Nine years of drivel
· CommentsAs I sat here and tried to decide what sort of drivel might fit on this page today, I realized I’ve been writing on Rapid Eye Reality for nine years now. It was around this time in 2001 that my friend Susannah and I sat at a shrimp boil on Tybee Island where we were celebrating our friends’ Mike and Julia getting married. Susannah asked me if I knew what a blog was. A week or so later, I created Rapid Eye Reality. The title–which many people have asked about over the years–was initially based on the blog’s original theme. I planned to record a nightly dream and compare it to the reality of the day. I quickly realized that the only thing people care less about than another person’s reality is another person’s dreams…and cats. So, the theme quickly disappeared, but the title and blog remained.
Many of the friends I’ve made in the blogging community long ago gave up the blogging game in favor of Twitter and Facebook. Others who still blog are having existentialist crises over why they even bother anymore. I go through similar personal stalemates from time to time. I make next to no money on this blog. I don’t have mad traffic. I don’t have a niche. My friends once spent a good hour giggling over an easy parody of RER that centered around a man’s obsession with his family and the house he lived in with his friends more than a decade before.
If I am being honest, I write here for two reasons. First, I have to write. If I don’t write, I’d end up drinking (more) or standing on the streets holding up signs proclaiming the end times. It’s a sickness. Some people work. Some people work out. Some people play music. I write. Even if I don’t get paid for it. Even if it’s not good. Even if it’s complete drivel. I write. It’s been this way since I knew how to write. There wasn’t a time I wasn’t writing something, filling comp books, or sending long detailed emails to all my friends (anyone remember the Deep South Update?). For the past nine years, it’s been a blog.
Second, I can admit enough vanity to also admit I want people to read what I write. I’ve never really understood that part of me. It’s common knowledge that I don’t like myself very much, so I don’t know why I do this. But I do and have for nine years now.
Here’s a few random-ish pieces from over the years:
Grandpa was a gambler
Suburban landscapes
Otis and magic door
A Night at Jimmyz
Walking in Deauville
Sinner and a sinner’s son
The Brett Favre of parenting
Cocaine cabbies
The superpancho
Dog days
One Night in South Carolina
And finally, a funny cached copy of how this blog looked after six months of existence (it takes a few seconds for the images to load).
August minutiae
· CommentsAs part of my on-going series of “Stuff About Which You Don’t Care,” here’s the monthly report on the little things that kept me busy. Please return in September for…well, whatever happens that is actually interesting.
Movies watched: The Candidate; A Serious Man; Homicide
Documentaries watched: Anytown, USA; Black Money; Jesus Camp; The Most Dangerous Man in America; The Fog of War; Overnight; Rank
Exercise: It seems like everyone around me is in the middle of some sort of training. One friend is training for a half marathon. Several others are working toward a 5K. One friend is in a weight loss bet, and another is in the process of a full body and life improvement program. It’s all fairly inspiring. With a few personal goals in mind, including making good on a promise I made to myself at the beginning of the year, August was the healthiest month I’ve had in the past 11. After a family vacation to start the month, I got in 13 workouts of various forms and put in about 18 miles on the track. I’ve finally shed most of the weight I put on over the summer and am working to get myself in better shape than I’ve been in in as long as I can remember. I have a plan, if only I can summon the discipline to stick with it.
Freelance writing: While I did a ton of writing for profit in August, none of it was outside of the poker realm. I did get a shiny new rejection letter that made me remember that there are people out there reading!
Travel days: 7
Poker Couldn’t quite stay away from the ultimate time waster and put in round 15 hours in the online machine. I played only 16 hours of live poker in August, none of which was profitable. I’m still up on the year, which is nice.
Rounds of disc golf: Because I was so busy with everything else, I only got 4 rounds in all month.
Best meal of the month: Part of this whole health thing has been cutting back on all the great food I normally eat. Fortunately, I ate pretty much whatever I wanted while on vacation and had one helluva great Low Country Boil with fresh out of the water Gulf shrimp. That I got to share it with my wife, sons, parents, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew made it all the better. I want to go do that again right now.
Photo of the month: Storm over Grayton
Grayton Beach, Florida, August 2010
We’re going nowhere
· CommentsI heard a political speech this weekend. I transcribed the end of it from a recording. If you didn’t hear it, too, I’d suggest you take the time to read through this brief section.
But I remember this: I remember my mom and dad went through the 1930s without welfare, without poverty programs. (Sarcastic)) None of us kids even had a social worker! [Laughter in crowd] How did we do it?
Well–ladies, excuse me–we worked our butts off [crowd cheers]. But I tell you this, good people: Crocker Jarmon still believes that individuals are responsible for themselves and so does the vast majority of the American people!
And that’s why were’s going to tell Big Brother to get lost!
The solution to welfare is not more welfare. It’s more enterprise. More industry and more jobs. Now, there are those that say to industry, “Don’t build, don’t develop, don’t cut a single tree or you’ll destroy our watershed,” and so on. But I know that when the time comes for building, we will build, because building means jobs.
And we’ll find a way to love Mother Nature and preserve her…without going to extremes.
You think I’m mean? [Crowd cheers, "No!"] Well, I am. I’ve spent the last 18 years in the Senate being a meanie, and if need be, I will spend another 18 years working to keep this country healthy, and growing, and booming into the future.
Frankly, it’s a speech that could’ve been given this weekend. It wasn’t, however. It came from the 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate. The writer, Jeremy Larner, won an Oscar for best screenplay of that year.
Somehow my many years of film consumption had passed without me seeing The Candidate . I watched it this weekend and was struck by how…modern…it was. It not only spoke to 2010 politics 38 years later, it defined 2010 politics. I sat in my living room and marveled at how prescient Larner was, how before-his-time he must have felt! And then I realized that it probably wasn’t prescience at all.
This is modern politics.
It’s been this way since I was a baby. It was this way when I was younger (Dan Quayle once called the film an inspiration, to which Larner wrote “Mr. Quayle, this was not a how-to movie, it was a watch-out movie. And you are what we should be watching out for!”). It is this way today.
Worse, I don’t see any reason to believe it will change.
If you think I’m taking a swipe at the Grand Old Party here, you need to watch the movie first. It’s not a film about conservatives versus liberals as much as it is a film about the political machine and ways it operates. The movie speaks to the buzz words, endorsements, and personalities of politics that manipulate hearts and minds. Nearly 40 years ago Larner warned us to watch out. Instead, we watched the movie and then pretended it wasn’t talking about us. We as a electorate believed we were smarter than the sheep while lining up to be sheared…again.
I spent the early part of the weekend wondering how several hundred thousand people could stand in front of Glenn Beck and find inspiration–inspiration enough to donate $5 million, in fact–in his words and the words of Sarah Palin. I’m all for political discourse and open debate. I appreciate a political movement as much as anybody else. But, when you read THIS terrifying piece and combine it with what happened in Washington D.C. this weekend, it makes a guy wonder. That is, if legions of Tea Partiers can be so easily manipulated, how often am I being manipulated by the other side–my own side? The answer, I suspect, is often.
The point is, as cynical as it sounds, we exist as part of a democracy in name only. While my values haven’t changed and my beliefs about right and wrong remain the same, I remain exceptionally cynical about the state of affairs in America. That is a big softball to the people who know who I supported President Obama. They love the told-you-so game. My only response is that I supported someone I believed would change the country for the better instead of someone I was sure would make it worse. Inefficacy is not a crime or treason. It’s simply another in a series of disappointments.
While I won’t spoil the film for the few people who haven’t seen it, there is one climax spoiler in the following sentence, so stop reading if you want to go in fresh.
Robert Redford’s character goes off-script in his final debate with his incumbent and utters the line of the film (a clip of which you can watch at the end of this post). Here’s what he says:
“I think it’s important to note what subjects we haven’t discussed. We completely ignore the fact that this is a society divided by fear, hated, and violence. And until we talk about what this society really is, then I don’t know how we’re going to change it.”
It’s been nearly four decades since then, and I’m afraid we haven’t gotten around to that discussion yet.
Patience, young grasshopper
· CommentsThe past three weeks have been busier than most for me and it’s not going to slow down much for another six weeks or so. I’m remaining patient. In the meantime, I’m Mr. Mom this weekend as my wife jets off to some exotic locale (a tables-turner, I concede). With no time to write, here’s a photo of a grasshopper I ran into last weekend.
Insurance fraud hail storm
· CommentsOn any given summer day in this fair suburban neighborhood, one could look out over the expanses of manicured fescue and Bermuda and find day laborers napping under giant sweetgums and oaks. They are dead to the world, arms over their eyes and in the deep coma of a man who has spent hours on a steep-pitched roof under the blanket of 95-degree skies and 95% humidity. Honk a horn and they won’t move. Wave when they are standing and they might offer a world-weary nod. They know who they are.
They are pawns in a game of fraud, and they are among the few people who are having to work very hard to cash in.
***
It was late March, a time when a gray sky can split like a pair of skinny jeans and punch a fist so big on the landscape, you wonder what you did to deserve such horror. That’s how it was when I lived in the Midwest and Deep South. Since I’ve holed up in the Southeast, nature’s sledge has acted more like a rubber mallet. I never worried.
I was alone that day, save the half-blind mutt that was sitting between my feet. When the first smack hit, I thought, “Earthquake.”
Anyone who has experienced an earthquake or actually lives in earthquake-prone regions would probably laugh, but the only time I’ve ever “been” in an earthquake it started and ended the exact same way.
See, here in this part of the world, we don’t get those big temblors you get out west. Five years ago, a fault under the Appalachians moved just a little, something so small that Californians wouldn’t have felt it. I didn’t feel it per se. I was sitting on my couch with my dog. Her head quickly rose up and she went on alert. About two seconds later, I heard what sounded like something hitting the side of my house. I went outside and looked around. Nothing. I grabbed a flashlight and walked the perimeter, a suburban warrior who would have had absolutely zero idea what to do if he actually encountered something. Still, nothing.
Once back inside, I returned to my computer where I saw the news of the earthquake. It was, in a word, neat. It was, in a phrase, completely void of consequence. South Carolina earthquakes are traffic light romances–more fantasy and potential than something that will end with a good story.
Hailstones from the March 2010 Greenville, SC hailstorm
I have an aunt and uncle–among my favorite relatives, in fact–who are pious, conservative people. They once endured a similar storm. My Aunt Judy stood on the porch and yelled for my uncle. “Connie Mack!” she screamed. “Hail! Hail!” Uncle Connie came quickly, sure my never-uttered-a-bad-word aunt was screaming “Hell! Hell!!” He admonished her for her dirty mouth, and then saw the hailstorm falling from the sky. Hell might actually look the same way.
I stood on that spring afternoon and thought to myself, “Hell, Connie Mack. This is indeed hell on earth.”
Oh, it didn’t last too long. A couple minutes of nature’s crankiness, followed soon by this suburban warrior checking the windows and outdoor vehicles for damage. Finding none, I walked inside and did what any other rational person would do.
I posted it all on Twitter and Facebook.
****
Once the storm pushed itself off the bottom of my Facebook page, I stopped thinking so much about the hellstorm hailstorm of 2010. As a creature of the Now Society, if it’s not trending on Twitter or getting copied and pasted into people’s status messages on Facebook, I am told I should go all Alfred E. Newman about most things.
Sometime this summer, people started knocking at my door. The day laborers started showing up on the lawns and peaks of my neighbors homes. The few hundred homes around mine had a–and my neighbors will have to forgive me for this–slimy aura surrounding them. And if any of you New Agers haven’t seen a slimy aura yet, you really ought to reposition your chakra. It’s a sight to behold.
Roofing companies from all over the southeast had descended on the world around Mt. Otis. Slick-haired hucksters appeared on my doorstep and told me about all the roof damage in my neighborhood. I turned them away one by one. I had no leaks. I had no damage I could see. I didn’t want to cover a $1,000 deductible just so a band of gypsy travelers from North Augusta could put some new tar paper on my roof and disappear into the night.
Indeed, this happened a lot. The sham companies showed up around town. Even companies that were at one point legit saw they could take a bunch of money, close up shop, and run off with the dough (the company, of course, denies the allegations). I didn’t feel like pushing the issue. It felt ugly to me, if not also fairly illegal.
Then more and more of my neighbors started getting new roofs on their home. More and more roofer advertising signs showed up in font yards.
And then my insurance premium went up.
This is where my impeccable sense of honestly and right-thinking took a powder.
Why, I thought aloud, should all my neighbors get new roofs and cause my premiums to go up? A new roof–which my house will almost certainly need when it comes time to sell–is not a cheap proposition. If I could get it done, I thought, without having to spend my kid’s tuition on it…
Oh, yes, it was a slimy and morally corrupt way of thinking. The hell of the hailstorm was still around me. I felt dirty, because when the next man showed up at our door–one of our actual same-street neighbors!–I allowed for my roof to be inspected for damage.
Said neighbor, who told my wife, “Hey, it’s a free roof!” told us unequivocally, “You definitely have hail damage.”
Well, I thought, this makes me feel a lot better. If I am actually owed a new roof because it was actually damaged by a natural force, then I shouldn’t have any reason to feel guilt.
And, hey…new roof!
***
“You know what roofer told you you had hail damage?” Big William asked.
Big William smelled of cigarettes, had a Dallas phone number, and drove a big white truck. He was also a very big man.
A State Farm Insurance adjustor, it was Big William’s job to inspect my roof before State Farm would sign off on any work. I welcomed Big William into my house, told him we’d not had any leaks since the storm, and then let him sweat and toil on my roof. When he appeared on my front porch 45 minutes later, he had a camera and the question about what roofer was trying to work for us. I told him.
Big William’s face sort of screwed up. “Well, he lied to you.”
This is not a kid-gloves world where people suggest that people might be incompetent or mistaken. The realm of contractors vs. insurance adjusters is one where people can call other people a liar. It’s like politics with roofing nails.
To prove himself, Big William pulled out a digital camera and showed me photos of my roof, the flashing, the gutter protectors, the shingles, and the venting. Big William told me that if I really had hail damage, everything he’d shown me would’ve been beaten to hell. Big William conceded my window screens had been damaged, but that was all.
Though I am loathe to take as truth anything that an insurance company asserts, I believed the giant. I knew Big William was telling the truth. The man was sweating and breathing like he might die on my front porch, but my ability to tell liars from thieves and thieves from crooks let me know that Big William was no liar. He was costing me a new roof and not letting me cash in on the rampant fraud on display all around me, but he wasn’t lying.
I didn’t argue with Big William. In fact, I shook his sweaty ham of a hand, thanked him for his efforts, and bid him goodbye.
We live in a culture in which taking advantage is almost a virtue. Taking something when you can get it–no matter if it is on the back of a lie or fraud–is praised as business acumen. Our society is based on collecting what you can, getting as far ahead as possible, and damning the consequences for others.
Would I have cashed in on the new roof if the adjustor signed off on it? Sure. I could use a new topper on the house. Am I mad that I’m not going to get the work? Not really. I think there is a valuable lesson in it all somewhere.
It’s one thing to get what you deserve. It’s another thing entirely to take what you want, no matter who it costs, just because you can.
Weekend pimp
· CommentsI woke up this morning with a common but somehow greater appreciation for people who are willing to share what’s in their head. I have several friends who have done that over the last year. Using various methods of publishing, four people with whom I’ve spent a lot of time have put out books. I know my readership here is fairly varied. You might know somebody on this list. You might not. In either case, it’s always good to help new artists as they make their way.
****
All descriptions are from the book’s dust jacket or web promo
Lost Vegas, by Paul McGuire–”Las Vegas lures you to shed moral responsibility and piss away your money on indulgences like decadent food, entertainment, gambling, and sex. If you don’t enjoy these pastimes, then what’s the point of visiting the land of compromised values? Where else can you get a cheap steak, crash a Mexican wedding, get cold-decked in blackjack by a dealer named Dong, play video poker for thirteen straight hours, drink piña coladas out of a plastic coconut, bum a cigarette from an 85-year-old woman with an oxygen tank, speed away to the Spearmint Rhino in a free limo, get rubbed by a former Miss Teen USA, puke in the back of a cab driven by a retired Navy SEAL, snort cheap cocaine in the bathroom at O’Sheas, and then catch a lucky card on the river to crack pocket aces and win a poker tournament? Only in Las Vegas.”
The Chosen, by John G. Hartness–”What do you get when you mix the father of all mankind with a snotty archangel, the Father of Lies, a couple of snarky waitresses from Texas and a tattooed street preacher from Tennessee? A cross-country trip to save the world, of course! Adam (yeah THAT Adam) has been around for a long time, but even he’s never seen anything like this. He has to gather his ex-girlfriend and his youngest daughter with his ex-wife (you remember Eve, right?) and his oldest surviving son (Cain) and get them across the country for a meeting with Archangel Michael and Lucifer to determine the fate of the world. Along the way there are strip clubs, cheap beer, expensive whiskey, biker bar fights, shotgun blasts in motel parking lots, sing-alongs in public parks and other wild adventures as our group of intrepid immortals and universal icons travel to save the world.
She-Rain: A Story of Hope, by Michael Cogdill–”In the early 20th Century, a pair of North Carolina mountain children sow the seed of a love that becomes their only solace in the hard yet beautiful world they know. They grow it from steep ground of poverty, ignorance, and violence. A landscape so brutal it can kill hope long before claiming life. Bloodshed years later finally sends Frank Locke on the run, deep into wilderness, abandoning his extraordinary love, Mary Lizbeth. When a whitewater river washes this desperate soul into the hands of Sophia, he discovers a luminous woman steeped in mystery, trapped in a tragically brilliant life. Far ahead of her time. Secreted from the world. As she awakens Frank’s mind, they rise to meet a love that binds three people for a lifetime. This love triangle forms a beauty no one sees coming. From the wilds of Appalachia, crossing nearly a century, it runs deep into a lush American fortune, and lives in letters of adoration and hope of the least expected.In a rhapsody of Southern voices, mingling hilarity and sorrow, She-Rain speaks of lives soaring beyond heartbreak, fundamentalism, and self-destruction. Through the most graceful longing, two women in love with one man ultimately prove the power of human hearts to answer high callings. They show us all how to heal — and thrive — to the very end.”
Same Difference, by Martin Harris–”It is late October 1976, a week before Election Day. Richard Owen, a former New York City patrolman turned private detective, returns late one afternoon to find a package waiting for him in his lower Manhattan office. The box contains newspaper clippings detailing the event which precipitated Owen’s having left the NYPD nearly five years before. The box also contains one other highly curious item — a human bone. Owen’s subsequent investigations carry him to the Show Place (an adult film and bookstore), the Marathon (a lower Manhattan nightspot), the Express (a “grindhouse” featuring skin and schlock), among other lurid locations. They also carry Owen into his past, reuniting him with his former partner and boss, as the detective relates a story marked by sex, violence, and political intrigue.”
***
A few additions: Realized after I put this up this morning that I have a few other friends who might need a little bump. Here are a few more options. These have been out for a while, but are written by some of my favorite people in the poker world.
The Dennis DeYoung Dilemma
· CommentsI’m sitting at a poker table. Or a bar. Or at the gate waiting for a plane. It doesn’t matter, because I ask the same question in all of these places and more.
“If you could be yourself or Dennis DeYoung as he is today, which would you choose?”
It’s a simple question, really. Right now I can snap my fingers and you can be the 2010 version of the former lead singer of the band Styx. It’s your choice. It’s either that or remain in your own existence and take your chances.
There are two curious things that happen when I offer this option. First, most people actually seem put off that I asked the question in the first place. It’s as if I am wasting their time or making idle “do you prefer Mac and Cheese or Cheese and Rice?” questions. Second, people invariably answer that they most certainly would remain as themselves. In the dozens of times I’ve asked this question, I’ve not yet had one person answer “I’d be Dennis DeYoung of 2010.” Everyone says, “I’d be me.”
A third thing happens that I don’t find as curious, but I do consider a lot more telling. Very few people ever ask why I would bother to pose the Dennis DeYoung Dilemma in the first place. After getting over the initial frustration with the hypothetical, they are happy to answer and get on to more important topics of conversation. It’s a rare–and I dare say nonexistent–person who wants to ponder the possibilities.
I haven’t yet bothered to force The Why of it on anybody. I guess, some would say, that is why I have a blog.
***
Styx in its heyday
There are fewer people, however, who can identify DeYoung by name, face, or career. In the line that begins with Mick Jagger and ends with Peter Cetera, DeYoung lost his place a long time ago, and Phil Collins isn’t giving up his spot.
Oh, sure, you can hit Wikipedia like anyone else and see that DeYoung is still active as a musician. He once or twice reunited with Styx, he did a couple of tours on the Simon Cowell Exploitation Train, and he has been the honored recipient of the “Great Performer of Illinois” Award. You can see that DeYoung was once the frontman for a band that had many a top ten Billboard hit. He played to sold out arenas and is probably solely responsible for most Americans’ introduction to the phrase “domo arigato.” The man was–and by some lesser measure still is–a star.
And you have the chance to be him.
***
If not for the fact that I really, really have lost patience for most people, I’d put a lot my spontaneous subjects to some further questions. Here are some follow-ups that I think might be instructive:
Various people would answer the questions above in different ways, but there is a natural aversion to actually admitting to any of the above. It’s unseemly to publicly hope for riches, fame, or Snooki. Similarly, there is something difficult about admitting publicly that you would rather be someone other than yourself. But privately…well, there is the rub.
It’s a far different question to ask someone “If you could be yourself or Johnny Depp, who would you choose to be?” Depp is still a name, still a face, and has proven he’s got a spot on the Walk of Fame that will shine even after his death. I suspect I would have lot more people answer they would be Depp. But, then what about Paris Hilton? Justin Bieber? Ryan Seacrest? The Situation? Would you trade for any of those lives circa 2010?
I agree, it’s an endless and largely pointless series of hypotheticals and you or I would be hard-pressed to find someone who will answer in a way that makes them look anything less than proud of who they are. If we’re bred to be anything, it is prideful.
What is unaccountable in the answers I receive is how we as a people have allowed ourselves to feel less than we are because we are not capital-m More. We want for more consumables. We want for more recognition. We want and then we want on top of that. It is as evident in suburban ennui as it is urban struggle. It is as pronounced as strongly by the Office Space prototypes as it is the people who have complete freedom to be whatever they want. I am as guilty of it as anyone, which is probably why I pose the Dennis DeYoung Dilemma.
Of course, it’s human nature to want more than what we have. Those of us brought up under capitalism have heard Horatio Alger stories enough times that we long ago forgot that a bootstrap was once just a piece of footwear. We can’t be blamed–nor should we–for our natural desire to wake up every day and work to rise above our station. If not for that drive, we would have neither the freedom nor the prosperity we have now.
Dennis DeYoung today
This is meant as no disrespect to DeYoung, a man infinitely more talented than I am, a man who has managed to parlay early stardom into a lifetime in the music industry. This is simply to remind anyone who cares that fame is fleeting. And not just traditional groupie-sex-drugs-money-fame. Little fame. Little riches. Little luck. Big luck. It’s all fleeting. The neighbor’s wife you covet can be a crack whore by Friday.
It very easy to want. It’s very easy to covet. It’s very easy to look to the life of a rich man, a successful man, or, indeed, a rock star and say, “I want that.”
It’s a lot easier to look at Dennis DeYoung and say, “I think I’ll see what I can make of myself.”
Do that. And be happy with it.
Six
· CommentsHappy birthday to the boy who taught me a new kind of joy; that life is not only about more than me, but almost entirely about more than me; that there was yet another way to love my wife; that, despite it all, I can wake up every morning with hope for the future.
Happy sixth, kid. I love you.
Six and smiling
I knew I should be afraid
· CommentsI woke up this morning with an inescapable sense that I should be afraid.
It was still dark out, which meant the monsters still hadn’t crawled back under my bed after a night of child-noshing. The meat in the fridge was only a day old, so I wasn’t forced to face my latent paranoia that food poisoning is becoming an actual sentient creature. My wife was still in bed, so I doubted she was sleeping with anyone else (although I checked under the covers to be sure there weren’t any height-disadvantaged paramours doing their dirty work).
Nope, all seemed well as I walked into the dark garage. All was well, that is, except for the fact that I should’ve just stayed in bed. Nay, it wasn’t the fire ants at the park, the loads of work on my plate, or the ever-increasing evidence that I’m about to turn 97 (or something close to it). No, it was only that I should’ve been afraid and I wasn’t.
What should I have been afraid of?
Muslims, to start.
On this day, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, Muslim folks begin their Ramadan fasting. It’s a religious thing for them, and probably just another way of showing us that they are only dedicated to overthrowing the American government. No daylight Mac-N-Cheese equals revolution, or so I’ve been led to believe. I wasn’t aware that’s what Muslims had in mind when they fasted from dawn to sunset, so I’m fortunate that Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association clued me in. In his call for all future mosques to be verboten in the U.S., he laid it out straight: “Bottom line: it’s suicidal for America to allow terrorist training cells to crop up all over the fruited plain. And each mosque is an actual or potential terrorist training cell…”
Thank heavens for Fischer. Really. I’m surprised we hadn’t thought of the mosque ban earlier. It should’ve been obvious after we started banning all the Christian churches in the wake of radical attacks by Eric Robert Rudolph, Tim McVeigh, and the like. Somebody really dropped the ball on the mosque thing. Just to be safe, I’m going to blame the gays.
God Bryan Fischer, help us, but the gays want to marry. The voters of California had their God-given right to vote (I’ve always wondered why God didn’t grant women and blacks the right to vote for so long) taken away by a light-in-the-loafers judge who declared Prop 8 to be unconstitutional. Again, this opened the door to people who love each other having the chance to get married. It’s heresy, this whole love thing.
That America ever let loose-moraled Northerners discover wedded bliss was a mistake of epic proportions. Now, not only the gays want to marry, but gay Californians(!), which I’m told is as much redundant as it is frightening. If Mike and Ike end up getting hitched in Bakersfield, the implications on my South Carolina family are uncountable. The civil rights we have worked so hard to grant to blacks will pale under the laissez faire approach regarding who gets to love each other. Our efforts to remove the flag of the Confederacy from our Capitol Dome might just seem quaint by comparison.
Of couse, Maryland Bishop Harry Jackson says don’t pay so much attention to that civil rights thing. And damn right he should say that, because we need to keep our eye on the ball. Jackson writes, “A marriage requires a husband and a wife, because these unions are necessary to make new life and connect children to their mother and father.” If somebody had made it clearer for me earlier, I might have been able to better protest the marriages of my friends who have chosen not to have children, or perhaps more importantly, the marriages of my friends who couldn’t have children for one reason or another. Sham marriages, all of them!
My foremost concern, of course, is about the psyche of the people who believe in God. I wasn’t aware, but if two women get married in San Diego, it would make people all over the country question their own faith. Who knew? Jackson knew. He writes, “It will create a conflict for people of faith (and nonreligious people as well) who fervently believe in traditional man-woman marriage and the law.” If people of faith are conflicted, how will this country survive?
Finally, if gays marry, Jackson tells us, it’s going skew our concept of what a family should be. Quoting here: “If gay marriage is allowed, the nation will soon begin to experience an increased degradation of the nuclear family — resulting in fewer kids being raised by both a mom and a dad.” Indeed, fewer, my friends, than the current number of children who are being raised by a single mom or dad after a death, divorce, imprisonment, or in-home estrangement. That is, if we see two people of the same sex in love, our country is doomed to fail .
I, however, have been able to work out a compromise that should keep us all from being afraid. See, I’ve recently been informed about the terror and security-destroying threat of a particular sect of sleeper cells. Where are they sleeping?
Cribs, man. Effing cribs.
My friend Elise reports from Texas that in-the-know State Representatives there have become rightfully concerned about the pressing issue of terrorist babies,–otherwise known as babies born under the rights granted to them by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution–who at conception are being groomed to overthrow the U.S. government. It’s a prospect so scary that I’m not entirely sure I want my kids sleeping in my house tonight.
But here’s the compromise: We let Muslims build mosques if they agree to only admit gay worshippers. See…if they’re gay, no babies, and if no babies…you got it, Mssrs. Jackson and Fischer…no terrorist babies.
I hope that helps you both sleep tonight.
Boogie Ball
· CommentsThe seaweed was thick that day. A park ranger told me it was called sargassum. I giggled, because that’s what children like me do when they discover words that sound like a combination of “sarcasm” and “orgasm.” It wouldn’t be long before I looked at my wife and said, “I don’t need your sargassum, missy.”
But the point was that Grayton Beach was a little messy on this day and I didn’t feel like fighting seaweed while spending time with my older son. We wandered the coastline for a while before heading back to our house. Unlike most of the houses on this beach, we had a very small pool to keep us cool on days when the beach wasn’t cooperating. Somebody called it a “martini pool,” which I thought was appropriate because I’ve drank martinis that contained about the same amount of liquid. But, it worked for us and it gave me a good way to gauge the size of my noontime cocktail.
I’ve been pretty lazy this summer and my body looks more like something you’d see at a museum featuring middle-aged white people. I’m the chief attraction in the Beer-Bellied Sloth wing. So, I sat beside the pool while the boy zoomed from one end to the other on a boogie board. Ultimately, I had to get in and cool off. I hid my belly in the deep end.
When the blue wiffle ball whizzed by my head, it nearly hit the switch that turns me from Fun-Loving Adventure Dad into Run He’s Going to Blow Dad. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw my boy waiting to see how I was going to react. I stopped, took a breath, made sure my belly was hidden under the water, and said, “So, that’s how we’re going to play, huh?”
The boy giggled. It was genuine. It was probably relief. Ten minuted later, we’d created Boogie Ball.
The boy playing frisbee with my brother on the beach
And now I was creating a game with my son. It was a true collaborative effort and it built a game that I’d be happy to continue anytime I had an appropriate field of play. Boogie Ball required only a very small swimming pool, a wiffle ball, and a boogie board. We turned the board upside down in between us. The player with the ball is required to bounce the ball once (and only once) off the boogie board and land it in the water defended by his opponent. If the ball lands in the water, the thrower gets a point. If the opponent catches the ball before it hits the water, the thrower gets no points. If the ball leaves the pool area, the thrower loses a point. The game ends when a player reaches ten points.
Oh, it sounds simple, but it became our passion that afternoon. My son, without instruction, began to realize the importance of “putting the ball where they ain’t.” Together, we massaged the rules until the game was perfect. Within an hour or so, my brother was standing by the pool and challenging me to a late-night match (after cocktails, of course).
It didn’t strike me during the heat of battle, but it was yet another indication that my boy is growing up. He was as much involved in creating Boogie Ball as I was. It won’t be long before I see him inventing something like The Game or Peak with his buddies. I can only hope I don’t embarrass him too much when I start begging to play with them.
