You Can Wear a Tie Under the Robes, Mommy

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 28, Verse 4

"To complain about the law is to praise wickedness.  To obey the law is to fight evil."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I've wanted to be a cop.  Went into the academy in 2002, washed out.  The seven year itch (SERIOUSLY! IT REALLY WAS SEVEN YEARS LATER!  WOW!) set in and I took some county police tests and, well, you know, it didn't go so well.  The FBI didn't want me either, which was especially sad for me, because the FBI combines three of my affinities: suits, overcoats, and, I guess, law enforcement.  

I tried to become a lawyer, too, a long time ago.  Fresh out of college.  Again-- suits, overcoats, and the law beckoned and, this time, it seemed to make sense.  Nice Jewish boys from the suburbs don't become cops, but they definitely do become lawyers.  Finally, THIS was a career move my mother's son could make that would be appropriate for her to talk about to her patrons at the public library.

Alas, it was not to be.  I got the LSAT's lowest possible passing grade.  Widener Law School offered me a provisional acceptance and, like someone who REALLY wanted to become a lawyer, I wrote them a letter refusing, in no uncertain terms, their tepid acceptance.  

When I was a boy, I was fond of watching Judge Joseph Albert Wapner on "The People's Court" (he's still alive, at a thoroughly judicial 93, in case you were wondering) and I had youthful aspirations of becoming a judge.  I had all the necessary qualifications, I reasoned, as a nine-year-old.  I knew when people were lying to me, I was quickwitted and had no interest in listening to anybody.  What more could the American justice system ask for?  Plus, I looked good in black.  

"And you can wear a tie under the robes, Mommy, and it'll show," I said at the kitchen table once while my mother was making dinner and probably considering suicide, "because the robes are V-necks."

We weren't a very law-and-order type of house.  My father was kind of a rebel growing up.  He grew up like many Israeli Jews of that vintage-- hyper-religious.  But, at age 16, "I threw my yarmulke into the sea and said, 'Fuck this!'"  (Well, he said it in Hebrew, but I don't know how to say that in Hebrew, much less type it.)  My mom rebelled, too, getting married and pregnant at a very young age and splitting from her parents.  We weren't taught about Johnny Law and reverently imbued with respect for things like property lines and stop signs.  Yet, somehow, I became very intrigued with laws and the enforcement thereof.  Maybe you might say "obsessed", and I can accept that.  Whereas lots of people in their teens and twenties had problems with authority, I had problems without it.  I instinctively look to ties and suits and graying mustaches for guidance.  And maybe that's why I dress as formally as I do.  Maybe that's how I want to be seen-- as a comforting symbol of direction and surety.  

Which is about as big an illusion as I am capable of conjuring up, because anyone who knows me will freely tell you, as freely as I'm telling you now, that I'm full of shit.

It's funny, though, what a button-down shirt and tie can do for a guy.  One day, when I was maybe in my early twenties, I happened to be taking a train from Philly to Washington.  I was standing in the station, looking particularly, at least I thought, bewildered, when another hapless traveler came up to me and started asking me questions about train schedules.  I thought maybe this guy thought I had Aspergers and had memorized all the arrivals and departures for fun, but then I realized, oh.  I'm wearing a navy blue three-piece suit with a pocket watch chain strung across the vest.  He thinks I work for Amtrak.  

Right.

I love laws.  As someone who has generally very minimal direction in his life, laws tell me what is okay and what is not okay.  I thrive on structure.  I get off on order.  Give me guidelines in explicit lengthy detail, and I might start humping your leg.  I need to know what is okay.  I have to know how not to be a bad boy.  If I don't know, then how will I know?  How will I ever know?  How will I know when to arrive?  How to behave?  How to dress?  How to cross my legs-- like a girl, like a fag, like a guy with big balls?  What do I do?  What do I say?  What isn't right?  I'm funny-- is it okay to be funny?  Can I say this in public?  Is this a word that's only okay for the house, Daddy?  Can I not say that in school?  

Please.  Tell me what to do, and how to do it.  Please.  I'm so scared.

That I'll break the law-- hurt the law-- hurt the spine of the book, the screen on the phone, the plastic coating, the foam insert, the shoulder blade, the flower petal.  I'm frightened, Aunt Em.  I'm very, very frightened.

A women interviewing me for a job this afternoon remarked, trying to be humorous-- I hope-- that, upon reading my resume, she thought to herself, "Now, what does this guy want to be when he grows up?"

Well, obviously a cop, a lawyer, and a judge.  And a writer, too.  But only if I'm allowed to wear a tie.  Where I work, you can't wear a tie.  It's too dangerous.  If it isn't in the employee handbook, it should be. 

Symbolic of JUNK!

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 29, Verse 23

"Pride ends in a fall, while humility brings honor."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

PBS gets white, Jewish people talking.  

Recently, PBS aired "American Masters: Mel Brooks", and this really got white, Jewish people talking.  More specifically, it got white, Jewish people talking to me.  The first conversation, to be fair, that I had about Mel Brooks that was inspired by this American Masters profile was with a friend of mine who isn't Jewish, but he might as well be.  We got into a disagreement (maybe) about the fact that I don't like Mel Brooks.  He was surprised.  I guess when you're white, Jewish, and reasonably funny, you're supposed to like Mel Brooks.

Last night, another friend of mine, who is definitely Jewish, remarked via text that he wished I was in New York with him so we could watch "American Masters: Mel Brooks" together.

Me: "Watching that with me wouldn't be very much fun.  Why?  Because he lacks the deep, vexing insecurities we both possess.  Or, at least, he hides it well."

Friend: "You don't even like 'The Producers'?  Fuck you!"

Friend (after some apparent consideration): "And I will fully admit that Mel's ego and personality can be extremely irritating, but even just by virtue of gathering such brilliant artists around him for his films, he deserves immense credit."

I struggle with my dislike of Mel Brooks and, when I struggle with things, I turn to my wife for answers.  As usual, she shot, and she scored.

"You don't like Mel Brooks," she said definitively, "because he's Jewish-- not only is he Jewish, he's exactly the kind of Jew you hate: he's loud, he's brash, he brags, he's in your face.  Just listening to him probably makes you want to run away screaming."

And she's right.  I heard maybe a minute, though probably less, of him doing an NPR interview and I shut it off, hitting the Power button on the radio as if a fly had just landed on it and was about to take a shit.  

"I revived the musical comedy."

"Spamalot" and "Book of Mormon" owe something to him and "The Producers".  

And maybe they do, but you saying it makes me want to vomit.  Do you have to say it?  

I'm not able, I suppose, to separate the man's personality from his work, the way I am with, say, Woody Allen.  Somehow, I can excuse the fact that Woody Allen has sexual intercourse with his adopted daughter, but I can't forgive Mel Brooks for being the sort of obnoxious Jewish stereotype that I despise-- the guy at the country club loudly talking about how his son is "DOING PRETTY WELL FOR HIMSELF" as bits of corned beef are flying out of his mouth, windjamming on cccchoffing spittle projectiles.

(That's pronounced "CCCCCCCCHHHOFFFFFING" for you fucking goyim out there.)  

I need my funny men to be insecure-- not just insecure, wracked with insecurity.  When Woody Allen gets interviewed or goes out in public, he is almost always wincing, as if a steel spike covered in peanut butter and red ants is being driven into his colon and being twisted around.  That's what I want to see.  Not Mel Brooks, who, when he's in front of a microphone and a camera looks like a kid on a Ferris wheel being inducted into the Shiteating Hall of Fame.

He sparkles, he glows, he's-- cute.

You're 86 years old, man.  Don't give me fucking cute.

OH!  SO HAPPY TO SEE YOU TAKING MY PICTURE!  CAN I HAVE A COPY?

IT MIGHT BE BLACK-AND-WHITE, BUT I'M A COLORFUL GUY!

AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD?  DON'T STOP THERE!

ARE YOU FUCKING LAUGHING YET, YOU SCHMUCK?

You get the idea.  

Mel Brooks once said, "If you're quiet, you're not living.  You've got to be noisy, and colorful and lively".  He is certainly all of those things, and he knows it.  And, yeah, he's funny, too, and he knows that, too.  And he doesn't just know it, he'll tell you all about it.  And I don't know about you, but I kind of don't want to hear that, and I don't have time for someone who thinks they're funnier than I do.  And I suppose I've always been someone who admires quiet.  Conservative.  Reserved.  Maybe that's why I'm drawn to the comedy of the English.  

Not the Russell Brand kind.

I wonder what the English make of Mel Brooks.  Obviously, I'm sure there are some English people who think he's shit, and others who think he's champagne, but culturally, I mean.  I'd be willing to bet that he's not so hot over there, although I don't quite know how you'd find that out.  First of all, the English aren't big on Jews anyway, so that's one strike against him, but the over the top personality I'm sure would rub at least a certain kind of Brit the wrong way.

It doesn't matter anyway, in the end.  It probably all just boils down to jealousy in the end.  He's funny looking and Jewish and famous as hell, and I'm that other stuff, and not that other thing.  Or maybe I just don't like anyone or anything that has broad appeal, because I'm contrary and a bit of a bitch.  Or maybe it's really because, deep down, I'm a raging anti-Semite, far worse than any Englishman or sheet-wearing shithead from Tuscaloosa.  

  

Maybe.

Festina Lente

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 29, Verse 13

"Rich and poor are alike in this: each depends on God for light."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I heard on the radio today some stuffed shirt talking about how, typically, young men tend to get radicalized nowadays somewhere in their early twenties, and that extremist radicalization occurs at this point not just because young men are susceptible to fanatical idealism, but because this is when young men are starting to grapple with whom they are, they're struggling with their place in the world and the meaning of it all, and they've gotten angry and frustrated by inequality and failures.

Always ahead of the game, I got radicalized at fourteen. 

These days, twenty-something men get radicalized, according to this guy on NPR, over the internet.  In 1994, there wasn't all that much internet to speak of.  I got radicalized under the hot lights of my middle school's theatre.  I needed no anti-capitalist literature or bomb-making diagrams/instructions.  At my fingertips, I held perhaps the most powerful tool I could have possibly come into contact with at that extremely sensitive and formative time in my life: the script and score of "The Pajama Game".

While the idea of 100 (seriously, there were 100 of us) pre-and-barely pubescent children running around onstage singing about how "seven-and-a-half cents doesn't buy a *HECK* of-a-lot" might just be funny enough on its own, I was cast as the comedic lead to end a bit more humor to the already extant comedy of the situation.  Vernon Hines is his name and, as his introductory song reveals, he's a "Time Study Man".  An efficiency expert.  Vernon's job at the Sleep Tite Pajama Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa was to make sure that work moved along at a reliable, consistent, brisk clip.  

Hurry up.

Hurry up.

When you're racing with the clock, and you're racing with the clock.

And the second hand doesn't understand that your fingers ache and your back may break

It's a losing race when you're racing with the, racing racing racing with the clock!

Vernon Hines is ever-present.  His well-worn clipboard clutched tightly against his chest like a baby's bankie, his pocket watch hardly ever resting inside his vest pocket.  In Act II, Hines interrupts a meeting to complain that the elevator is stuck, which, obviously, is throwing off productivity at the pajama factory.  Which Hines can't have.  During the scene, Hines is convinced to remove his trousers and model a pair of pajamas, which he grudgingly does at first, and then finds he enjoys the attention.  The comic highlight of our middle school production of the show was a wordless bit of panto where my, um, pants are removed onstage to reveal boxer shorts featuring two enormous pocket watches on them.  After I model the pajamas, which slide down to the ground, I hastily put on my pants, backwards, not realizing, and try to zip up the fly, which is behind me.  I then remove the pants again, put them on correctly, zip the fly only to catch my cuff in the zipper (which, by now, is also slowing down productivity).  I try in vain to remove the cuff from the zipper and get tossed off stage by the woman playing my character's fiancee.  And she throws my shoes at me while I'm off stage.  It was the first time I had ever done a scene and received applause on an exit, and it was drug-like.

Obviously, I'm still talking about it, and it was almost twenty years ago.

But aside from that being the moment I decided to bite into acting and not think about removing my teeth, it was also the moment that I found religion.  And it wasn't a quaint, peaceful relationship either.  It was fanatical.  Radical.  When I got cast in "The Pajama Game", I went with my father to a jewelry store.  I used $300 of my Bar Mitzvah money from the year before to buy a gold-filled antique Elgin pocket watch, which I wore, strung across my vest, in the show.  I wore it in lots of shows thereafter, too.  There were other pocket watches to come, and wristwatches, too.  There's an Ogee clock on our mantle from somewhere around the 1880s downstairs.  

Tick tock, tick tock, tempus fugit.

Tick tock, tick tock, time goes by.

Aside from the accouterments, which are almost always expensive, there was a very clear and very strange relationship with the abstraction of time.  I began, almost instantly after the close of the show, to become obsessed with it.  Controlled by it.  I walked down to the bus stop a half-an-hour early in 9th grade.  Once I could start driving, the time I would show up to school was, um, not normal.  Let's just say I sometimes beat the janitor.  And everybody else.  

And I liked that.

Instead of wasting my free time after school and rehearsals on homework, I did it the morning it was due, sitting on the floor in the hallway outside my locked homeroom.  When I was too early to access the building at all, I scribbled my history or English work on my 5-Star notebook in my car.  

And, nearly twenty years later, it hasn't gotten any better.  I wake up at 4:37 in the morning.  I'm out of the house by 5:15.  I'm at work by 5:40.  I come down to the chartroom by 5:52.  The night-shift nurses know.  They probably think to themselves, "Jesus-- this is one sick bastard."

And they're psych nurses.  They know.  And, you know what?  They're right.  I am.  I can't help it.

I mean, I can.  But I choose not to.

I choose this.  I don't know why.  Anxiety?  Fear?  Identity?  Had Vernon Hines become who I was, or wanted to be, or am today?  Can I really blame a musical from 1955 for the mess I am today?

Maybe.

I don't know.  I do know that I don't believe in God, and I don't believe in Judaism, but I do believe in time.  And I suppose that's just as well, because time is just as man-made as the 1967 Seiko 5 Automatic on my left wrist, or the Festina 17-jewel dark-blue dial Automatic that's on its way to my doorstep from Oviedo, Spain and it's just as man-made as God and Judaism, too.  I hope one day that my fanatical devotion to the 12 and the 1 and the 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 and 12 again becomes more taciturn as I grow older.  Maybe one day I'll realize that it isn't so important when I show up for things, that people won't judge me if every task isn't done just so, that everything won't come crashing to a fiery end if I show up on time as opposed to forty-five minutes early or, God forbid, on time, or Christ help us: late.  

Right.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I don't have time to think about that right now.  I have to empty the dishwasher.

One thing, though, before I go.  I did have time, while writing this, to reminisce a little bit about that production of "The Pajama Game".  Remembering that moment onstage, with my pants off in front of my parents and yours and around 500 other people howling in laughter at my Gumby legs and my clowning and my pretending to be older even than I am now-- that might have been the happiest I've ever been.  Thanks for helping me remember.  That was nice.   

Consulting

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 8, Verse 6 & 7

"Listen to me! For I have important information for you.  Everything I say is right and true, for I hate lies and every kind of deception."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

There are two kinds of people in this world....

Don't you wanna fucking gut people who say that?

Yeah.  I do, too.  Want to know why?  Cuz there are two kinds of people in this world: assholes who say "there are two kinds of people in this world", and assholes who don't.  Personally, I more strongly dislike the type of asshole who uses that phrase.  And, since I dislike myself, and I'm an asshole, I'm going to use it too.

Ready?  Watch this asshole:

There are two kinds of people in this world... people who read "Dear Abby", and people who don't.  

I never read "Dear Abby" growing up, though we did get "The Philadelphia Inquirer" delivered to our house every day including Sundays, a sure sign that we were not-quite-so-but-almost-daringly upper middle class.  I can remember perusing the paper avidly as a boy of maybe eight or nine.  While my older sister got Cinnamon Toast Crunch milk splotches on the comics and my oldest sister enjoyed reading about rare diseases she could collect in the Health section, I was busily scanning the obituaries looking for familiar last names.  I don't know exactly who I thought I was going to find in there-- the aunt of my fourth grade teacher, the dad of the guy at the pharmacy?-- but I sure looked religiously.  I guess I learned my obituary reading habit from my mother, whose fear of death was legendary, and from whom I also gained a healthy aversion to airplanes, crime, dust, animals, and college.

While I don't know for sure, I'm reasonably certain that nobody in our house read Dear Abby.  It's hard to imagine my hairy-shouldered Israeli father taking suggestions from some Stepford wife from Sioux City while swilling scalding hot coffee that tastes like a submerged cigar, although it is kind of entertaining to me to imagine him reading, and then religiously following her advice.  Like about sex.  

As my relationship progressed with my wife, I started to realize that she was one of the kinds of people in this world who reads "Dear Abby".  At least, she did.  Very frequently.  On Uexpress, whatever the fuck that is.  Sometimes I would drift into the office while she was reading the column and I would let my eyes fall on a sentence or two, and then a paragraph, and suddenly, I was addicted.  To making fun of it.  A parody of "Dear Abby" became a staple on my old blog, with zany, profane, racist and offensive (maybe to YOU) advice to actual letters that had been sent in.  

And that was all good fun, and we all had a jolly good laugh.  

As I have been searching for a new job for, oh, I don't know, maybe twenty months or so, sometimes someone will ask me "Well, if money or qualifications or practicality were no object (and, believe me, they're not) what would you want to do every day for the rest of your life?" and, sometimes I say one thing and sometimes I say something else.  

Today?  I'd say, "telling you how to run your goddamned life". 

That sounds like as much of a dream job as I can think of.  And I wonder sometimes if Pauline Phillips knew how good she had it, that little bitch.  Sitting at her Underwood with some licorice candy (women like her eat that, you know) clutched in her perfectly manicured digits, clacking out advice with solemnity and purpose, cocksuredness and clarity.  It's hard to fathom that someone like me, with such a dearth of self confidence, could pull it together enough to unapologetically tell someone that their shit stinks and that they need to get a life, and I suppose that's what makes it a dream job.  And the dream is sweet, I think.  I think it's sweet.  

My father, speaking of sweet, is facing a decision in the next year or so about whether to unload his business on some poor fucker or close it up and tank it all.  I asked him, at one of our infamous lunches at the park, what he was going to do with the rest of his occupational life, as there is way too much piss in this man's vinegar to just retire.  

"I don't know, Mummy," he said, "maybe I will consult.  I love to tell people what to fuckin' do."

And he's good at it, too.  Far better than I'd ever be.          

Be a Lady, Tonight

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 6

"The good man is covered with blessings from head to foot, but an evil man inwardly curses his luck."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I've been thinking recently, a lot recently, about luck.  Like organized religion, popular movies, and nice things people say about me, I am inherently inclined to think negatively about it.  Luck is for people who view life not as a disconnected series of encounters and events that are disorganized and chaotic, not ruled by a benevolent watchmaker or constructed to let good things happen to good people.  Luck is for the lucky.  They see it, they appreciate it, they acknowledge it and celebrate it.  

For the rest of us, luck is a crock of shit.  

That said, I have been what one might call "lucky".  I have had fortune favor me in many ways, and for however sour and scowling I may be (and I am) I know that I have far more often than not been shown the kinder, smiling side of life, rather than its pale, pock-marked, bristle-haired ass.  And, for that, I am grateful, because, where I work, I see more than my fair share of asses.  

Usually, you don't understand how lucky you are unless your life is viewed in the context of another's.  This is kind of a shitty thing to do because, of course, you're essentially saying, "Well, at least I'm not as fucked as THAT guy!", which isn't nice.  

But it is what we do.  

And, really, compared to you-- I'm not so bad.

(See what I did there?)

Often times I suggest to people that they should make a gratitude list.  Most of the people I with whom I deal daily are, um, negative.  They're fond of wallowing in their own shit (sometimes literally) and decrying the injustices of their tiny world and the people in it, even the people who have tried to do them a good turn.  They are focused on the pain and the darkness and we all know you can't see in the dark, so the gratitude list is a little reality check of sorts.  It sounds corny and disingenuous, like everything in the field originally sounds when first introduced, but it is what it is.  

So I thought I'd try it.  

Here.  

Now.

Okey dokey.  Here we go:

We'll run down the obvious ones first, to prevent eye-rolling.

wife, kids, dog, health, reliable car, functioning kidneys, reasonable mortgage, lots of stuff, 3 functioning toilets in the house

NOW we get to the interesting stuff:

I was lucky back in 2006 or something.  Aside from that being the year I got married, it was also the year (at least I think it was) that I won tickets to "The Lion King".  It was playing as part of the Broadway at the Academy series and it was part of a contest that 90.1 WRTI, the classical radio station, was running. I was the lucky caller.  I was so stunned when they told me I'd won that I must have sounded like those dickballs on "Antiques Roadshow" when they get told that their 1937 mint condition Jackie Robinson autographed syphilis is worth $788,000. 

Speaking of syphilis, I used a public restroom in a restaurant a couple days ago, and that got me thinking about how lucky I am that I've never seen another man's penis in a public restroom.  And this got me thinking about homophobia, and I truly don't think I'm homophobic (SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE LIMP-WRISTED POUFS WHO, UH, REALLY LOVE COCK!) but, that said, I just really am not particularly interested in seeing someone else's penis.  I'm not all that enamored with mine, why would I wanna see the dick of some random Asian guy in a Members Only jacket, Phillies cap, and glasses from the eighties standing next to me at a urinal?  I'm sure many guys have had to see other guys dicks in restrooms, especially highway rest-stops, because guys are digging around inside their flies at highway rest-stops as they're rounding the corner into the bathroom, but I've been lucky.  And I'm grateful for that.

While I can sail into and out of a public restroom without viewing whang, I have other talents.  I'm comfortable acknowledging that I have acting talent and writing talent, and a reasonable facility with human-to-human interaction.  One thing I have terribly poor confidence in is my singing.  I am thankful that Gilbert & Sullivan created their operettas and their patter roles for people for whom singing is not necessarily their forte.  And I am thankful that stage directors and music directors and casting committees, many several times over, have thought, "Maybe he can't sing very well, but he can sing well enough to do this" and have cast me in patter roles in just about half the G&S canon.  

Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B. (twice)

Major-General Stanley

Sir Despard Murgatroyd

Reginald Bunthorne

Lord Chancellor 

John Wellington Wells

I never thought, long ago, that I would ever have the chance to publicly proclaim my love for these delightful, beautiful, and funny operettas by slipping into these roles, walking, talking, singing.  For an audience.  Who paid money.  But I've been lucky.  

When I think of the G&S roles I've done, I think about the costumes and the Herculean efforts undertaken by seamstresses, including my wife, to make these costumes fit my, um, delicate frame.  And that reminds me of something else for which I am grateful: clothes that fit.  If you're ever at a loss for what to get me for CHANUKKAH:

Shirt: 15 neck, 34/35 sleeve

Trousers: 30 waist, 32 length

Yeah, I say "trousers".  So?

I'm of course, lucky to have you.  Whomever you are-- you're here.  Maybe you got here by Googling "airplane crash goat sex" and, yeah, you'd probably get here eventually, or maybe you're one of my closest friends, who knows my neuroses like the way to work in the morning.  Whoever.  Whatever.  I don't care.  You're here.  And that makes me the luckiest sonofabitch who never saw a dick in the next stall over.  

Thank you.

Pangea

CHIP OF WISDOM:

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

We don't talk about it much anymore.  

Sure, it creeps up every now and again-- like a zit or something-- and it finds its way into conversation sometimes.  It's usually something innocuous and banal that sparks it.  A book title, or a quirky bit of unrelated conversation.  On Sunday, it was Mother's Day.

My wife's mother was visiting from out-of-town and my wife was railing against the tradition of taking "the little woman" out to eat for a Mother's Day Brunch "because you sure can't trust a man in the kitchen and mom's got the day off-- har har har".  Her mother tried to say that some stereotypes about men and kitchens being like oil and water or Doritos and coffee are true.

"Right," said my wife, "like when I was recovering from my surgery, I remember one day Daddy was taking care of me and he made me macaroni and cheese for lunch and dinner."

And so it was time to pop the zit again.  You know, the brain surgery zit.  

They cut my wife's head open in July of 2004, back before we had children, back before we had a house, back before we had a joint checking account.  Back before she was my wife.  They were inside her head for approximately nine hours, poking around, digging, cutting, suctioning.  It's impossible for me to believe that was almost ten years ago.  It seems some days like it was yesterday that I was lying on the floor of the waiting room that you weren't supposed to sleep in, while "Bridget Jones's Diary" blared on the TV that you couldn't turn off or lower the volume of or change the channel.  Some days it seems like it is impossible that it ever happened at all.  

But, run your fingers across the top of my wife's head and, under all that lovely, fine dark hair, you'll feel that ridge.  Pangea.  It happened.

We often talk about how we were "babies" when we first met, and we were.  It's true.  She's right.  We didn't know shit about nothing; the only thing we knew was we were weird and in love with each other's weirdness.  She says that she didn't allow herself to think about all the things that could have gone wrong during her surgery.  I couldn't allow myself to think of anything else.  Terrified, sickened, half crazy with fear, I slowly marched with intractable resignation towards June 22nd, 2004.  There was an AVM in there that could explode at any moment, leaving her disabled, paralyzed, dead.  Who knew?

Brain surgery, of course, could have done all those things to her, too.  But we didn't talk about that much.  We tried to enjoy each other as much as we could.  We went to plays, movies, concerts.  We stayed up late and talked.  We were silly.  We were scared.

At least, I was.  

I don't know if she was.  I'm too scared, even now, even almost ten years later, to ask.  I guess this is me asking.  

To me, my wife is fearless.  She does things that I am frightened to do, even though she'd probably tell you that she's frequently sidelined by fear.  She makes choices that are empowering and bold, while I stagnate and caress my various stupid routines.  If they'd told me, in 2004, that they were going to cut something out of my head, I don't know that I could have gone through with it.  I really don't know.  You can't know, of course, until it's you, but I don't think I could have done it.

I know she's scared of some things-- everybody is-- but I like knowing that she faced down a pretty ornery dragon once upon a time, and I know that, when my time comes to do something similar, I'll only be able to do it because she did.  She has a career and I have a job.  She's not afraid of real responsibility like I am.  I hide in my do-nothing, go-nowhere world.  Because I'm frightened to succeed just as I am to fail.  

Fear is funny.  It's inside of you, and you know it is, and sometimes it's just dying to get out, and sometimes it's very content to just nestle and nuzzle inside of you, keeping your intestines warm, like fat. I'll never know what was surging through my wife's veins while she was wheeled into that elevator away from me for the last time with that thing in her head.  And I guess that's okay.  Because we don't talk about it very much anymore.  And I guess that's okay, too.  

The Rest... Is Silence

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 19

"Don't talk so much.  You keep putting your foot in your mouth.  Be sensible and turn off the flow!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

You can't follow me on Twitter.

Sorry.  I know that's a pretty crushing blow.  I shouldn't have just come out and said it right like that.  I should have at least kissed you and felt you up first.

It's hard to imagine that I, one who lustily seeks out opportunities to climb on top of a soapbox and energetically ride it for eight seconds would eschew one more audience-driven venue.  

But I have.  I have eschewed it.  It hath been eschewed.  A Jew'd.

A-choo.

Maybe it's because I don't understand it.  I'm at that age now, you know, where I don't understand things that people who are younger than me do, apparently, understand.  I don't understand why new cars have to have infotainment touchscreens.  That bothers me, and I am perhaps a little too proud that the dashboard of my 2006 CR-V is about as spartan as a cheap plywood end-table.  Cars have enough computers under their hoods-- I don't want one in my fucking face while I'm trying to drive, and I certainly don't want them in the fucking faces of the other fuckfaces who are trying to drive next to, in front of, in back of, or potentially head-on into me.  I want their fucked faces looking at the road, and their little fuck fingers curled around their steering wheels, not selecting "Pour it Up" by Rihanna or watching a cat play Double Dutch with a vole on YouTube on a screen in their car.  Driving's hard enough, and people are dumb enough without that shit.  Okay, now I'm done sounding like Andy Rooney's more profane step-brother.    

Of all the advice I've ever been given (don't watch fucking YouTube while you're driving notwithstanding) I've never been told "Don't talk so much".  No, people seem to like it when I talk, though I'm not always the best judge of their sincerity.  I have been told, on numerous occasions, far too frequently to count, "Don't think so much".  

Thinking too much gets you into far more trouble, I've found, than talking too much.  

Of course, here's the conundrummy little paradoxical quagmire: people only know you're thinking too much if you're talking about what you're thinking.  Too much.  About.  

(Whoa, right?  And I don't even smoke pot!)

I have this bad habit: when people ask me what I'm thinking about, I generally tell them.  And that's not so good.  Because, really, people don't actually want to know.  It's taken me a long time to realize this, and it still doesn't stop me.  Nothing does.  Not even not having Twitter or an in-dash infotainment center.

I will earnestly launch into some rant or other if you'll sit and even half-listen to me.  I will tell you about my fears and my anxieties and my terror and my memories and I will T.M.I. you like you've never been T.M.I.'d before because I'm pretty sure that I don't have anything to lose by having you get a little closer to me.  I don't mind it.  In fact, I maybe kinda need it.  I was never one to keep people at a distance.  I don't know how to be private or closed off.  It's not in my nature.  I put on this show of how I just want to surrender and dig a hole and hide forever from the world, but force me to go to a party or a social gathering (watch your glasses and your pretty little nose, because I will kick) I light up, in spite of myself.  The rambling jokes, the awkwardness, the energy all comes out in a dizzying spectacle of self-deprecating humor, imitations, bizarre references and sardonic put downs and come ons.  

Because I need to see you smile.  I need to hear you laugh.  Rarely, depending on certain factors, I may need to look down your blouse.  Hey, I'm not perfect.  But this is what it is.  Call it whatever you want: an audience, a friend, a partner-- I need it.  And whether it's through talking, thinking, writing, acting, creating-- it's all ways to reach out.  Because it's desperate over here.  At least, I think it is.  But maybe I just think too much.  

That's what this is, of course.  It's me talking too much.  Always too much.  It's too much, Goddamnit, so why don't you make me stop?  

Right.  

Go ahead.  

Make me.  

Putt'em up.

I dare you.

(Sissy.)

Sometimes I wish I could be content just... being.  Quiet.  Yeah-- with being quiet.  And I go through a lot of my day being quiet, at least, I think I do.  I'm terrified of saying "the wrong thing" or "the ugly thing" or "the terrible thing" or "the unforgivable therefore you're fired thing".  But I'm never afraid of saying the embarrassing thing.  I don't know why-- I'm apparently horrified of being embarrassed, of committing some social sin where everybody points at me and laughs, or, worse, is moderately afraid of me.  I tell people that the first thing you have to get over as an actor is the fear that you're going to look foolish, because you are.  But that's bullshit, the first thing you have to get over as an actor is you.  And maybe I'm just not over me yet.  

I'm definitely over 140 characters.  And I like that.  

Put Me In Seclusion

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 14, Verse 2

"Even his own neighbors despise the poor man, while the rich have many 'friends'."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

You can't think of everything.  Even I, a master worrier and contingency planner and seer-of-things-that-canst-thou-goest-wrong, even I occasionally miss a step and misstep.  For nine long months we had that no-dog feeling.  Under-stimulated (whoa) and bereft, we wandered mindlessly through our day with nary a useful thing to do with a leftover plastic grocery store bag but stupidly put it in a tin canister for... no good reason other than that's what we used to do with leftover plastic grocery bags when we had a dog.  

So... we got a dog.  

Aside from the fact that our Basset Hound hasn't quite figured out the outside bowel movement exclusivity arrangement yet, she's pretty much the perfect dog.  But, when you're without a dog for a long time, and there's that part of you that really really really wants one, you forget about some of the nice things that come with not owning one.  Like not having to stand outside like a dumbfuck scarecrow while you're waiting for some animal on a leash tethered to your tightly-wound fist in the pouring rain so it can squeeze out a turd before you can go to work.  

And then there's that other thing.  That other thing that becomes especially more prevalent when the temperature warms up.  You know what I'm talking about.

You know.

When you own a dog, you have to take it on walks.  And, when you take your dog on walks, you invariably run into your neighbors.  Not just the next-door-ones either.  People on your street, people that live down the street.  Up the street.  Across the street.  The street that's parallel, the ones that are perpendicular.  Angles.  Acute.  Obtuse.  My neighbors are isosceles.  

I hate them.

Even the neighbors I kind of like, I despise.  

"OH!  You got a NEW. DOG. (!?)  She's SO.  CUUUTE.  (!!!)  What's her NAME?"

Can

I 

say

hello

to

her

?

?

?

It's not that I don't like my neighbors, it's just that I wish they would all drop dead.  Immediately, together.  In a pit of some kind.  With snakes and horny, rabid rats that have been starved and tortured for at least 3 weeks.  And lemon juice.  This pit should be filled with lemon juice-- the rats and the snakes should be swimming in it.  And it should be unsweetened.  I said lemon juice, not lemonade.  I don't want anyone enjoying themselves in there.  

My wife and I often talk fantasy talk-- and I don't mean like where I dress up like Count Chocula and she wears a chainmail diaper and we coat ourselves in marmalade-- about what life will be like when we have time and money to retire.  You know, when I'm 87 and she's 86.  For me, an idyllic retirement would be a house on maybe two or three acres, with big fucking trees everywhere, lining the property like an honor guard of soldiers, ready to protect and defend our right to privacy to the last.  I don't think two to three acres is asking too much.  I don't need a rolling estate with gay footmen winding the clocks, but I wouldn't thumb my nose at a little distance from the neighbors.  

It's funny-- I'm a strange conglomeration of nice and mean.  I can put on a great show and exchange pleasantries and social niceties with the best of them.  I can pretend I'm interested in your lawn-mower or your children or your newest end-table or your newest mole, but, really, I'm dying inside, and secretly I can't wait to scurry back to the hermetically-sealed enclosure of my tightly shut-up house and loudly mock you with my wife.

HA!

I'M MOCKING YOU!  

YOU JUST WANNA HAVE A NICE CONVERSATION WITH ME ABOUT NOTHING AND THEREFORE YOU MUST BE PUNISHED!

I just want to run away, and maybe all the judging I do is just projection.  They're tsk-tsk'ing me.  My grass is too long.  The hedges are Afro-esque.  There's too much shit on our front porch.  The pachysandra is fucked up on one side of the front lawn.  We don't measure up.  We don't fit in.  We're observable and noticeable and therefore we are judgeable.  

Able to be judged.

Unable to care.

Less than.  Equal to.  

If we had no neighbors, I rationalize in the fever of my comfortable irrationality, whom may we be judged against?  No one.  We are our own yardstick.  And with it we cannot be punished.  

The dog is asleep right now, lovingly nuzzling an assuredly aromatic oven mit.  Soon, I will dutifully take her out to see and be seen.  She's a chick magnet, but I'm married, and the chicks she attracts are over sixty and are silently sending me to hell because our plastic, drug store porch chairs haven't been washed since last summer.  

Thanks, Tenny.  Good girl.  

Partners

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 4, Verse 23

"Above all else, guard your affections."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Mothers and sons have scripts.  They are steady scene partners, and they can read each other's rhythms and faces and pauses like old vaudeville performers.  When Larry Fine was in his seventies and nearing his death, he and Moe Howard were still performing together, even at the nursing home where Larry was recovering, or trying to, from his latest stroke.  The story goes that Moe was running late and Larry had to go on without him.  He was terrified.  It was the first time he had gone out on stage without his beloved friend and comedy partner by his side in over fifty years.    

In middle school, I filmed a few episodes of a mock news program that was set in the late 1700s.  A friend of mine and I were co-anchors of a show called "A Bit of History", and we read phony news dressed in silk stockings (okay, they were very long gym socks) and white perriwigs bought from the local Halloween Adventure store.  My father steadfastly filmed these episodes which were originally done for school projects, and were slated to run on the local cable access channel, but we never could get our act together.  Now, Greg, my comic partner, is a successful alt/folk singersongwriter out west and I'm, well, here.  He and I, fully clothed and submerged in water, pretended my family bathtub was a colonial warship, we tramped through local creeks, frightened neighbors, and destroyed my parents' dining room with huge custard pies that we threw at each other and, you know, missed.  I cajoled other hapless schmucks to join me in comedic misadventures, sometimes for a camera, sometimes for a live audience since then, but Greg was always my favorite comic partner.  

My first comic partner, though, was my mother.  We did scenes together.

Me: Mommy, I love you.

Her: That's very sweet, honey.

Me: Mommy, don't you love me, too?

Her: Of course I do!

Me: Then SAY it!

---

Her: You're my best boy.

Me: Mommy!  But I'm your ONLY boy!

---

This was the first bit of rehearsed dialogue I ever did with anyone.  I thought we were hilarious.  What did I know-- this was before I discovered Moe and Larry on my Bubba's enormous wood-encased television, and long before I discovered Greg in 7th grade formaldehyde biology class.  The lines my mother and I spouted back and forth to each other were always delivered with the same pitch, pace, rhythm and I liked the rehearsals because they differed in no way from the performances.  I enjoyed the predictability of the script, and we never deviated or improv'd.  

She was a good scene partner.

Nowadays our dialogue isn't rehearsed, and it's more spontaneous and more dangerous, and less satisfying and less happy.  While she lives less than half-a-mile from my house, I feel like she's off somewhere very far away.  Our pauses aren't Pinter-esque, they're just heavy, and hard.  And, some days, I feel just as lost and frightened as Larry staring out into the house with no Moe beside him. 

We were very vocal about our love for each other, that family of mine and I.  I will never forget how my father, a hardened sabra who fought in two wars and who has taken the lives of others on this earth, taught me about how to show love.  He didn't always know what to say or do, and he didn't always know how to respond to me, definitely his most eccentric and perhaps his most needy child, but he never ever failed to show his love.  The man let me eat bacon on Shabbat and he let me drink coffee at age 8.  He nurtured every crazy thing I was into-- nevermind if it was antique Volkswagen Beetles or Bach harpsichord concertos, navy blue three-piece suits from Mennonite-run thrift shops, the Civil War or 1970s British comedy.  He even indulged my desire to become a police officer.  

That one didn't come easy, though.  

We went out to dinner as a family-- maybe the last time, actually, now that I think about it-- to a restaurant in New Jersey shortly after I had graduated from college.  All five of us in one car.  We were on Route 73 and a New Jersey State Trooper lit up his overhead lights and pulled over a dark green Mitsubishi with heavily tinted windows.  

"He probably pulled that guy over cuz he's black," my middle sister said authoritatively.

"What the fuck makes you the expert on traffic stops?  You can't even see if he's black-- his windows are tinted so dark you can't see shit."

"Fuck you!  What do you give a shit?" she spat back at me.  What was she, stupid?  I had just written and published a book on cops as an undergraduate in college.  

"I give a shit because you don't know anything about what they go through and you sit back and make fun and criticize and you don't care and that cop could die tonight shot by that asshole in that car and he'd never see it coming and you think it's all a big fucking joke!"

My sister and I fought like animals the whole way home.  Late that night, in the living room, I told my father I was enrolling in the academy.  And he and I sobbed hysterically together on our knees, pressed up against each other so tight I could barely breathe, clutching onto each other's shirts for dear life.  A few weeks later, he was running alongside me on the track of my old high school to help me prepare for the mile-and-a-half run, which I blew the doors off of.

The weight-lifting test... not so much.  And that's the way that one went.  

In the salty heat of our embrace on the living room floor, I felt his love forever-- his terror, too.  My mother and I still have our scripts, we just don't rehearse as often as we should.  She has two grandsons now, and a granddaughter, too.  I'm no longer her only boy, but that's okay.  I know.  I'd have to be a real lamebrain not to.