I'm Gonna Kill the Bear!

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 17, Verse 12

"It is safer to meet a bear robbed of her cubs

than a fool caught in his folly."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

A few years ago, I swore off getting my "news" from CNN.com.  I just couldn't stand the inanity of it, the fluff, folderol, and fiddle-dee-dee.  I mean, really, if you can find any actual news on there, it was probably put there by accident, or by some well-meaning, starry-eyed intern who actually thinks they're there to one day become the next Edward R. Murrow.  And, I'm sure, after this tidbit of real news was found, that poor sonofabitch was hoisted out of his chair by his jockeys and thrown out the 19th story window.  Assuming CNN's headquarters is in a building that high.  It's probably located in some idiot's basement.

Lately, though, I've found myself going back on occasion.  Like, for instance, a couple weeks ago I was at an all-day conference and, at the conclusion of the conference, I wanted to quickly check a news source to make sure California was still above water and East Timor didn't suddenly get attacked by East, North and South Timor.  Because NYTimes.com reads rather poorly on mobile devices, I went to CNN.com, and was satisfied that a.) the world didn't end and b.) I was right to forget CNN.com existed.  

In case you were curious, here's what CNN.com thinks you want to read about today:

• NEW Daughter visits Casey Kasem
• 'Thou shalt not' clauses rankle teachers
• Black bear reclines in a hammock
• NFL star helps teen get prom date  
• NEW Cruz wins GOP straw poll
• Turkish cops harass CNN reporter on air
• Icahn, Mickelson in trading probe
• 6 Americans detained in Honduras
• Living 60 ft. underwater for 31 days  
• 5 men arrested in girls' rape, hanging
• Suicide note chokes up vet's dad  
• Shinseki out at VA; others may follow
• Were bonuses tied to VA wait times?
• Big Papi calls pitcher a 'little girl'
• LeBron: 'I take care of what I can'  

Actually, I shouldn't say "read", rather "watch" as all of those with with the little camcorder symbol mean that, thankfully for the illiterati, no actual reading is involved.

Now I want you, please to direct your attention to the third "headline" on this little list of journalistic despair.  "Bear reclines in a hammock."

I'm sorry-- since when is that news?  I get it-- it's incongruous.  Bears don't use hammocks, SILLY!  But, see, the humor of the incongruous is, developmentally, I believe, supposed to peak and then wane at the 3-year-old mark.  Like, when you say to a toddler, "I'm a pumpkin!" they crack up and say, "No!  You not a PUMPKIN!"  So, your average pre-schooler would find the idea of a bear in a hammock hilarious.  So, does that mean that, therefore, CNN.com thinks that we have the emotional intelligence of a three-year-old?  Even if we do, and so even if we do find it funny-- is it news?  

I don't know what it is about bears, but they sure do feature prominently on the news-- and they don't even have to especially do... anything.  All they have to do is encroach a little bit too far into our territory (which, of course, we stole from them initially, and continue to do as we sprawl our way across this sorry-ass country) and they get on TV.  I mean, to me-- a bear should make the news if he claws off the faces off the alto section of a Mormon church choir.  Of if he's IN the choir.  (Bears don't sing in Mormon church choirs, SILLY!)  But, otherwise, enough with the fucking bear stories.  

And this is from a bear enthusiast.  I can remember, at a very early age, being absolutely transfixed as Marty Stouffer raised Grizz on PBS.  He fed him milk from a bottle.  Griz slept in a dresser drawer among all of Marty's neatly-folded plaid shirts.  He grew up to weigh as much as a Nissan Versa.  Stouffer got accused of illegally baiting cutthroat trout in Yellowstone.  And another childhood hero bites the dust.  

Still, my affection for bears lived on.  Perhaps it is because of my early exposure to Griz on "Wild America" that led me to seek out films that featured bears.  Two really stand out.  

"The Great Outdoors" is one of those thoroughly underrated 1980s films, with gratuitous, low-level humor and equally gratuitous low-level sanctimony and schmoopiness at the end. Still, the film had its many merits.  It was many an awkward elementary school pupil who, after seeing that film, proudly announced the his or her lunch-lady that the hotdogs being served in the school cafeteria were made of "lips and assholes."  The bear in this movie gets his bum-hair blown off by a shotgun blast in the climactic (?) scene.  Classic family viewing.  My sisters and I were fervently in love with this movie, and still quote it to this day.

Almost exactly a decade after "The Great Outdoors", another grizzly bear movie hit the big screens, and this film didn't have any (well, not much) low-level humor and decidedly no sanctimony and/or schmoopiness anywhere.  While the male duo of "The Great Outdoors" (John Candy and Dan Aykroyd) were a logical match for their comic mastery and their obvious affection for each other, the psychotic, testosterone-fueld, ragingly malevolent pairing of Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in "The Edge" made for some uncomfortable moments while the viewer impatiently pines for a view of Elle Macpherson's lips and/or asshole.  

While doing research for this post (that might be the funniest line I've ever written), I learned that the bear in "The Great Outdoors" and "The Edge" was the same bear actor-- Bart the Bear.  I wondered, as I read his impressive film bio, how many times CNN.com did a story about Bart the Bear.  I'm sure they covered his tragic death of cancer in 2000.  He only lived 23 years, and yet he starred in 13 major motion pictures.  He was also in commercials for Labatts Blue and Tums.  I guess he needed the money.  Obviously he must have been hard up when he did "Meet the Deedles."

I have to say, I have a hell of a lot more respect for Bart the Bear (rest his 9'6" soul) than I do for pretty much anyone who works at CNN.com.  People who work there think they work for a news organization, when they're really just churning out cotton candy and rubbing it on the nipples of the American public, waiting for a cutthroat trout to come lick it off.  I don't think Bart the Bear was operating under any similar delusions about who he was or what he was doing.  He was a Goddamned bear, and he knew it.  He ripped the motherfucking gill-shit out of trout and salmon and he fucking fucked trees and took unfathomably huge dumps all over God's green earth because he was a bear and nobody was going to tell him shit about anything.  And, when those big-ass klieg lights were on, he knew he was making movies and that he was a fucking star.

And I like that.        

  

You'll Always Be My Tijuana Taxi

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 14

" 'Utterly worthless!' says the buyer as he haggles over the price.

But afterwards he brags about his bargain!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

When my mother wanted to modify my behavior, she was pretty transparent about it, as she is about most things.  She would say, "Honey, I'm going to try a different tactic."  And she did.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.  Either way, at least the two of us knew what was going on.  It's best to have all your cards out on the table, I find, especially when you're dealing with family.

While most people probably won't agree with me on this one, I also think it's the best way to deal with car salesmen, too.  Just walk in there and be as plain, bold-faced honest with them as you possibly can, and just watch them stare back at you blankly.  Most people who are serious about buying a car have read all sorts of malarky and hornswaggle online and in car and consumer report magazines and in books about "tricks" you can employ at the dealership to get the "upper hand" and not "get ass-raped with a searing hot light sabre till you're bleeding out your eyeballs".  

Forget all that cock: just go in there and tell them the absolute truth.

"I have no money."

"I have this thirteen-year-old car I want to dump on you and I know you're not going to sell it on your lot, you're just going to dump it on an auction warehouse twenty miles away and the "trade-in" value you're going to give me on my car is going to be absurdly inflated so I think I'm getting a great deal and then you can absolutely light sabre schlong me on financing for the remainder."

Telling the truth about the car you want to buy from them is also a great way to get a car salesman off balance.  I sat inside a brand new Toyota Prius C a few months ago and the smell of the plastic was so noxious I almost gagged.

"It smells like a fish-market in here.  Whatever happened to 'new car smell'?  Does that cost extra," I asked, my face all scrunched up in a wince and a scowl.  A wowl.  

"I... I don't know why it smells like that," the salesman replied.  "It does smell," he admitted, to his credit.

An '04 Honda Accord stunk like an ashtray I found, after I stuck my head inside the front window and gave it a sniff.  There were cigarette burn marks on the seat, the center console and, oddly enough, on the headliner.

"Are you kidding?  You don't actually think I'd put my two little children inside this car, do you?" I asked the salesman, who, coincidentally, had just lit up himself, "I mean-- who owned this car before?  Rod Serling?"

Years ago, I took a moss-green Ford Focus stationwagon for a test drive.  The salesman sat next to me, because that's what they do.

"So?  Whaddya think?" he asked, "Doyalikeit?"

I turned to him with a quizzical look on my face.

"No," I said.  "Do you?"

He was lost for words, Mickey.

"I mean-- what is there to like about this car?  The cheap interior?  The non-existent acceleration?  The flimsy, plastic sun visors?  Come on."

One might have, rightly, asked me why I was test-driving it if that's the way I felt about it.  Well, truth be told, I like test-driving cars, and, when you have no money, the Ford Focus, of that vintage anyway, is what you can afford to pretend to not really like but nevertheless entertain because, let's face it; it is what it is and it's at least better than a PT Cruiser.

My favorite car-insult story came just a couple months ago, when I cooked up a psychotic plan to get rid of my voracious, gas loving Volvo wagon for a 2003 Toyota Corolla with 116,000 on the odometer.  I took the Corolla for a test drive.  It was hot as blazes out that day, and the Corolla was black, so I was feelin' the sun, and I was not feelin' the roll up windows.  Oh, did I mention it had roll up windows?

To me, to cut my gasoline bill in half each month, I could deal with roll up windows but, when I turned on the air conditioning, it blew hot.

"Is this a joke?" I asked the salesman.  He smiled, indicating, I guess, that it was.  I then attempted to adjust the side mirror which, oddly enough, was a power mirror.  It didn't move.  

"Do you check these cars before you put them on the lot or are you just like, 'Eh, what the fuck?'" I asked him.  He smiled again and said that they go through a "basic inspection" which, I guess, means that they make sure the car has four tires and a roof.  

The car drove fine-- it is, after all, a Toyota.

When we got back to the dealership, I got out of the car, and the salesman asked me if I locked the driver's side door (manual locks).  I looked at him.  

"You worried somebody's going to steal that?  Relax," I said, handing him the key.  We went inside and waited for the "manager" to come over and put a final value on my car.  He came over to the table, a smiling, short, round-bellied kid of maybe, maybe thirty.  He told me my car was worth $4,000.  The Corolla was listed at $6,000.  Meaning, if my math is correct, that I would be giving away my luxurious, heated-seat, leather-swathed, wood-grained, all-wheel-drive funwagon for a econobox with roll-up windows, manual locks, no air conditioning and a broken side mirror, AND that I'd have to pay an additional $2,000 for the privilege.

"Are you serious?" I said to the manager, absolutely seething.  He smiled at me.  "Are you goddamned serious?  How can you sit there with a straight face and tell me that you want me to hand you over $2,000 of my hard-earned money for that piece of shit-- that... that... Tijuana Taxi out there with roll-up windows and a stroke?  Who in the hell do you think is going to walk in here, into this dealership in this affluent suburb and buy that miserable little car?  Nobody.  Nobody in their right mind would buy that for their kid, or their upstairs maid (quoting from "The Love Bug") or their grandmother-- that eyesore is just going to sit there collecting dust and taking up space on your lot."

"Well, sir, you may have a point there," conceded the manager, still smiling, "can I ask you something?  What exactly do you like about that car?"

"The fuel mileage.  Plain and simple.  That is it.  Nothing else, and I mean NO-THING else," I said.

The truth.  Sometimes it hurts.  Sometimes, when you tell it, they smile at you.  Sometimes it gets you a ride in a Tijuana Taxi.  Sometimes it makes people angry, sometimes it gets you in trouble.  But this is for goddamn sure: it'll probably never get you laid, it always feels good to speak, and it's the very last thing a car salesman expects to hear.

Stopped

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 20, Verse 9

"Who can ever say, 'I have cleansed my heart;

I am sinless'?"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

My life has been a series of "stops" lately.  Or, rather "stopped's".  

I've stopped taking my Viibryd.

I've stopped looking at porn (how do you really know for sure that they're eighteen?)

I've stopped my Facebook account.

I've stopped trying to get rid of my car for something more economical.

And what's the other thing....  Oh, right:

I've stopped blogging.

For a good while there, I was like clockwork.  Monday Thursday, Monday Thursday, Monday Thursday.  

March.  

Tick 

tick 

boom.  

Even when a Proverb really didn't make sense, I beat it into submission until we got where I wanted to go.  These Proverbs are really just along for the ride-- and I think they know it, too.  They know.  I mean, really-- what does Proverbs 20, Verse 9 have to do with not looking at porn anymore, or any of the other jumbled shit going on in my brain that I feel compelled to try to put down?  I don't know.  

It's been about a month since I've been off my medication.  I was just telling someone the other day that I don't seem to notice any difference (I'm certainly not shedding pounds like I was hoping I would) and then, just today, I noticed a difference.  Short with my children, inattentive, restless, agitated, exasperated, frustrated, down, vacant, closed.  

Stopped.

Now, yes, we all have "off" days, but this was a little too "off" for my liking.  I wonder if part of it's the heat.  It was 84 today, and muggy, sloppy and slow.  Even just standing in the kitchen, there was sweat on my brow and my skin felt like it would set my arm hair on fire in an instant.  I don't do well in the summer.  I snap easier, I'm more overworked, more raw.  Less patient and less refined.  I guess being half Israeli only does so much in regard to tolerance for the heat.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do-- am I supposed to go back on my meds?  Were they making me "nice"?  Funny?  Effervescent?  Were they making me who I was, or someone I never was?  Or were they very expensive sugar pills?  Hey-- maybe that's okay-- I like sugar.  If I need medication to get me back to who I was before, why the fuck is that?  What happened, and when?  And why?  I don't want medication and, much more, I don't want to need it.  

My birthday is on Monday-- I will be thirty-four.  This will be my first birthday sans-Facebook in quite a few years, I guess, and it will be interesting to experience my birthday free from the exploding Wall phenomenon.  Obviously, there will be a dramatic decrease in well wishes-- Gary from elementary school will probably not remember-- but I wonder if whatever contact I do receive on my birthday will be of a higher quality, if it will come from the heart, from someone I didn't expect.  Of if there'll just be texts from my sisters and my parents and my best friend, and dinner with my wife and my babies and the dog and presents on the couch.  And I wonder if that will be just fine with me, or if that's what I'll say to conceal the hurt at being forgotten about by my 458 "friends"-- whomever they were.  

Of course, my life hasn't all been about "stopped's" lately-- I've started some things, too.  I auditioned for a film/television/commercial talent agency to try to get my name and my gorgeous face out there.  If I get anything, I'll probably play a doctor holding a clipboard, explaining the side effects of the latest grape-flavored adult suppositories in a commercial that'll air between two and four-thirty a.m. on that Christian network, but I'm okay with that.  Work is work.  I also started to not be afraid of flying solo as a director.  I'm directing a show, all by myself, like a big boy, for the first time in a long time, and I am terrified and head-over-heels with the show already, and I haven't even cast it completely yet.  And I started something else, too... what the fuck was it?  Oh, right:

I've started blogging again.