Have

Remembering those who went before us for the cause of freedom from tyranny.

With the passing of each Memorial Day observance and then again with Veterans day I wonder about the life of my Grandfather. He was among those who survived his service during World War II and was able to return to the United States, build a life and get on with the business of normalcy. Reading Grandpa’s one paragraph internet obituary this morning, looking for information on his military service, I was thinking about the two lines that define and sum up his early life. He fought at Bastogne and was held over in Europe after the war aiding the liberation of p.o.w. camps. My grandfather didn’t like to talk about his service in the Army and I can’t blame him. He saw and did things of a nature that no person, let alone a man in the bloom of his young adulthood, should ever have to. We had very few conversations about World War II. He explained to me once that the Battle of The Bulge was hellish days in the snow, expecting to be killed by the Nazi’s. When I was a high school senior, Grandma got him to open up about the war and they showed me his uniform, the double A of the 82nd Airborne prominent on the shoulder. Later still, when my sister was getting ready to go off to Parris Island to become a Marine and I’d enlisted, he stood with me in the cramped recruiter’s office she was leaving from. “I’m proud of you kids for signing up.” He started to tell me, finishing with  ”I wouldn’t have done it though. I had to serve.”

That’s the rub. There was no flourish. Like the 19,000 Americans who lost their lives fighting against the Axis during the Battle of the Bulge, he had to be there. A guy with an eighth grade education pulled off the line at G.M. and dropped into France after travelling overseas on a ship full of dysentery. He had to do it. So me and my kind can have. And have some more. I have the choice to get up and go to work tomorrow, or not,  because of millions of Americans who fought and were wounded or killed in combat. I have a choice, because so many military men and women gave up their choice to have all that they wanted. I love and respect each and every one of our service members, especially those who gave up their lives so that we the free could have everything we ever wanted. On behalf of a grateful nation, thanks.

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Air

As a trained husband, skilled in distinguishing between important sounds and mere noise, I can sleep through nearly anything. Babies crying, car alarms, end of days. These are just white noise to the ears of a professional sleeper. One sound did present itself in an obnoxious enough way (no, it wasn’t my own voice, surprisingly) to get my attention and turn me once again into “Dad: Destroyer of Household Goods.” The noise has been emanating from our Air Conditioning unit, which sits somewhere beneath the bedroom window. No amount of Don Draper-style parenting (“Stop that! Go to sleep!”) worked on the a.c., so I had to take matters into my own unskilled, twitchy hands. The device was buried under generations of kudzu and jungle vegetation. Indiana Jones style, I machete-ed out back armed only with a sledgehammer, a can of WD-40 and a Fodor guide (chiamare il condizionatore riparatore?). I could have hired the neighbor kid to do the yard work but he has his own issues. Poor guy is 90 and still lives with his mother, aged 112. There are slacker problems with the Oldest Generation, I guess.

To have air conditioning, let alone central air, is a blessing I am so thankful for. Growing up, our family made do with a World War II era, 40 pound office fan, that we’d lug from room to room. Dad had fished it out of a dumpster on one his many home shopping trips.  As the oldest child, I was allowed to have the fan at night. Not much of a comfort, as the thing was like sleeping next to a running tractor. I’d put Joe Satriani or Mettalica tapes on my Walkman and crank them all the way up to drown out old reliable. My sleeping skills were fully developed long before leaving home. I never yelled at the fan. It had a sweet spot that could be punched. You had to be careful. Knocking it over meant the evil bastard would eat through the floor and wind up in the basement. Have I mentioned my eternal love for noisy but consistent a.c.?

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Groupie

 Friday night entertainment in small-town, middle America is often where you find it. Follow the noise and you’re bound to be rewarded with something interesting. Last night the students at Coloma High School (that would be in the southern reaches of Michigan. The Indiana Riviera, as it were) put on a talent show to benefit anti-bullying efforts and promote a substance free lifestyle. The kids were great, and I give them a lot of credit for taking the stage with songs and comedy. My 9-year old daughter Anna, the sage wisdom behind many of these blog posts, was in attendance. To say she’s impressionable would be an understatement. Anna takes in whatever she’s viewing with the rapt attention of an alien being sent to observe and report on the weird cultural rituals that make up life on Earth. It was in this way that she fell for an 18-year-old guitarist. Like riding a laundry basket on wheels, downhill and with no soft landing in site, I am raising a pre-teenage girl. All I could do was hum Wilco’s Heavy Metal Drummer all day today (“…she fell in love with the drummer/another then another…”). Here we go.

The boy in question is a great Christian kid, and I offer him all the hearty congratulations in the world on his graduation this coming week. He is the unwitting victim of Anna, however. Some girls develop crushes, but Annabanana goes Doctor Who on whomever (or whatever) piques her interest. She was reverse engineering his guitar playing. Once, when she complained of boredom, I told her to grab her pink kiddie guitar with the busted fret board and play Hanna Montana tour bus. Instead, she found a Hal Leonard book and taught herself two chords. Good thing our young friend is off to college soon. Anna’s not after him, it’s his chords she wants. I caught her head banging, unprompted, when the kids struck up Smell Like Teen Spirit. I am so in trouble.

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Podcast Episode 5 Episode 2

 

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bodysuit

The other day on this blog I was griping about the local bikini moms and their penchant for wearing various stages of dress (or un) around town. Sure it’s a bit showy, but with the arrival of steady 85 and 90 degree days I’ve adopted a laissez-faire  (aka,  whozee-cares) attitude. It’s a non- issue when soggy heat, mosquitos and shambling masses all come together for summer. Bathing suits, wading pools of Miller High Life (official beer sponsor of resignation) and outdoor living are in season. Besides, my new muse is the cat suit.

Last night, watching the American Idol finale, I was really amused by the body hugging costumes many of the veteran guest performers trotted out in. I didn’t live blog the show, because I was busy with a running verbal commentary on the proceedings. None of the “serious” topics mattered during the two-hour program. The eventual winner, the performance by Aerosmith, the packaged montages, Phil Phillips’ facial expressions all took a back seat to the parade of evil spandex. I love and respect the curves and natural appearance of all women. God is good. When shallow man and wardrobe staffers stuff these wonderous people into outfits engineered to withstand high tensile stress, the plan goes wrong. John Fogerty, formerly of Credence Clearwater Revival, came out wearing a flannel shirt. A respectable uniform, the same we’ve seen him in since 1968. Fantasia Barrino, on the other hand, was mangled into a sequined cut-up body suit. Half Bruce Banner/half Hulk, you knew as sure as the Gospel fire coming out of her that the outfit would be shredded and she’d smash the studio audience to bits. Later, after Rihanna (who doesn’t wear anything), came Chakka Khan. She may be every woman and by golly there were at least three smuggled in her outfit. I always say that being mature means one can wear pretty much whatever they choose. Thank you skin-tight Idol outfits for setting me straight.

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Pavement

A few months ago I was lamely explaining my reasons for abandoning the daily running program that had become a cornerstone of my life. The whole argument came down to barfing. Professionals turn their noses up at the term barf, seeming to prefer the more tasteful notes in the word puke, or that classic of the ancient world vomit. I, however, was spending all my free time (and many of my scheduled moments) barfing. The doctor was trying to establish how much I was “really” running. The answer was not at all, real, or otherwise. Barfing had me on a fitness program of its own, and that was about as real as things got.

I got off the barfy train a month ago thanks to medications that may kill me (but will keep my stomach contents in place) and began the task of rebuilding the runner’s body. This is not an easy gig. The inverse of living as Andrew and His Technicolor Dinner Re-runs, was that I had to eat to make up the lost energy. My body began to take on the look of Jabba jr. The way back to the solid, strong (and mercifully silent when outdoors) runner I used to be meant becoming a walker. Jabba the Shuffler is slowly being replaced by something better than the old upchuck marathoner of a year ago. To coin the cliché, whatever doesn’t make a person sick any longer, should make them mad enough to go and fight. My once full race schedule is down to one event, the aptly named Old Farts Marathon, in Lowell, Michigan at the end of summer. I have no notions of suddenly getting back into good form. The truth is that this will be a season of dirt, scrapes, hills, too-early mornings, and way-too hot afternoons. A very good trade for barfing, if I do say so myself.

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Mister

I read recently that commenting on blogs is a good way to introduce people to your own writing. As a reclusive nut case, I mostly sneak around blogs I admire and retreat back to this particular whateveritis after reading them. If you’ve commented here, or followed, I’ve read your work and enjoyed it before going back into the cave of Mostly Teachable. There is a reason that I don’t comment much, and that reason is the fear of sounding like an argument I read today between two braniacs about whether Mr. T. is pro or anti-Nietzsche in his personal philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who died in 1900 after battling drug addiction, mental illness and syphilis. What a joy he must have been at parties. “Let me get this straight, Fred. God is dead? Geez, you don’t look that good yourself.” 

The argument over which side of the Nietzsche school Mr. T errs on is ludicrous. There’s a reason that a group of Hollywood character actors rode around in the A-Team van and not the great philosophers of the last three centuries. The reason is that the philosophers would have never made it out of the van. What a weird scene that would have been if NBC had made an action series in which Nietzsche, Kant, Camus, and Kierkegaard had formed a band of vigilantes who weekly were charged with bringing down banana republics. There’d have been thrilling arguments over the nature of existence and God, of science and reality. Not so much the throwing of hand grenades, but the dialogue would have been something else. Is is possible that Mr. T. is a great philosopher on his own terms? I saw him at Burger King once in Chicago, and he was an imposing figure, but very kind to his fans. That’s really all I ask out of my heroes. That, and an explanation of free will.

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Bikini

   Living in a smallish town along Lake Michigan, there are few things we look forward to more than the start of Summer weather. Even though there was a hot snap in mid-March in which temperatures rose above 80°, the rest of the Spring was typically chilly and wet. The March anomaly left us in a weird place, as much of the population shambled out to the beaches only to freeze before getting back indoors. We ended up as a bunch of sandsicles. Now, with Memorial day in sight, the calendar and weather are finally on the same page and we can enjoy two and a half months of great weather before breaking out the parka and re-treading the snowmobiles. The arrival of great weather also heralds the reemergence of the local bikini moms. Aging women in beachwear  ready to show the world that time may change them, but they can’t change time.

As a man, I have nothing against the bikini, or the sight of a woman wearing one. There is a double standard when it comes to being able to wear them in public, though. I was thinking about this while in a local Dairy Queen last night with my daughter. One of the bikini moms was out with her kids (I mean the actual children, and not the chauvinistic euphemism) in her swimwear. This wasn’t one of those train wrecks like I used to see as a child. She wasn’t wearing a crotched bikini top, or just wrinkles. Still, I began to consider the double standard. I can’t wear a Speedo to DQ. There’s this whole rule about “no shoes, no shirt, no Mikhail Gorbachev in a tiny bathing suit.”  The Hunger Games has shown that we’re a culture desensitized to brutal violence, so it should come as no shock that our lives, liberty and the existence of Jersey Shore are all indicators of being an overly casual society. Since you no longer have to find a Sears catalog to see a bikini, I’ll probably just wear my coconut bra down to Tasty Freeze for a cone. Good times.

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Podcast Episode 4 Meat Glue

A few(ish) words on the nature of being a fully functional carnivore, followed by shouting and Sleater Kinney.

On the microphone. Another quality effort phoned in. See you next week!

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Mistakes

Every once in a while you can find something interesting to read on the internet. I don’t troll around the web looking for things to read or write about, because life brings its own parade of absurdity without having to surf around for subject matter. Today I happened to see an article at My Daily Moment about 5 mistakes women make in bed. MDM is full of articles about how not to mistakes in the bed, how to tell if you need a bed, how not to fall out of bed…lots of bed material. To be fair, they have recipes, too. Potato salad that you can take home in your purse on the morning after, milkshakes that can be left under the bed for indefinite periods of time, etc. Good stuff. As an expert on nothing and a person knowledgeable about zip, I have my own list of bedroom mistakes women make to add to My Daily Moment’s list. Here are 5 intimacy mistakes every women should avoid:

  1. Don’t bring sloppy joe’s to bed with you. I can’t stress this enough. No matter how much you crave Manwich, the choice has to be made between getting down and getting your sloppy on. There’s nothing finer than the site of grown woman wearing barbecue sauce, but it’s a hassle getting it out of the sheets.
  2. Refrain from doing voice impressions from the Transformers movies. The robot voices are okay, and a shout of “Autobots, let’s roll out!” is sooo sexy. No, I mean don’t do the Megan Fox voice.
  3. You love Phil Phillips, but try to not make the Phil Phillips face. Statistics are not yet available on how many relationships have been ruined when lovers attempt to channel the young American Idol star in bed, but one is too many. (See also “Wannabe Dave Matthews Facial Expressions”)
  4. Choice of lingerie. Simple, comfortable and cute is a good rule of thumb. Dressing like Mr.T., whether due to fetish, or repressed A-Team trauma, is usually too much.
  5. Say nothing, act casual. There is a tendency on the part of the modern lover to recite passages from Ulysses, Mother Jones magazine, or run on sentences from Mostly Teachable. The more talking done in the bedroom, the more chances for sloppy joe accidents. Bring nothing but your smile and a roll of paper towels.
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