why we have a special day set aside for its recognition: Labor Day. Please feel free at this point to hurl something at your screen, but don't break it. I would hate to be responsible for property damage in addition to that awful joke. I would also feel bad if it were somehow inferred that I don't have the proper respect for motherhood. Mothers are awesome. Mothers are powerful. Mothers are magical.
I can say this with a straight face because I have personally witnessed what would otherwise be considered impossible events brought on by the presence of somebody's mother. Think of how many tons of vegetables are eaten every day simply because your mother told you to. Mothers are responsible for mediating all manner of sketchy behavior, sometimes simply by invoking their presence. They don't even have to be in the room. "What would your mother say if she were here?" I've taken the steam out of plenty of fifth grade boys with that one.
And here's another distinct difference between my relationship with my kidney stone and mothers' relationship with their offspring: I was happy and relieved to be rid of my kidney stone. I did not feel any sort of intrinsic bond with that sliver of calcium. My mother, on the other hand, has endured decades of irritation from me, and yet she remains unflinchingly fond of me and maintains a nearly constant interest in my well-being. This extends to my experience with kidney stones. Ah, the irony.
I confess that at times I benefit from the fact that my wife is also a mother. When those moments arise that test our marriage vows about sickness and health, I feel like I get a little extra TLC because my wife moonlights as a mother. Well, she actually works more than full time on that whole motherhood gig, but it's nice when some of those big time momma concern rays fall on me, especially while I'm flopping around in pain because of (ta-dah!) kidney stones. Whereas it is primarily the father's job to insist that their child "suck it up" an play on, mothers have a way of softening most any crushing blow.
And one more difference: I didn't receive a card from my kidney stone this year. Not even a phone call.

Saturday, May 10, 2014


I used to try and tell my older brother about the new Jimmy Buffett album I found while flipping through the new releases bin at Rocky Mountain Records and Tapes. This was inevitably a futile gesture, since he had been down there the day before or had talked to a clerk earlier in the week or somehow scooped my big news just by being that much more in the know about all things Buffett. He was, and always will be a Parrothead. My attempts to try and find that piece of news or rare bit of Margaritian lore were almost always met with, "Yeah, I know. I heard about that," followed by the very polite and encouraging, "You got your tickets too, right?" Over the years, I have had a few triumphs whereby I was able to get that souvenir or rumor that was a revelation for him, but I learned not to try and out Parrothead the Chief Parrothead.
You might think that would be an experience from which I would learn. Why then would I choose to try and keep my friend from New Jersey up on all things Bruce and Springsteen related? This is a guy who had a subscription to Backstreets when it was a magazine. I may at one time have held some sort of sway when we lived in the same time zone, but the mere fact that he lives on the right side of the country while I live on the left keeps him three hours ahead of all the breaking news on E Street. I'm a continent away. And, I confess, a couple orders of magnitude away in terms of obsession. In the big book of Springsteen fans, I hardly rate a footnote. I've never been to the Stone Pony, and I am constantly being introduced to side projects and lost singles by the guy I used to be able to surprise, at least some of the time. Access to Al Gore's Internet has been something of a leveler, but I still don't even expect to compete.
For a while, I thought that I could be the eyes and ears of my son when it came to all things Marvel. I spent my youth reading comics starring Captain America, Spider Man, and even the occasional Doctor Strange. When it came time to introduce my progeny to this universe, I was pleased and happy to be able to pull out the crates of vintage issues, the ones I had long since committed to memory. When they started making movies, I felt smug, knowing what lay around the corner for our heroes. Peter's Uncle Ben always dies? Gwen Stacy? Same deal. The lack of surprise for me was made up for by watching my son react to the unfolding legend. Somewhere along the line, my son gained access to Al Gore's Internet as well. Now he follows Stan Lee and the rest of the Merry Marvel Marching Society on Facebook. And Twitter. And all manner of social media that only confuses his old man. If I want to know what is up with those Agents of Shield, I don't ask Al Gore or Tony Stark. I ask my son.

Friday, May 09, 2014

On This Site

First of all, let me clear up some of the math misconceptions: I am starting my tenth year at this location. I could have made the sixth of May my anniversary, but then I went and took a weekend off nine years ago. Since then, it's been one a day. Nine years of prattling on about whatever it is or was on my mind at the time. Sometimes it was pressing. Others it was a passing fancy. If you've ever been passed fancy I think you know how confounding that can be.
But this is a celebration. Today I would like to thank all those people who made the past nine years possible. I couldn't begin the list with anyone else but my mother, who encouraged me to take up a pen and paper in the first place. She's been reading what I have to write since I started. I would also like to acknowledge my father's contribution to my pool of genes, since his love of a story is what fuels my need to tell people about whatever it is that I decide has to be turned into a story. My brothers, who tell stories of their own and star frequently in the reminiscences of days gone by.
I miss my dogs. They listened when no one else would and gave me a world of anecdotes that continue to bring me smiles in their memory. I have a sea of other friends who are not so furry who have also helped me keep this ball in the air. Some of them comment. Some of them send their approval in other ways. It's nice to know when I get one right. It's also important for me to know when I've gone too far, since the isolation of the keyboard and screen sometimes allows for this. I appreciate those voices that say, "Really? Did you have to say that?"
The teachers who taught me how to write. The teachers with whom I now work. The teachers with whom I used to work. These are inspirations for many of the best bits of wisdom I have to share. Like Bruce Springsteen or John Elway, it's important to have heroes, and these folks are the ones that remind me day after day what the important work is. I could write an opera or paint a picture, but those avocations don't take place in this finite space.
This is what I've got: My little corner of Al Gore's Internet. Entropical Paradise, named not for the conservative think site or the electronic music recording, but rather for the band name I thought up in college. I don't have a band, I've got a blog. I've got a group of friends and family who drop by on a regular basis to keep up with what I have to say, and that feels about right. I have a couple of friends, one of whom suggested I give this blog thing a try way back when, and another who maintained his own site of haiku. They are the ones who got me off the mark back in 2005, and so I salute you for that. And while I'm at it, I suppose I should give a shout out to George W. "Pinhead" Bush who may be the most frequently mentioned human in this blog. Thanks for the fuel, W. Thank you all for helping to keep this fire burning.

Thursday, May 08, 2014

Sorry, Michelle

Starkist doesn't want tuna with good taste. They want tuna that tastes good. Or so I've been told. The same can be interpolated for kids and their school lunches. I know because five days a week I stand next to the "share box" that fills up on any given day with the healthy alternatives that our school lunch program. The kids know the rhythm by heart: take your choice of entree, with a milk, two items from the salad bar, and have a seat. If you don't want milk, don't take milk, we are reminded. Over and over again. Otherwise the full or nearly full cartons end up being poured into a strainer to keep the straws and bigger particles from ending up in the bucket. The one that gets thrown down the drain.
There isn't much sharing of milk going on. There is variety, most days, with a couple of choices for your meal along with some fresh produce to put on your cardboard tray. Wednesday is pizza day, when the choices diminish to cheese or pepperoni, but that's not a concern since Wednesday is pizza day. The share box is pretty empty on Wednesday. Because it's pizza day.
Beef and broccoli over rice? Italian chicken drumstick? Veggie soft tacos? These are a little tougher sell. These are all just a smidge healthier fare than what they get on Wednesday (pizza), and those are the ones that end up being shared. Those are the days that make us all wonder if we're missing something when it comes to feeding out kids. What's the point of giving them healthy food if they won't eat it? Starting next school year, pasta and other grain products in schools will have to be whole-grain rich, or more than half whole grain. That includes rolls, biscuits, pizza crust, tortillas and even grits. Grits? Oh boy. I can't imagine how many takers we would get at our school for grits, especially if they were whole grain grits.
School nutrition directors say the standards were put in place too quickly as kids get used to new tastes and school lunch vendors rush to reformulate their foods. When kids don't buy lunch, or throw it away, it costs the schools precious dollars. The truth is, that "share box" really ends up being shared with the compost bin. My solution? Serve them whatever you like, whole grain, gluten-free, soy-enriched. Just make sure it tastes like pizza.

Wednesday, May 07, 2014

Spatial Recognition

It has been a long time, but I do remember when I used to show up at my son's preschool, or even his elementary school as a surprise, and his eyes would go wide as he realized that daddy was there. I cherish those memories of the connection we share, specifically those that brought him across the room in a rush for a big hug. He's going to be seventeen next week. He's not rushing across the room anymore.
Not in public, anyway. And certainly not in front of his peers. This past weekend I went to see the play for which he was doing some very impressive tech work. I stood with my wife just a few feet away from where he was chatting up his fellow techies and preparing for the closing night's performance. I waited for that recognition, which finally came not from him but from a couple of his friends. I can't claim to be shocked by this change. I've been aware of it over the years and I have become increasingly aware of his at-school persona as he has made his way from grade to middle to high schools. I know what social death awaits any high school student who would race across the auditorium to embrace their parents. I get that. It doesn't keep me from dying inside, just a little.
That's because I remember what it was like to have my parents around when I was busy trying to become whoever it was that I was trying to become in high school. My parents were Band Parents, a fiercely loyal and hard-working bunch who showed up early and stayed late, sewing up uniform pants and loading vans full of equipment. My father got himself put in charge of the concession stands for home football and basketball games. I saw him almost as often as I saw many of my friends. My friends all thought he was great. He was so funny. He was so cool. Which would have been great if A) those weren't the exact things I was trying to be and B) he was my father. This generated a distance between my father and I that neither one of us ever fully understood or talked about, but it persisted until I graduated from college.
In both cases, my relationship between my son and with my father, I never doubted how close we were and how much love we shared. That foundation was laid a long time ago, and even when I can't get eye contact from my son, I know that he knows what my father knew: we are bound together. It would be indiscreet to talk about the hugs I still get from my son and the affection that is only visible when we don't have to worry about that distance we both know has to be there. I know that my father went to his grave with a kiss and a hug that I gave him at the airport just before he took his last flight. I don't mind anybody knowing that. Now. It's been a long time since I was seventeen.

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

The Daily Mirror

“The U.S. is a living hell as elementary rights to existence are ruthlessly violated.” Pretty tough words, especially when one considers the source: North Korea. The Korean Central News Agency  report cites examples such as racial disparity, misuse of political funds, gun violence, and widespread unemployment and poverty. Ouch, and or touche.
Of course, this is coming from the country with a record so bloody that an official United Nations inquiry recently compared its practices to Nazi war crimes. It's also the country that, just before pointing its finger in the direction of the Untied States,  pointed at South Korea as holding the “world’s poorest human rights record,” topping an article that deduced the poor situation was “a product of the U.S. colonial rule,” in which “its people languish in unemployment and poverty.” Ooo, Kim Jung Snap!
But enough about them, let's get back to the whole Faux News, North Korea bureau version of things: “Its chief executive, Obama, indulges himself in luxury almost every day, squandering hundred millions of dollars on his foreign trip in disregard of his people’s wretched life." Like when Glenn Beck stirred our own conservative fervor via a sketchy and eventually proven false Indian news report that President Obama’s visit was costing two hundred million dollars a day and utilizing a fleet of thirty-four warships.
And it's not just Glenn foaming at the mouth in the service of the North Korean propaganda machine. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee told a summit in April, “I’m beginning to think that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States.” Careful there, Mike, you might end up putting members of the KCNA out of work.
Speaking of that work: “The U.S. government has monitored every movement of its citizens and foreigners, with many cameras and tapping devices and even drones involved, under the pretext of ‘national security,’” KCNA writes in reference to the NSA surveillance scandal. It doesn’t mention that North Korea has apparently purchased more than 100,000 closed-circuit surveillance cameras to monitor its citizens with over the past few years. As the recent UN assessment notes, access to information technology in the notoriously insular country is severely restricted and censored.
Even when it's the pot calling the kettle black, like when the report points out that more than two million U.S. citizens are kept as prisoners, “the highest number in the world,” it stings just a little bit. That pot is North Korea, after all. Thanks for the lesson in humility, y'all. 

Monday, May 05, 2014

Watching Your Watch Him

That's the name of one Eric Hutchinson's big hits: "Watching You Watch Him." It's also how I spent a great deal of time as I stood on the floor of San Francisco's famous Fillmore. I did gaze adoringly at my wife, as I do from time to time, but mostly I was watching the fans of Eric Hutchinson watch him.
I was given this gift of slight detachment because I won tickets to see the guy. I was briefly aware of some of his music, but I could not be categorized as an Eric Hutchinson Superfan. But I did have a very delicious opportunity to observe the Northern California Hutchead in their native habitat. Many of them were recognizable by their omnipresent smartphones. These were held aloft at regular intervals in order to take murky, shaky video of the show that they had no doubt eagerly anticipated for months. Now they were in Eric's physical presence and they wanted to be sure to capture the experience for nearly immediate uploading on Al Gore's Internet. This allows the more distant or unlucky Hutcheads to witness in low fidelity all the fun and excitement that their bandwidth would allow.
Don't get me wrong: I danced. I laughed. I sang along. I sang along even though I wasn't privy to the lyrics of Eric's entire catalog, as some around us were. As many around us were. I was just keenly aware of the distance between my wife and I who had gone out on a lark and those who were there on a mission. I enjoyed myself, but not in the same way I would at, say, a Bruce Springsteen show. Hutcheads would be aghast at my over-the-top behavior at an E Street Band concert. I've embarrassed myself, family and friends at those events, so why should I be so judgmental about a crowd of twenty-to-forty-somethings hopping and bopping to their Crocodile's rock?
I suppose it came down to this: I won these tickets for knowing the title of an obscure Nicolas Cage film and having access to a phone at seven fifteen in the morning. I had a couple apples from the tub near the door and a Reuben sandwich at the cafe upstairs before the show. When I went downstairs, we waited just a few minutes and milled with the rest of the throng until the lights went down and Eric hit the stage with his band. I had fun. I will probably buy a few more songs, bringing my Hutchinson Hit Parade to nearly a full album. But I won't be doing what my wife suggested we do as we walked up Fillmore, the street, at the end of the night. Spying a slightly used RV by the curb, she asked me if I wanted to quit my job and follow the band across the country. No, I told her, but I did buy a T-shirt.

Sunday, May 04, 2014

Good Sport

There's a lot of talk out there about what it takes to be the owner of a professional basketball franchise. Currently, there are eight prime candidates for that job in the Los Angeles area. The Clippers, of the National Basketball Association, are looking for a few good men or women who would like to pay a whole boatload of money to be able to sit wherever the heck they want in the Staples Center. These seats will be nowhere near those of Donald Sterling, who like Elvis, has left the building.
Back to the qualifications of the next owner of the Clippers: Number one should be a certain amount of racial and cultural sensitivity. Mister Sterling seemed to be missing this particular quality. Number two would be the ability to fake that racial and cultural sensitivity, in a pinch, something that Mister Sterling was able to do. He had the NAACP pretty well fooled. Number three, if you've got a predisposition to offensive rants against large groups who happen not only to make up your fan base but your own team, try and keep them private. This goes back to the boatloads of money mentioned previously. If your wallet is fat enough to spare a few million dollars for limousines and fines of various kinds, save a little aside to pay off the guys from TMZ who happen to have access to the tapes made by your disgruntled girlfriend who just happens to be a part of that same group that you were busy defaming just a couple of sentences ago.
How about Floyd Mayweather Jr.? He's an athlete, and he has about a kerjillion dollars to spend, so he looks pretty well suited to the job. More than Frankie Muniz, who looks to be a big fan but maybe not as superrich as we might expect from the time he spent with Walter White. And he's white. Magic Johnson is not. So much so that Donald Sterling was particularly incensed by his girlfriend's connection to the living legend that is Magic. And he's almost got Diddy money. Why not go straight to the Diddy then? Sean "Peanutty Goodness" Combs claims to be a Knicks fan, but business is business.
I could go on and on, but if it can't be Oprah. She's got Diddy and Magic money. She gets apologies from racists. And last I checked, she knew how to keep her girlfriend happy. But here's the bottom line for me: I just don't want Donald Sterling to make any money off of this. That's why I'll be happy to take the job. I don't have Oprahdiddy money, but I will promise to not reward that pinhead Sterling with anything but my Subway Eat Fresh Club card. Which is probably more than he deserves.

Saturday, May 03, 2014

Nothing Personal

As I was walking away from the mailbox, leafing through the day's correspondence, I was surprised to see the phrase, "June 21st isn't just like any other day." For just a spare moment, my heart leapt. What were the chances that the friendly folks at NEA Insurance Operations would be promoting the First Day of Summer, which by the most tired of coincidences just happens to be my birthday? What are the chances that these people would just happen to be sending out some sort of promotion that coincided with the date of my birth?As it turns out, the chances would be one hundred percent.
Before I opened the envelope, just to be certain that this wasn't some sort of eerie confluence of events, I considered the possibility that this company which is associated with teachers and their school-related calendars might have picked this date as the kickoff to Summer Vacation. This would provide me with that additional layer of connection which would make this whole junk mail interaction just a little more intimate. Once I had peeked inside, I was greeted with the enthusiastic pitch: "It's not just your birthday, it's also your chance to lock in $100,000 NEA coverage for 15 years for $23.08 a month." It made me feel all warm and special for a few more seconds before I rejoined the reality that was already in progress.
They weren't sending me out a special notice just for me. Their data bank spit out this invitation based on information that I had given them way back when I had first signed up to be a teacher and become part of the team that would deliver the finest education to the students of America as well as periodically be reminded of my advancing years via fill-in-the-blank missives sent to me in hopes of my further contributions to the profession: Life Insurance.
I'm not getting any younger, and there are plenty of institutions out there ready and willing to take the opportunity to remind me of my age and station in life. Every time I put my name and date of birth on a form, written or on Al Gore's Internet, I was inviting this kind of kind attention. I also explains the other envelope that came along with my NEA offer, only this one didn't have my name or birthday on it. This one came with "cards enclosed," making it ever so much easier to become part of AARP. The American Association of Retired Persons had already been rebuffed by me a couple of years back, and at that time they had even done me the service of getting my name right. This one came to someone named Dk Caven, which I recognized as a twist of initials and name that must have come from one of those electronic forms that was completed in a rush in order to sign up for some "free service."
There's still a month and a half or so until my actual birthday, and until then, I will steel myself with the resolve that those envelopes that come postage paid, even if they mention that all important date, shouldn't be taken personally. But it would be nice to get an actual card from the NEA, even though they were nice enough to include a 2014 calendar magnet as their special gift to me. What a shame the year will be half over before I can feel good about using it.

Friday, May 02, 2014


I didn't go out shopping for a Vega. It found me. When I was a sixteen-year-old sprout with visions of automobile futures, I went in search of a Plymouth Arrow. I knew I was going to buy a used car. I just wasn't clear on how used that car was going to be. I mowed a lot of lawns to raise the nearly one thousand dollars that I intended to spend on the car of my dreams. After a brief flirtation with the idea of owning a Chevy van, with Star Wars graphics painted on the side, I landed on this idea of an Arrow.
Why? Because it was the name of Oblio's dog. From Harry Nilsson's animated classic "The Point." Also because I became aware of the price differential between a Chevy van and any "small car" I might be able to afford. It was 1978, and the gas crisis of just a few years back weighed heavily on my mind, as did the gas crisis I was about to face. That is to say that paying for my own gas was going to be a crisis.
As it turned out, there wasn't a used Plymouth Arrow anywhere on the lot. At least not one that I could afford. That's when my eye and mind began to wander. It didn't help that I was a teenager standing on a used car lot with his father who was no help at all when it came to salesmen who really desperately did not want me to drive away with my father. "What do we have to do to get you into this baby today?" That sort of thing.
All they really had to do was meet my price point. The car I bought, the 1972 Vega hatchback, was eight hundred and eighty dollars. That meant I had a little more than a hundred dollars left over for tax, licensing and the aforementioned gas. I tried to kid myself into believing that I was getting a Camaro. Same great styling from the same great company: Chevrolet. I was not getting a Camaro. I was not getting a Chevy van. Nor was I getting a Plymouth Arrow. I bought the car that I could afford.
I bring this up because I keep having conversations with my son that start like this: "Hey dad, I'm thinking about using some of that money in my Bumblebee account to buy a car." The account is called that because long ago he decided that he might like to buy himself a yellow Chevy Camaro just like the one they used in Transformers: The Movie.
"You've got about four hundred dollars in there." I know that he has no real designs on a Camaro at this point.
"Yeah, a friend and I are thinking about buying this four hundred dollar car and fixing it up." I understand he has plans. I also understand that he will eventually own the car that he can afford. And the one that his mother and I can afford to have him driving around the highways and byways of California. What we all can afford.

Thursday, May 01, 2014

What's The Good News?

My wife hates it when I wake her with news stories about death and destruction. She very much prefers the good news, the stories that generally fit in between the murder and dismemberment. That's why this one is dedicated to you, honey.
A teenager was arrested on Monday after he brought a loaded assault rifle and two handguns to his high school and said he had a list of demands he wanted to read over the intercom. No weapons were fired and no injuries were reported in the incident at Madison High School. The student's parents had initially notified the school that their son was missing early Monday when they found he was not at home. After realizing that three weapons were missing from the home, they went to the campus to find him. They found the student at the school and found two handguns in his backpack. They specifically asked him where the third gun was, and that weapon was found hidden in a restroom. Again, no shots were fired.
What makes this story even better, to me at least, what that it happened in San Antonio, Texas. And it didn't take a "good guy with a gun" as so many firearm fanciers have suggested in the wake of what has become an epidemic of school shootings in our country. It took concerned parents who tracked their kid down and made sure that he didn't do any harm. I'm not certain that this will win them my vote for Mom and Dad of the year, since somehow they did manage to let their somewhat emotionally disturbed son make it out from under their watchful eye locked and loaded. Did I mention "no shots fired?" It's not a story about drunken elephants, but it will have to do.