A MEMORIAL DAY GIFT

A million jokes have been made about gifts that dads typically receive from their children; bad ties, even worse after shave, but I’ve always scored pretty well.

I think the greatest gift a parent can receive is to know that something you did with your child as they were growing up left an impression with them that you weren’t really aware of. My son, Jordan, has given me that gift on several occasions and because of that I count myself as the luckiest parent in the world.

He and I had a Memorial Day tradition as he was growing up. That tradition was incredibly important to me, but I didn’t really know how important it was to him. He writes about it in this post:

We took flowers…

Stop by his site if you have a moment.

Jordan – thank you for this gift. You have no idea how much it means to me.

Dad

I’VE LOST 30 IQ POINTS SINCE I BOUGHT MY DVR

I held off as long as I could, but the sweet siren song of surround sound and high definition beckoned to me like Parthenope beckoned Ulysses. I untied myself from the mast of frugality and dove headlong into the ocean of sensory bliss. The alluring strain of the island nymphs (or perhaps it’s been Melinda and LaKisha from American Idol, I’m not quite sure) have continued to pull me toward the dangerous shore.

I must be stopped before I am dashed on the rocks of intellectual ruin and before I drag this metaphor out one sentence further.

Yep…I got a 50” plasma and a DVR and now I watch way too much friggin TV.

I should be outraged by the genocide in Darfur. I should be outraged by the James Comey revelation that Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales paid a little late night hospital visit to John Ashcroft. I should be outraged by the profiteering of big oil…and I am.

But I’m a lot more outraged that my DVR stopped recording American Idol last night right before the winner was revealed.

I told myself when I made the purchase that I would spend most of my TV time watching the life cycle of invertebrates on the Discovery Channel but darn if I haven’t been sucked into the vortex of whether Jack Bauer is going to save the world AGAIN on “24”, whether Apollo and Julianne would beat Joey and Kym, and whether or not all of those people on Oceanic Flight 815 are ever going to stop having flashbacks and get off that damn island!

I…must….turn…it….off…but….I…can’t.

I know that many of you will be tempted to leave comments stating that you are above wasting your time with television and that you spend all of your evenings reading Proust in the original French by candlelight, but I know the truth…

You want to know who America’s next top model will be just as bad as I do.

CRAZY IS AS CRAZY DOES

Yesterday I saw a guy riding a bicycle in a Santa Claus suit with a sign on his back that said “will sing naked for money.”  

He was getting a lot of attention and I was kind of jealous because I’ve been making the same offer for years and I haven’t had a single taker.

I saw him early in the morning riding down the middle of a busy street near my office. I saw him again on my way home riding in the middle of a pack of about 30 bicyclists all decked out in their lycra suits and helmets. The two sightings were 9 hours and 20 miles apart. You’ve got to admire that kind of commitment to being crazy.

I really don’t mind harmless crazy people. My mom was a harmless crazy person. She was convinced that a secret network of real estate agents was spying on her and she used to put my underwear in the refrigerator after she did my laundry, but those are stories for another day. The point is that mom would have never dreamed of hurting another person and I doubt the bicycling Santa would either. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying the attention and every time I picture him in that group of riders I laugh out loud.

So why are there so many crazy people in the world that do want to hurt other people? And why does it always seem to be about religion? I’m so tired of turning on the radio or the TV and hearing about people who have killed/want to kill/plan to kill/are hearing voices telling them to kill – some other person/race/sexual orientation/political party/sports team affiliation – all in the name of God.

I know it’s been this way forever. There was the inquisition, the crusades, the holocaust, and a million other horrible examples. I know the only difference today is that in a world with the internet and instantaneous world-wide communications the crazies simply get a bigger pulpit. It just gets really depressing sometimes.

I’m a total news junkie but I’m going to do myself a little favor this weekend. I’m not going to turn on CNN, MSNBC, or NPR. I’m not going to open a newpaper, or even surf the web. Instead, I’m going to watch a couple of Mel Brooks DVD’s, drink a few glasses of wine, and think about the bicycling Santa.

Anybody want to join me?

(I might even be persuaded to sing naked!)

FAREWELL FALLWELL

The blogosphere is awash with posts about the demise of everyone’s favorite crazy Nazi uncle; Jerry Falwell.

I think Transvestite Rabbit summed up everything that could be said about Jerry by simply letting the man speak for himself. Go check it out.

Rather than commenting on the fact that Jerry apparently lacked the mental mechanism to filter anything that came out of his mouth (or was too mean or arrogant to care) I thought I would share a Jerry Falwell related story.

One of my best friends used to be an English professor at Lynchburg College (not to be confused with Liberty University that is also in Lynchburg.)

It seems that Liberty had some difficulty over the years sustaining a core curriculum strong enough to maintain accreditation. They would send students over to Lynchburg College to pick up classes and many of those students found themselves in my friend’s Freshman English Comp class.

He affectionately referred to them as “Jerry’s Kids.”

He also loved messing with their heads, but that’s another story.

The goal of every Freshman Comp class is to attempt to teach students to put more than a couple of sentences together in a coherent form. That’s a tall order and my friend began to compile a list of the silliest pieces of writing he received from Jerry’s Kids in their maiden essays for his class. Among my favorites:

“Scents are created when smell molecules are combined with air.”  Technically correct I suppose, but it still makes me giggle.

And “Everything is what the world is like.”  That’s really deep. Does that mean we are all living in some sort of parallel universe?

My friend eventually got the hell out of Lynchburg but now teaches at a college in Montana where I’m sure he encounters a whole different sub-set of extremists. It doesn’t matter though; he went there for the fly fishing.

So…farewell Falwell, and here’s hoping that your legacy of hate and intolerance masquerading as Christian conviction dies along with you…

…but knowing it won’t.

THE OLDER I GET, THE BETTER I WAS

Do you hate it when old people talk about body parts that no longer function correctly? Well, if you do you should probably move on ‘cause I’m about to start a grocery list of aliments that is getting longer by the day. If I get really wound up I might even start talking about the size of my prostate.

My body has been on a downhill slide for a few months now and the decline seems to be picking up steam.

I’m on blood pressure meds. I‘ve also been having trouble sleeping so my doctor gave me a prescription for Ambien. Then I came down with bronchitis a couple of weeks ago for which my doctor gave me an additional four prescriptions. That makes a total of six prescription medications I’m taking daily. I seriously thought about buying one of those plastic pill containers with the days of the week on it, but they were right next to the Depends at the pharmacy and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

My ankle never has healed correctly from my accident last fall so I walk with a limp much of the time and I’ve started having muscle spasms in my lower back. I can’t read the newspaper unless I nail it to the wall and walk across the room and my wife quit whispering sweet nothings in my ear because I kept yelling at her to speak up so I could hear her.  I’ve even started writing notes to myself at night so I won’t forget to do things the next day. At least I remembered to wear pants to work today (what can I say, last Tuesday was really embarrassing).

It is a BITCH getting old.

The problem is I’m not really that old. I’m only 48, but I currently seem to have the body of George Burns; and if you recall, he’s dead.

The upside is that one of my medications for bronchitis is a cough syrup with Codeine. If you have a couple of tablespoons of that, take an Ambien, and then wash it all down with a glass of wine, you can have some REALLY funky dreams.

On a different note, I know that several of you read BiskyBabe’s site. In her current post she mentions getting a new job. Well, it was my company that hired her so be sure stop by and leave your condolences since she now has put up with me everyday. I can already tell you we don’t pay her enough to have to deal with that.

Well, its 8:00 p.m. so I’m off to make a nice Metamucil/Geritol cocktail before I go to bed.

HEY BOSS, ARE YOU READING THIS?

Perhaps you’ve heard the news story about Stacy Snyder, a Millersville University student who is being denied her teaching degree by the university because of a photo she posted on My Space. The photo is innocuous enough. It shows her wearing a pirate hat and taking a drink from a plastic cup. The caption she posted on the photo was “drunken pirate.”

Aaarrgggh matey! If she got in that much trouble for posting a picture of herself in a pirate hat, what kind of trouble could I get into for posting a photo-shopped picture of myself standing in the pulpit holding a giant dildo?

I’m probably screwed (no pun intended).

I have actually worried about my employer or my customers finding my website. I do most of my business with churches and in many cases any sense of humor they might have had was washed away during their baptism.

I’m stupid enough to use my actual name for Xanga which makes it that much easier for anyone googling my name to come across this site. As far as I know, only one customer has stumbled across my posts; and Lance if you’re reading this, when you first told me you found it I almost crapped my pants. Fortunately Lance’s sense of humor is as twisted as mine is so I lucked out.

By the way, if anyone in upper management at my company is reading this, I want you to know that you are the greatest employer in all of recorded history and I am humbled and honored to be working for you. I would also like for you to disregard that I am writing this on company time.

I would never purposely offend anyone. Ok, that’s not exactly true; there are many Republicans that I like to offend just for the hell of it, but I do know that many of my customers might find some of my posts offensive, so the story I mentioned above kind of concerns me.

Do you ever worry about what you write on Xanga?

GOOGLE IS COMING TO OKLAHOMA

(Really, I’m not shitting you)

Google announced yesterday that they are building a 650 million dollar data center in Pryor, Oklahoma. I’m puzzled by this because many of my relatives live in Pryor so I know for a fact that nothing good comes from there.

If the data center is going to fit into the local “ambience” it will have to consist of 30,000 double-wide trailers placed end to end.

Abandoned refrigerators in the parking lot would be optional.

I’m sure they are coming to Oklahoma because it will be a cheap place to build and to operate, but the people moving here from their corporate offices in Mountain View California are in for a big culture shock.

First of all, we don’t have any actual mountains for them to view but we do have Cavanaugh Hill which is supposed to be the tallest hill in the world. For some reason we are ridiculously proud of this.

We don’t have an ocean but Pryor is near Grand Lake. I hope they like the smell of crawdads and stink-bait.

We don’t have anything like Hollywood but we are within an hour or so of Branson, MO, so they can go see any number of has-been musical celebrities that most people think have been dead for 20 years. For example, Andy Williams has a theater there and he’s 127 years old. Glen Campbell also plays in Branson. He’s not 127 years old but he does look like it in his mug shots.

I really shouldn’t make fun of my home state. The transplants from California will be able to partake of our world class cuisine. That cuisine consists mostly of barbeque and fried catfish but it’s still really good. Transplants will also be able to take advantage of Oklahoma’s most abundant natural resource; Methamphetamine.

We Oklahomans are understandably excited about the news. We’re hoping that Google coming to town will prop up the state’s economy which currently rests entirely on Indian Casinos and Wal-Mart super centers.

I’ve always liked the way Google decorates their search page with cute little graphics on the holidays. Perhaps they will do some decorations to commemorate their move to Oklahoma. I’m thinking maybe a couple of cows with few dollops of natural fertilizer for good measure.