History

There’s a couple of things been happening lately, one, my daughter is due for her second child in two weeks or less and the other is my Ex putting on a shower party for our daughter before she pops.

But I’ve got nothing to do with the shower thing, nobody invited me to it. My Ex did hit on me for a gift, like I’d been invited or something, after all it is my daughter having a baby and stuff. A nice gift-card to Target (Never Wal-Mart!) to buy diapers with, or maybe just a check. Better to let them use the money as they need, hopefully able to visualize a life beyond diapers, like on a white-water rafting excursion or something, or even a new video game. Whatever it takes.

Anyway my Ex commissioned me to take this God-awful gaudy frame off a sweet picture and then transfer the picture into a frame she’d bought which looked to be about the same size, give or take. The picture is one of lions, well, and this young, obviously African naked girl (to avoid the Feds I better call her butt a woman’s butt), standing there protected by lions. My Ex and I have a mixed-race grand-daughter who in less time than you think could probably pose for this artwork. It is explained to me this piece is about our future family.

So I couldn’t transfer the artwork from one frame to another for professional reasons. I told her I needed to make the frame and then proceeded to make her the most beautiful frame for it, out of canary wood, a thing you can’t stop looking at. I mean the whole art statement, picture and frame and all. I hung it on my own wall and couldn’t stop looking at it. And she loves it already without even knowing she’ll love it even more as time goes by.

I brought it by today, the day of the shower for my daughter. Back in the day my Ex had the most beautiful strawberry blonde hair falling on her generous and freckled shoulders. But today, when I bring by the framed masterpiece her hair is a shade of very red, more red than she’s ever been (and I go back a long ways here, let me tell you!).

Feeling like I’d really scored some points with the frame artistry and such, I felt like I was on a roll. That coupled with blowing up the wading pool for when the grand-daughter came over, I had all kind of Karma in the bank. I wondered if I had the balls to mention the color of her hair. Granted we have history, granted I’d more than once heard her remark disdainfully about your ‘bottle redheads’, and now she was one.

Shouldn’t I know better than to stir the hornet’s nest? I mean we’ve been divorced better than twenty years, haven’t I learned a thing since then? Are we not standing in her kitchen having familiar give and take? I mean I didn’t even bring up the subject of her new red-headedness, she did.

She’d fired her hair-dresser of thirty years because she couldn’t ever get the ‘strawberry-redhead’ color down. My Ex had saved swatches of her hair when she liked the color and in thirty years that woman had never matched it. How hard could it be? So my enterprising former wife went out and got product and dyed her own hair. In my own defense I’d like to mention she brought the subject up, replete with the details, etc.

After I’d been filled in I looked out the patio door to the safety of the back orchard. Several thoughts came to mind, the sanctity an apple feels connected to its branch and filling to fruition, the marvelous promise extant in caged peonies, and yet this is what came out of my mouth.

“You look like you dumped your head in a bucket of henna.”

Whatever Karmic advantage I had instantly vanished. I couldn’t help but think of the time I took her out to learn her golf and compared her swing to somebody trying to kill snakes. I’m surprised she didn’t throw me out again.

So then I had to back-pedal like crazy and try to explain to her my lame version of ‘love’ as I saw it, whereby the person was loved in spite of what they did to themselves.

My explanation was greeted rather tepidly. I probably had erred. A better tactic would have been to praise her own hair-dressing talents to the skies. “I’ve always wondered how beautiful you’d be with hair that tint…” Sigh!

The only thing to do is go over and massage her back as she’s busy doing something at the sink. While you perform this ameliorating function, don’t be afraid to say things like, “See that’s alright, isn’t it? Don’t you feel better now? Sure…”

To which she bows her head, accepting the contact and then says, “You men are all the same. There, isn’t that better? Like that’ll make me forget.”

“Think of it this way,” I rationalize. “If I didn’t love you the way I do I’d never be able to say things like this to you.” Which made her laugh in spite of herself. Can’t for the life of me figure out why she ever threw me out.

I’m sure my incredibly beautiful and talented grand-daughter had fun today in the pool I blew up for her. There is yet time before a diaper gift-card needs to be delivered. I probably could have wrangled an invitation to the party later in the afternoon, but I’d have been the only guy there, young or old, and maybe I’m not so fond of parties as I used to be.

One thing I do know, the frame I made will stick in my Ex’s mind. It’s gorgeous. Like a battery it is accumulating good Karma, an amalgam of art thrown into the breach that when accepted and revered reveals a pathway, only lightly mined.

“A bucket of henna,” and yet I couldn’t keep from saying it. Well, I wouldn’t want her to think I was someone other than the man she loved for years now, would I? History is remembered more accurately when it’s consistent.

 

I love to watch Tiger Wood play golf.

In an odd kind of way he reminds me of my youngest son, brilliant, talented, temperamental. So I get Tiger, I get him. I have a lot of respect for a guy owning a big-ass yacht. That’s been my dream too, breakfast topside, weather permitting. “The Missus and I would like to sunbathe by the pool with mimosas around eleven, Bratislav.”

“As you wish, sire.”

Tiger is a son none of us had. Natural ability, an uncommon work ethic and the very best schooling. Why do you think he can plop some ball out of the middle of Caesar Salad splashing with a hop into the hole. Or going just beyond and backing in? It would be a mistake if I did such a thing (even if I took credit for it). But Tiger will go for that shot with a high expectancy. And that’s where more differences between the Tige and me appear. For some reason he’ll go out and practice a couple thousand chips, and putts, not to mention homing in on every club in the bag.

“How many more buckets will you need, Mr. Wood?”

“What was your name?”

“Jim.”

“Well I don’t know, Jim. Do you play golf?”

“I do, Mr. Wood.”

“And I do too. So I don’t know how many buckets I’ll need.”

“I promise, I’ll run buckets of balls out to you…Mr. Wood, Tiger…all you need!”

“I appreciate it Jim, my dad used to do that, so just stay on top of things and Stevie will see you get tipped right.”

I mean Tiger can’t be expected to deal with miniscule things like tipping, especially when he’s reading troublesome greens, the ball breaking left to right even though he’s facing a five-foot-putt. Get it rolling on the line with the right pace and fist-pump! No doubt the greatest golfer in history. Oddly enough Jack Nicholson is his nemesis in terms of major golfing victories, and yet Sam Snead holds the record for overall victories. Tiger could play all the time, every little half-million or better winner’s check, scaring the dog-do out of every other PGA opponent. It would be a psychological over-achievement. And Sam Snead’s records of victories on the PGA would fall, it’s inevitable anyway.

But my boy Tiger has aligned his stars differently. He’ll get Sam’s record, but first he wants Jack’s. And Jack is all for it, he wishes he’d have had half the talent Tiger’s shown. Damn! It was hard work for a guy from Ohio, while Tiger grew up all over the world, even went to Stanford (they don’t let dummies in there). Not to mention the change in club technology. Jack had to hit it perfect to make it back up, take the shelf breaking to the right, to leave a tap in birdie. Tiger has to worry it’ll spin too far. Never mind.

Jack thinks a lot of Tiger and so do I. But I do hate it when he has to go for it when he’d be much smarter to plop the ball twenty feet from the hole, relying on his putting (his career suit) for dominance. But all the great ones would rather tap in for birdie than run in a twenty-five foot putt. Even worse is when you leave yourself four to five feet short for par. This is called the ‘yips’, and a short putt is less likely to be holed by a professional with the ‘yips’ than is a twenty-footer. A good number of pros have gone through the ‘yips’, Tom Watson, the broadcaster of golf, Polyester Miller, Arnold, Jack (not so much), and a ton of others. Tiger is one of the best from that distance, maybe 90%, go figure, maybe that’s why he’s the number one rated golfer (and has been for a good long time).

I do hate it when Tiger doesn’t go for the safe shot. But maybe he wouldn’t be a Tiger if he did. In the interest of high drama he can’t be beat. When he goes for it all and fails, he doesn’t hardly ever fail so ugly he can’t pull off an emotional even-standing (some golfers call this putt a par, in my case I’ll accept a bogey).

You’re right, my kid reminding me of Tiger is amazing. I love the kid! He could have been a contender if he’d have cared to contend. But I love the guy, especially since he reminds me of Tiger. And why not? I’d rather he reminded me of Tiger than a Goth with barbed-wire and snake tattoos.

So I’ll just let the yacht dream drift onto the back-burner, tattoos and all. I’m not saying the dream is gone, my son, like Tiger, is brilliant. It could happen…I just hope I’m not so demented by then I can’t enjoy it.

And in the meantime did I mention how much I enjoy watching Mr. Wood play?

 

A latter-day fisherman tries to explain why

My dad loved to fish, but he didn’t do it very often and with little success. Looking back on our fruitless forays I realize it was the getting out in nature he really liked. He didn’t use lures, fish-eggs, minnows, plugs, no, nothing like that, I mean why go to so much trouble when you could collect night-crawlers right out of the yard with a flashlight?

My two brothers and I responded differently to my father’s fishing legacy. Two of them decided to learn how to catch fish and then went out and caught them. I didn’t really care, besides I didn’t really like to eat fish all that much anyway. I remember my last wife cooking red snapper, the overwhelming odor of which seemed to taint the air for days afterward. I guess if I’d had the taste for fish I’d have gone out and caught them, but my philosophy for forty years was ‘live and let live’ when it came to the briny tribe.

That doesn’t mean I liked to catch and release, far from it, I don’t take wild game if I’m not prepared to eat it. Why induce some trout to a panic state only to thank it for giving you a rush and letting it swim back to a school to share its humiliating experience of domination and unclear mercy. If I was a fish I’d rather be eaten than lose that extent of face, plus it would seem to give a fish a ‘get out of Jail card’ feeling of freedom, ready to strike at any fly or flashing thing after that. And who’s to say the next angler dangling his lure might be me with a totally different outlook of catching and eating. So I don’t think the catch and release thing is beneficial in any way, either for the psyches of angler or prey.

But for the last year and a half or so I’ve gone back to fishing because of my older brother. He’s a guy who takes the whole ‘hunter-gatherer’ thing seriously. He has quite a history of killing things and eating them (our family always had venison in the freezer, we were more successful, as a family, at hunting than we were fishing). But when my older brother’s wife (my sister in law of forty years) died I realized a good way to spend time with my brother and ease his bereavement was to go fishing with him. The upshot of it all is a couple of trips to Alaska and a spate of fishing at his favorite holes, with unparalleled success. My freezer is full of fish and, even odder, I don’t mind eating it.

I have several stock recipes for eating fish, having to do with aluminum foil, lemons, butter, and onions, etc. But I’m branching out and getting more creative, using the leftover fish in chowder, fish tacos and so on. I would still rather eat deer or elk, but I keep plowing through my freezer and eating what I got, fish. My opinion is I don’t think it’ll hurt you to eat it, along with a baker and some salad (eat your green stuff…I mean it!). Right now in my icebox I’ve got salmon, halibut, ocean rockfish of various denominations, trout and crappie fillets. What does halibut cost in the store? Mine costs more, I caught it in Alaska, but who cares? I’m a hunter-gatherer.

My hope is my brother gets over his grief and goes deer and/or elk hunting soon, as a supplement to my fish diet. He can’t possibly eat all the things he could kill if he put his mind to it and it would only be appropriate for me to help him. I’ve killed a lot of animals too, and ate them, I might be able to kill fish but I’m not so sure about mammals anymore. I think a good thing would be for someone to set up a wild game exchange where one could trade fish for some sweet pieces of backstrap. I’d be all for that!

But anyway I’m having salmon tonight. I don’t have any lemon, but I do have lemon pepper and some sweet onion and butter. I’ll probably put in a baker (did I mention I was born in Idaho? Think potatoes, Think Idaho). And don’t worry, I won’t stint on the green salad. My brother caught the salmon up in Alaska last week, God bless us all, everyone!!

Life could be worse but why go there again if you don’t have to? Just ask Michael Vick who recently got out of prison for killing dogs. If Mike had eaten them dogs I wouldn’t have a problem with it, I’ve eaten dog and it was pretty tasty with teriyaki sauce. I don’t know what any of Michael Vick’s detention has to do with anything, but I get the sense I have to throw in some philosophy now and again to the blog or people will get bored. Consider it thrown.

Now please excuse me, I’ve got to go fix the fish…



 

The Family Reunion or A once in a lifetime thing

Every two years my mother’s side of the family has a reunion at Kum Bi Yah (Idaho phonetic spelling) camp (owned by the Disciples of Christ) in the southern range of Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. Up on top of the ridge you can see all the way to Winnemucca, Nevada. My Grandpa Copsey had something to do with the camp back in the day, his name’s on a plaque over the fireplace in the Dining Hall.

When we first started going up there the aunts and uncles ran the show but when Grandma died they tried to lose interest in the whole thing. It was too much work, all the organizing and cooking, the aunts and uncles were tired. So we cousins took over, telling the aunts and uncles all they had to do was come up and enjoy, we would do the work. Things have gotten a lot better ever since, we drink alcohol openly, the menu goes beyond meat, boiled vegs and mashed potatoes (with gravy), we have a golf tournament down in the valley every time, and the old folks play pinochle while hashing over ancient disagreements and interminable imagined slights.

I am lucky to come from such a family. Most of us are ‘above average’, might even be a few mensas in the mix. I will grant some of them are strange, brilliant yes, but strange. There’s a set of twins I would have bet would be in prison by now, but instead will probably be famous scientists or something. They used to skulk around furtively, like spawns of Satan, conspiring to unholy mischief. One of them got beaned with a horseshoe when skulking by the pit too close, apparently it didn’t do him any lasting damage. And here’s the surprising thing, they are college age now and can actually hold a conversation, even asking appropriate questions indicating real interest in someone other than themselves. I didn’t see that coming.

This year’s reunion was bittersweet for me. One of my favorite uncles died after a long bout with Parkinson’s, which makes it three uncles felled by the inexorable scythe of time. Our supply of aunts and uncles is dwindling which raises the question of whether the reunion will go on much longer. Is the connection between us cousins strong enough to want to continue? I do predict it will last at least two or three more times, for sure, although the aunts and uncles are reaching the age of ultimate uncertainty. My own mother heads the list, in my estimation, of those least likely to see another reunion, but there might be a couple of others too, you just never know.

Mom’s been losing it for a while, and isn’t gaining any back. My mother is one of the best pinochle players in the world. She almost always wins, no matter who she’s paired with, yet this year at the reunion she didn’t play a hand. Most unusual behavior, in fact a first. Mom claims that bugs in her house steal her clothes, that someone keeps coming in and rearranging the calendar. She feeds cereal and milk to her bottles of medicine, although lately she’s given them raisins instead. Her doctor put her on some Parkinson’s medicine, a time-release patch, but she quit using it when it made her brain hurt. I asked her what she meant and her rambling description of brain-pain left me with the feeling the medicine had made her aware of how confused she was. Without the medicine she was still confused but not aware of it as much.

When I visited my brother a couple of months before the reunion we went over to Boise where my mom lives with her husband Roy. She was pretty good that day, fairly lucid, and depressed about how she suffered from depression all the time. At the family reunion she looked like she’d aged ten years, instead of being 82 she looked like she was 92. She’s frail, her skin so transparent blood vessels meander like rivers on a map across her face. My prognosis is her life expectancy can be measured in months instead of years. Roy ain’t much better, although both of them should be in managed care or something he refuses to go. He still has his driver’s license (I’ve never ridden with him but reports are it’s frightening), and doesn’t want to leave the comforts of his double-wide for a life lacking in independence, as he imagines it.

But back to the reunion. As I sat and chatted with my mother, trying to impart some news about my oldest son and his wife being pregnant, I felt like I was trying to assemble a jig-saw puzzle where none of the pieces went together no matter how you tried. I looked over at Roy who looked ready for a nap (it being after lunch and all), “Roy you should take a nap,” I told him.

“No,” he answered, “I hate to go to sleep at a gathering like this, it’s a once in a lifetime thing, you know.” I didn’t remind him he’d been at the last reunion too, two years previously, no sense confusing insight with a lot of useless facts, after all. Two minutes later he was sawing logs.

I thought my younger brother was going to be at the reunion but with a bulging disc in his neck his doctor advised against travel. My older brother had to work (and besides he’s never been much for the reunion anyway). So I carried the ball for the whole team, believe me it wasn’t easy.

In my opinion the reunion was a wonderful time and I’m glad I didn’t miss it. My cousins are so amazing and we have such a good time together. These are my people, we’re not clones by any means, but we share many compatible and familiar genes. We also share history and memories (even if we remember things differently), we fill in the blanks for each other, and there’s a godawful lot of us too (I think there’s 32 cousins total, though not all of them attend the reunion regularly) so you never get bored as long as you circulate.

So what I guess I’m saying is that even if my mom dies soon, I’ll go to the next reunion though both of my parents will be gone. I guess if everyone does that the reunion will keep on going. If they don’t then the tradition will pass on too. We had the first reunion nearly fifty years ago. Whether we go on with it or cease entirely one thing is clear, we’ve had a good run. Though my kids didn’t come this time they’ve been often in the past and they love it, the whole idea of family. We’ve started our own reunion in the off years, my brothers and wives (and mom and Roy), our kids and now grandkids. If I want to wax biblical I’d say reunions beget reunions.

I know there’s going to come a time when I sit napping (I hope I don’t drool too much), amid all the activity, my family thriving and growing new sprouts around my weathered and withered bark. I can only hope I’m lucid enough to form the thought of how right it all feels. The wheel spins until the ride is over, in the meantime enjoy. The whole deal of life is too short not to, a once in a lifetime thing, it’s good to remember we are each links connecting, an abiding chain. Damn! I may not be mensa, but sometimes I’m close, maybe.

 

DenaliLand and other delights

Just got back from ten days in Alaska. My brother and I landed in Anchorage, rented a car and drove all over the state. Well, actually we were lucky to be in the part of Alaska where they have roads to drive on, a part they call the mainland.

We only had two things we meant to do, one was to see Denali (the Native name for Mt. McKinley) and the other was to go fishing. We accomplished both tasks and in the process went so far as to see Fairbanks too (the highlight of the trip to Fairbanks was to eat breakfast in the farthest northern Denny’s in the world). Because of about 60 fires burning around Fairbanks the town was hot and smoky, I’m sure there’s mountains around it but we couldn’t see them. A couple of the fires are bigger than 150,000 acres, but no one’s concerned, the way they fight fires up there is to let them burn and why not, fire being a great way to rejuvenate the landscape.

Denali was a three-ring circus, which is why I call it DenaliLand. The park itself is pristine and beautiful and really no different from the surrounding area of Alaska which isn’t park. But the area outside the park is a consumer-blitz nightmare. I kept expecting to see Mickey Moose, or little grizzly-bears in T-shirts and Mouse-ears. There are thousands of hotel rooms filled with cruise-line passengers anxious to see nature and take pictures of it. The employees at the hotels are from Bulgaria, Serbia or Macedonia, all of them getting a clear picture of what America looks like, a steady stream of rich fat people who don’t have to lift a finger except to eat.

Since my brother and I weren’t from a cruise ship and hadn’t booked reservations in advance we couldn’t find a room. We were what they call ‘walk-ins’ and had to drive fifteen miles back toward Anchorage to find a room. We were lucky to find anything but the place we got was very scenic with the Nenana River flowing past. Raft-loads of fat tourists swept past regularly, having a ‘white-water experience’ while the overworked guide handled the only set of oars. They probably paid a couple hundred bucks for the experience.

Our plan was to take a bus into the park, an all-day experience, so we got a Park Service brochure to see what our options were. The hotel we were staying in boasted how they could get us reservations on several bus trips so I trooped down to the main desk to see about it. Little did I know the only bus trips they reserved were for cruise-line passengers and instead of the 25 bucks bus-trip listed in the brochure the price was 150 bucks through the hotel. We declined making reservations and decided to take our rental car into the park (they only allow private vehicles to go in fifteen miles). We didn’t see any bears, but we did see a cow moose and some ptarmigans. McKinley itself was not visible because of the smoky haze from the fires burning up north. Luckily for us we’d been able to see the mountain on our trip from Anchorage and it is amazingly huge and tall. It is the most dangerous mountain in the world to climb because it is so far north and prone to extreme temperature and weather changes. A mountaineer has to pack all his gear from one camp to the next (Alaska lacks Sherpas to do it for you) and the process takes about 45 days, including acclimatization.

After Fairbanks we drove south to the Kenai, our fishing destination. On the way we saw the Portage glacier up close and personal from the tour boat. Fifty years ago the glacier came almost to the road, now you can’t see it without going on the boat, it made a huge lake and retreated around the corner. We don’t know much about glaciers or what makes them advance or retreat, environmentalists believe global warming is melting glaciers world-wide but apparently Portage glacier doesn’t know that and it has stopped retreating. My own feeling about melting glaciers is it’s actually a sign of an ice-age coming even though that sounds counter-intuitive.

Before I smashed my toe I was supposed to have a job there at the Portage glacier area building a boardwalk trail, so we stopped at the jobsite and saw some buddies working there. The bugs are pretty bad making the work unpleasant, maybe I’m glad I didn’t go after all.

Then we went south down the Kenai. First we went to Seward which felt familiar to me though I’d never been there before, probably because it is an Alaskan town I’m more accustomed to “a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.” If you’re ever there go to a restaurant called “Ray’s” down on the dock, incredible food!

Our fishing charter went out of Homer so we went back up the Kenai peninsula on the Seward highway to where it intersected with the Sterling highway going down to Homer. There isn’t a road directly between Seward and Homer since there’s a fairly significant mountain range between them. The Sterling highway follows the Cook Inlet south and if the weather is clear you can see across to the big volcanoes on the mainland. One of the volcanoes is active, Mt. Redoubt, but it was hiding it’s activity in the clouds. Oddly enough across the inlet from the volcano on the Kenai a section of beach nearly a half-mile long rose up forty feet creating a new hill since the volcanic activity. The odd part was it all happened during a time of seismic silence, it wasn’t an earthquake, nobody knows how it happened.

My brother and I had two very good days fishing, in fact our arms got tired from hauling up so many halibuts. Since we were fishing for meat and not trophies (really big halibuts are very old and tough fish and should be let go because they are an incredible resource as breeding stock, the biggest ones are always females). We did see one lunker caught, probably around 300 lbs and it took everyone in the boat to pull it in after they shot it in the head to kill it. You have to do that otherwise the thing will trash the boat and everyone in it thrashing around. The ones we finally kept were in the 20 to 35 lb category and will be delicious.

I highly recommend both books I read on the plane ride up and back, Garrison Keillor’s “Liberty” and a book called “Ordinary Wolves”. The latter paints a very realistic picture of Native Eskimo people coping with this modern day and all its ‘conveniences’. The writer, Seth Kantner, actually grew up in a sod-roofed igloo out in Alaska’s far northeast outback among the Inupiak people and living like they did. Quite interesting and very well written.

 

Another news day

I’m sharing chocolate mousse cake with MSNBC heart-throb and financial expert Erin Burnett. We’re sitting near the window in a very trendy New York café, but my eyes are only for her and vice versa. The world goes by outside, markets crash, unemployment statistics rise, I cut off a piece of cake and feed it to her. Her big brown eyes stare into mine, her straight, lovely white teeth slide the cake off my fork and the resulting thrill traces up my hand and into my very soul, thrumming in the key of “E”. With a napkin I wipe a stray piece of mousse from the corner of her beautiful, bee-stung lips.

“That’s what I like about you,” she confides, “You’re so ordinary!”

Erin is not the only TV babe I have fantasies about. I used to be crazy for Kelly O’Donnell, probably because she’s a redhead. I got a real weakness when it comes to redheads, especially when they stand outside the White House explaining things with such becoming earnestness. Lately though she doesn’t stir me that much. I blame it on Erin.

Martha Radich used to be lots cuter it seems like, well and so was Katie Couric too back in the day. I don’t know about Martha, but I used to catch glimpses of Katie’s legs once in a while, which were fine! Lovely calves and ankles, oh my! I don’t want to go so far as to talk about cleavage, that would be too much like kissing and telling. But trust me, none of them holds a candle to Erin in that department.

Not even Susie Garob on Nightly Business Report stirs me like Erin does. Susie does have an exceptional complexion and I love the way she invites me to watch the program. Such clear eyes, the way her lips form the words “Talk with key decision makers to get you ready for the next business day”, her perfectly formed shell-like ears. Paul Kangas leaves me cold but Susie makes me lust for investment opportunities, although not to the extent Erin Burnett does. She’s cornered my market without a doubt!

I’ll pause for a minute here and wait for the women in the audience to quit laughing. Go ahead, mock on, I know the truth. Which of you women have the honesty to admit a crush on Dan Rather, Stone Phillips or even kindly old Walter Cronkite back when you were silly girls, huh? What I’m going through is no different. The news has a different impact whispered in the ear, more thrilling I’d think. One might even be able to ignore ABC’s Peter Jennings’ obviously foreign, Canadian pronunciations, if it were coupled with some pillow talk. So see, my infatuation with Erin Burnett is not so far-fetched after all now is it?

“I love older men,” Erin tells me as we stroll uptown arm in arm. “Younger guys are all about their flashy cars and Platinum credit cards. They don’t impress me at all.”

“And I do?” I ask playfully.

“You have the experience to please a woman,” she whispers, “and your voice could melt chocolate over the phone.”

“I got one hormone left and you’re getting on it, Erin,” my mellow baritone raising goose-bumps on her shapely arms.

And so it goes, just another news day.

 

Automotive bogeys

At the risk of losing the respect of my peers here on this website I admit to a certain elitism, I play golf and I also watch it on TV. Of course I’m not rich enough to be a member of any golf club and the green represents a very safe spot to stand when I’m hitting an approach shot (for those non-golfers out there the approach shot statement shows I generally suck at the game). But let me get to the meat of this blog entry, namely car commercials.

The reason I bring up car commercials and golf on TV at the same breath is because the two go together, though not in a proletariat way. TV commercials for cars during golf events are generally luxury car commercials. Given that golf is an elitist sport this should not be surprising to anyone, however a change has come in my observation, namely the kind of cars they advertise now are not big fat Buicks but rather fast luxury convertibles which enable the owner to speed through bad parts of town, tires smoking.

I don’t know about you but watching cars slide, tires smoking, nearly out of control (with professional drivers) has not made me go out and buy one. The truth is I do better watching cars go around corners and stay on the road. After forty-some years of driving I cherish a car staying on the road, because I know first hand when a car goes off the road there’s a real potential it can be a bad thing both for the car and the driver.

My brother recently fulfilled a mid-life crisis by buying a very high-end car, a Pontiac GTO, something he’s wanted to own since the 1960’s. The difference between GTO’s in the sixties and GTO’s in this century is that the car will now stay on the road a lot better than it used to. My brother was quite proud to show me this advancement by going around corners way faster than was prudent in my opinion. I chalked it up to the fact he’s not gone off the road as often as I’ve had, but I carried the fear in my heart that when that fact stares him square in the face I’d be in the car with him.

Nobody wants to sell a boring car. Duh, this beauty will carry you from your driveway to work every day!! And back again (with good gas mileage both ways to boot)! If GM, Ford and Chrysler have a fault (and far be it from me to play the blame game), it is they keep trying to make us believe cars are sexy. Girls naturally want to screw guys who look like Clint Eastwood and smoke their tires speeding through bad parts of town, sliding out of control to avoid hitting the rappers (right turn, Clyde!).

Hormones which are excited by such risk-taking result in generations of genetic risk-takers. Aren’t we in a financial crisis right now due to these toxic-loan predatory types? So why encourage them, I ask you? But a more sober thought would be some Lexus convertible squirrel driver (ala spaghetti western types, needing a shave Eastwood-style), running over a poor kid while smoking his Pirellis around a corner and sliding fashionably out of control. A thing like that could screw up his insurance.

By the way I’m a bogey golfer at my best. Bogey has several meanings, including an unidentified something nearby (in fighter-pilot radar parlance). Also bogey means a ghost, a haunt. Thank the lord I’m not a par golfer, since that would indicate I’m rich enough to play all the time and therefore would need to drive a luxury convertible. After running over a couple of poor children while smoking my tires and sliding sideways through ghettos, I’d hate to pick up some bogeys.

 

Ferrets and chickens and other beasts, oh my!

People can be pretty foolish when it comes to pets. They will construct elaborate indoor runs designed to interest their favorite little critters and create backyard cemeteries for their short-lived loved ones. But worst of all, in my opinion, are those unstable semi-creative pet-gonzos who write songs in praise of their smelly, messy, thieving critters.

When they start singing on those PBS programs I have to change the station and I don’t care what else is on I’ll watch it anyway. It’s pretty clear none of these people have any training, either in lyrics, tunes or vocals. Thin reedy voices wandering all over the place haphazardly lead me to believe that melody is only a guideline, as if it were a misfiring GPS device, in which case your vehicle had better be ready for off-the-road adventures.

The good thing about these people is they have no fear of appearing foolish. In fact they almost relish it, the more nutty the better. It makes sense, you got to be nutty to love a thieving little weasel who hides your shoes, socks, underwear and anything else striking their fancy. Aren’t they just the cutest!

And then there’s the dog people, gushing over a drooling behemoth of a dog the size of a baby elephant. Or getting a close-up of beady little eyes peering out of a seeming dust-mop which convey the emotional content of a beady little mind. “He is so expressive!” Also ill-tempered, a picky eater and subject to anal itches compelling it to drag butt all over the carpet (not shown on PBS).

Add to the mix chickens who love Italian tenors or who live long lives after having their heads cut off. I will admit the chicken fanciers don’t brag about how their feathered crew are house-broken, although they do show some creativity with diapering the cluckers.

With the movie “Best in Show” the mock-documentary geniuses were hard-pressed to outdo the reality it meant to satirize. Reality has no problem holding its own with fiction when it comes to the truly obsessed. As far as I’m concerned “Best in Show” failed the test when it didn’t have some purebred dust-mop owner singing off-key.

I’ve been bit by dogs (my own), hamsters (my son’s), attacked by chickens and geese. Had my arms lacerated by rabbits and cats. Through it all a song about pets has evaded my creative mind. After this much husbandry I’ve divorced myself from pets except for houseplants. They don’t bark, mark territory, steal my socks or need house-breaking. Okay, houseplants are boring and so am I.

Which means you won’t see a program about me and my houseplants on PBS, nor will you hear me singing off-key about their behavior and loyalty. But in the interest of marketing maybe I should work something up, as a song-writer I’m pretty good with rhymes and rhythm too. Did I mention I can carry a tune? Is anybody from PBS listening?

The ivy climbs about the window frame
Just like it did around the door.
Begonias, by rights, would do the same
except they seem to love the floor.

Okay, I agree, the concept needs work.


 

Over-sensitized to heights and haunts

(A note: I thought I'd already posted this but it turns out I hadn't. In a purely chornological sequence it's out of sequence. Good thing that doesn't matter like it would if I were getting paid for writing these blog deals)

The two things, heights and haunts, don’t seem to have much in common to most people. In my case they represent two things which didn’t bother me when I was younger, but the more I have to do with both of them the less I like either.

In the case of heights I was over-sensitized by working for about two months on a fire lookout tower. We started about fifty feet up straddling metal I-beams and then worked up. At the end of the job, even inside the cabin, I couldn’t wait to get down. Before then I’d done a lot of work tearing off covered bridge roofs, which I’ll never get up on again. Who knows, maybe I started getting over-sensitized during those tear-offs and the lookout tower just finished me off.

When it comes to haunts the same kind of sensitizing occurred. As a kid I never had experience with ‘the other side’ until I went to work in the nuthouse at the cannery. My job was to dry filberts (hazelnuts to the rest of you heathens) and I worked the night shift for years. It was folk knowledge among the workers in the nuthouse that the place was haunted. A man working with maraschino cherries had died in there back in the early fifties, word had it he was overcome by the gas (don’t ever, for any reason eat those cherries, trust me on this I know how they make them), and he might be the haunt. In any case it was surely haunted according to old Steve, the night watchman. And he didn’t like it one bit either; my guess is he was over-sensitized after twenty years of feeling the darn thing as he walked through the dark nuthouse night after night.

I first felt the haunt by mistake. The mistake was reading H.P. Lovecraft books down in the bowels of the nuthouse. My main job was staying awake, ‘The Mountains of Madness’ worked just fine, it scared hell out of me. That was when I deduced the haunt (which may only be true of certain kinds of haunts) was feeding on my fear. Like some kind of bait my fright attracted it and the next thing I knew I was seeing things out of the corner of my eye and worse yet feeling like someone was reading over my shoulder. Yikes!

Being a literary sort I’d also read Carlos Castenada’s perhaps fictional tales about the brujo Don Juan. Don Juan taught the novitiate Carlos that when an external spirit tried to invade your body it would do it through your navel area. That is where your brujo sends his will to accomplish things for him, but if you are just a weak college student then this area is a big gaping hole. But oddly enough trying this strategy, namely imagining the hole being filled with my will like a plug, caused the haunt to have no ability to frighten me so it could feed even more. So that was the first time I encountered a ghost and it gave me confidence I could meet them face to face and leave with my soul intact.

Then, years later, I moved into a haunted house. Love causes one to do funny things, moving into a haunted house being one of them. We knew it was haunted, we even tried to smudge the windows, burning sage around the edges in the approved manner. Unfortunately I didn’t have much faith in it. There were windows up in the stairwell we couldn’t reach and I guessed (rightly it turned out) if you didn’t smudge all the windows the deal wouldn’t work. However I was doing a kind of brujo thing by smudging and I wasn’t afraid of any haunt, I figured all we really needed to do was convince my lady friend it had worked and everything would be fine. So I evinced confidence. I was able to live in the house for six months before the hives the haunt produced in me made me move out (either that or I had to get away from my lady friend, the jury’s still out). The hives cleared right up as soon as I did.

At the cannery the haunt just kind of lurked and screwed with me peripherally, the haunted house was a whole ‘nother story. In bits and starts we got the story of the house from the neighbors in the area. The house was rented often but nobody stayed for more than a year, it seemed. And everyone who ever rented it complained about how it was haunted. The dirty secret of the house was who the haunt really was. Apparently back in the forties a couple had had a child, maybe something was wrong with it, but they left it to die in its crib in one of the bedrooms upstairs (unspecified). Either the haunt was the child, upset at never getting a chance to grow up, or the father haunted by his act of abandonment.

The child of the woman I lived with actually saw the haunt one night. It hovered outside the second story window and then came through the wall at him. He said it was an adult and even described what it was wearing (a striped shirt, like a sailor shirt, and dark pants). As he screamed in fright, both of us ran upstairs and the child claimed his mother passed right through the ghost, which is why he recoiled from her embrace temporarily.

This episode kind of got my brujo energy going and one day, while taking a shower, I used my will to call the haunt into the shower with me. I blasted it, time and again, telling it there would be no more frightening of children. It would stay beyond the window, and in fact would live in a little outbuilding from this time forward. I felt pretty proud of myself. It had ignored our general smudging, but now it knew the power invested in these new tenants and had better toe the line, so to speak.

At the time I was working swing shift at a mill and it was my habit to take a little nap in the afternoon. Not long after my other-worldly diatribe I was taking an aforementioned nap when I was rudely awakened. We had a waterbed and I woke up thinking I was on the bounding main. The water was making waves like someone was shoving it at the foot-end. As I woke up I continued to feel this plunging action and yet no one was in the room with me! What the hell?

In retrospect I have to agree with those who believe the haunt to be the child, all the haunting was like the actions of a pissed-off kid trying to cause trouble. But the problem was the guy had gotten to me and now was focused on me, a good thing maybe, since he was leaving the children alone. After a while I started getting the hives, which I’ve never had before or since in my life. Part and parcel of over-sensitizing, somehow it had got into me through my will-hole at a weak moment. The only thing I could do is get away from the house.

I won’t go into how the woman and I were drifting apart anyway. Suffice to say I moved out and in less than two weeks the hives had gone away. I’m still not sure what the cure was. But every time I go somewhere haunts are supposed to be I feel them.

And I don’t like it. There’s a place over on the Oregon coast, Heceta Head, where they have a light-house keeper’s building which is haunted. I went in and felt okay until I tried going up the stairs, then I hit an other-worldly wall. The place is haunted, I’ll guarantee it, and I’ll be damned if I spend one night there, even if they give me the night’s lodging free.

I’m over-sensitized to heights and haunts. Allergic, you might well say. I’ve lived in an apartment house now for fifteen years (it used to be an old house) and if there is a haunt here I can’t feel it. Conversely if my landlord wants to re-roof it I’m not going to take part in any roofing party.

Otherwise I’m not scared of anything.

 

Examining the commercial world

Where to start? Okay, Anacin, back when TV was black and white. What a drug! It could conquer all three types of headaches (my favorite was the hammer beating an anvil). I shudder to think of the number of commercials I have seen since the 1950’s. I shudder to think of the ones I’m subjected to now.

Twin claw-foot bathtubs being an example. I have never seen so many horny women, stroking manly arms and hands with anticipatory ardor. When is the right time? “When both of us are ready.” From the commercials it looks to me like those women are always ready. Where would they find this many horny women willing to hang around and wait for it? The only answer I can come up with is they must be married, hitting their stride as women at the same time their men are stumbling over soft tissue. An erection lasting four hours is music to their ears, “I made an appointment with the doctor for you, tell him you need a couple of these brand-name claw-foot tubs.”

And aren’t those commercials elegant? The participants sincere and believable, the humble homesteads actually kind of on the lavish side? What’s the demographic they are aiming at? Rich white guys trying to keep it up (soft tissue don’t win trophy wives unless you forget the pre-nups). And who buys most of it?

I’d like you to meet Ernie. He has a job as a rent-a-cop, you’ve seen him, nice wide thick leather belt (it’s got to hold up a holster, after all), and obscuring the belt completely Ernie’s ubiquitous beer-belly. Ernie lives in a double-wide with his girl-friend Nadine, you’ve seen her too, the brassy bottle-redhead that tried to get you to buy her another boiler-maker at the Dew Drop Inn. Ernie and Nadine skipped the twin claw-foot tubs and bought the four-hour erection online. They’re good with it as long as it works. And why not, in Amurica ev’ry man’s a king, by God! And so are the women! (Nadine’s the computer whiz)

But my point is claw-foot bathtubs are only one facet of what’s wrong with Amurica. Our culture, if we actually believe we’ve got one, is derived through the media of TV. Even the young who normally dis the media of their out-dated parents are addicted to TV. And by TV I mean commercial TV, layers and layers of channels, movies, movies on demand, and commercials. Kids are raised to watch screens, whether it is computer screens or TV screens, the results are the same. Smart programmers know how to synch them onto brands. And so our culture progresses.

Don’t pay any attention to the side-effects and how dare you ask me if I’m healthy enough for sexual intercourse! Some Quaker Oats and twin claw-foot bathtubs and pretty soon you’ll be looking up quilting lessons just so you won’t have to deal once more with my four-hour erection. Then where will I be? Did I mention I’ve been looking into the male enhancement thing?

Of course the thing saving our culture is the fact that Ernie doesn’t have a lineup of trophy wives waiting in the wings, pre-nups or not. If Nadine is sick of looking at his male-enhanced, dick-pill induced claw-foot bathtub old Ern isn’t likely to get a lot of other exposure.

And I guess that’s my point in all this diatribe against commercials and commercial TV. It can’t solve your problems no matter how much you pay. A cultural lack like that could give you a headache if you’re not careful and then where would you be?