Chipped Wisdom

Monday, July 7, 2014

This Comment Was Deleted.

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 18, Verse 6 & 7

"A fool gets into constant fights. His mouth is his undoing!

His words endanger him."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

As soon as I saw the picture, I cringed. Not because it was disappointing or revolting or wrong-- because it was lovely. Because I knew what was coming. Down, down below.

In the unruly bowels of the Comment Section. But we'll get to that. Unfortunately. For now, let's focus on the positive.

The picture I saw, that lovely, cringeworthy picture featured two beautiful African-American women dressed in pale-blue short-sleeved shirts. The older one has her left hand resting on her belt, and she gazes knowingly at the younger one, who smiles back with a disarming air of innocence, but meeting the gaze upon her ounce-for-ounce. Mom wears badge #3636, and has worn it every day for twenty years. Daughter is just getting used to #1523.

Mother, Beverly, after twenty long years in a rough district, will retire in a few months. Daughter, Sicily, seems to know how lucky she is: "I can say that not many people get the opportunity to do something that they enjoy doing with someone they love, respect, and look up to - and I have that right here. I have that right here."

I wonder, when Philadelphia Daily News writer Stephanie Farr, no stranger to the Philadelphia Police Department, and what writing about its men and women, can bring about, ever considered that writing a beautiful, honest, touching story about a mother and her daughter policing the same city, in the same District, might evoke in her readers. Maybe she knew. Maybe she knew and she didn't care.

"Passing the Baton," written about Beverly and Sicily Milligan, will hopefully, one day, be a story that never needs to get written-- because mothers and daughters on a big city police force together will be as commonplace as a father and a son ("my dad was a cop, my uncles are all cops, my grandfather was a cop, my great-great grandfather's muttonchops were cops, etc"). One day there won't need to be an article like Stephanie Farr's. One day there won't need to be a Pride Day, either. Because we'll all just... get it.

Well, maybe not all of us will.

My cringestinct proved to be right on the money about Philly.com's readership, and their worldliness. Their openmindedness. Their social graces. Their abhorrent, revolting, repugnant racism.

This comment was deleted.

Six out of twenty-eight comments. Though, if I ran Philly.com, I'd probably have gotten rid of at least five more, but that's where subjectivity comes in, I suppose. Maybe I'd be a heavy-handed kind of editor. Maybe I'd be the kind of editor who abolished comment sections altogether, because I don't really understand why they have to exist. Not to sound like a holier-than-thou curmudgeon-in-training, but I got my first Letter to the Editor published in the Philadelphia Inquirer when I was seventeen years old. And there were approximately two dozen after that, in papers around the nation (I have a big mouth-- you're just figuring this out now?) and in Canada. Some of them, looking back on it now, weren't worth the paper they were printed on, but someone with a desk and a phone (and probably suspenders and a combover) decided that they at the very least came from the heart, and that somebody out there would benefit from reading what I had to say. My letters were vetted. Michael McCombover gave them a pass. He called me to verify my identity and then, the next day, or in a few days, I got to enjoy seeing my words and my name in print.

These commenters don't get vetted. And they never see their names-- just their avatars and their screennames. And the vitriol that they spew doesn't need to get read by anybody. Certainly not Beverly and Sicily Milligan who, I'm sure, as police officers, no, as BLACK police officers, no, as FEMALE BLACK police officers have been and will be called everything in the book and beyond. They're big girls, I get it, they can take it. But why subject them to the disgusting barbarity of anonymous, atrocious words of hate and ignorance in what should be their finest hour: appearing together, side-by-side, looking like the picture of pride and beauty-- no: Honor, Integrity, Service. Why? Didn't the people who run Philly.com know what was going to happen? Why couldn't they have closed the comments for that article.

No. Just assign some poor intern to sit at a computer screen and give him/her instructions to hit "Refresh" every four seconds and delete the first "N-word" comment that pops up. Why? Because of freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? Freedom of shittalking shit to behave like shit. These are the freedoms people like those commenters love to defend, while conveniently forgetting about "and liberty and justice for ALL."

For 22nd District Officers Sicily and Beverly Milligan.

I am so very grateful to Stephanie Farr for writing that eloquent, heartfelt piece, but I hope to God one day will come when she won't need to, and her editor won't need to block comments or delete comments or wonder about what the comments will be and fuck the comments.

Fuck them.

Hate-filled trash just terrified of a world where a black woman could grow up to do a thankless job like her mom, a world where she could slip her hand into a white glove, hold it up and swear to protect, serve, defend, and possibly take a bullet for a heartless bastard who would never even think about doing the same.

One day maybe we won't need an article like "Passing the Baton." But, I'm ashamed to say, in 2014, we definitely do, and maybe it's good that we are allowed to see why. Even if all we can see is This comment was deleted.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Does This Friendship Require a Lot of Oil Changes?

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 19, Verse 4

"A wealthy man has many 'friends'; the poor man has none left."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I'm not sure if I have a lot of friends anymore. What I am sure of is that I have some cognitive distortions, which is a fancy, psychobullshit way of saying that my thinking is fucked up, so, when I sit down and feel sorry for myself and cry into my decaffeinated tea about the dearth of friendship in my life, I have to pinch myself (I originally mistakenly typed "punch myself", and I guess that would be effective, too, though people would eventually start to wonder about the bruises) and ask myself, "Is what you're thinking really true? Or is it bullshit?"

Sometimes I have to ask myself things. Things like that.

For instance, an old high school friend of mine opened up a really cool restaurant with awesome food-- it's Jewish-Italian (like she and her husband) and I've made it a point, whenever an old high school friend of mine is home visiting from wherever the fuck they've moved to, I take them there. And I've been there with a different person maybe four or five times. So, that right there says, okay, I have four or five friends. Plus the friend who opened the restaurant. Though she isn't really someone I would necessarily hang out with, every time I come to the restaurant there is a very warm, lovely hug (she's a great hugger-- some people just have it, I don't know what it is) and a genuine smile of happiness and she'll always make time to sit and talk, no matter how busy the place is. And that all feels good. It doesn't hurt that the food is so delicious it should probably kill you. Eat enough of it and I guess it will.

I was reminded, this past weekend, that I have other friends. Well, maybe they're really my wife's friends, but she's pretty generous with sharing, and she shares her friends with me, and it's seamlessly just... worked between us all. I share some of her personality quirks that attract a certain kind of person to her, so I suppose it's natural that they'd get attracted to me. No, not in that swinger kind of way, but, hey, I'm open to whatever.

That's a lie. I'm not open to whatever. I'm closed to whatever. I'm closed. I'm closed to things like that.

We have this dining room table-- it's made of oak. It's beautiful and ancient-- thick, heavy wood. It was given to me by a friend. Actually, the sister of a friend. And she's kind of my friend, too-- even though both of them are nearing seventy. That's two more. Some of my friends are old. Anyway, this table has leaves that you can use to extend the table. I think maybe we've done that once or twice before. Having a table that has leaves that you never use is kind of like having alcohol in your house that you only "keep for company" and that you never open.

My parents had liquor in their liquor cabinet that they only took out when my great aunt and her husband would come over. One day, they came over and my father looked for the key to the liquor cabinet and he couldn't find it. So my great aunt and her husband moved to Florida and died. The liquor, however, remains, malting away inside that cabinet which, ever opened again, would probably knock you stone dead with the stench of urethane and cat urine. That's what I remember it smelling like when I was a little boy.

Maybe that's why I don't drink.

So, on Saturday, we opened our home and our table and, around it were seated ten people (okay, two of whom were my wife and I and two were our children) smiling and laughing and awkwardly joking and sharing personal anecdotes and eating good food and being generally very nice to be around. Friendly. Friends. They were all gathered to mark 10 years since my wife's brain surgery. Her Brainaversary. They drank soda and spritzers our of cups marked "Bird Brain", "Brainiac", and, my favorite, "Shit for Brains". They ate watermelon with a little placard that read, "Now That's Usin' the Old Melon!". People brought over brain-themed food items, including deviled eggs (those fuckers really look like autopsied brains-- I, unfortunately, know that from experience), Smart Food popcorn, and they ate my wife's Monkey Brains, and a pretty awesome no-bake Jell-O cheesecake brain mold.

This one got a hunk of parietal lobe, that one got occipital. It was all good. These weren't necessarily my people, but they were my kind of people, and that was definitely enough. My sister-in-law was there, too and, over the years, she has become my friend, too. She moved here from St. Louis to be closer to her sister and our children, but she, through working at my hospital and just through life, too, has become my friend, too. Someone I can effortlessly bullshit with, or just be quiet with, or profane with-- and it's good. Hell, she gave me the topic for this blog because I've been pretty spent on inspiration, and a lot of things, of late. Parenthood will do that to you-- you have been warned.

I was lucky for three years-- I got to see my closest friend every day at work, and every other weekend, also at work. Now I see him every three months or so, and that's okay, but it's not the same. We text every day, because that is how it should be, that is how it must be, that's kind of how we are. It's not so good. And it's also the story of my life.

My wife, of course, remains my best friend. The one whom I can tell anything, say anything, believe anything, throw anything at or to, go through anything with-- you know, like brain surgery. We were very young when that all happened, chronologically, and together. We were very young together, very young at being together. You know what I mean. But, as I cuddled her in her hospital bed, nuzzling up to her even as her skin stunk and her head-wound was a mess of matted hair and blood and pieces of God knows what and staples and antiseptic, as Hunan the Intern opened the door and saw us together, he assumed I was her husband.

I wasn't, yet. But we both knew that was coming. Hunan was onto something. I'll bet he's a great doctor today, that schnook.

My best friend and I don't celebrate bullshit holidays like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day and Father's Day, not because we're better than anybody else, but Brainaversaries are far more important to recognize. Birthdays are good, too-- but all that other manufactured stuff can go to hell. We don't need it, but I know for sure that we do need friends, even though they are tremendously hard to come by and sometimes harder to keep. Friendships, like cars, can sometimes depreciate if you're really not up on the required maintenance, and they do require regular oil changes. Since I can't imagine that anybody reads this fucking blog anymore, whether they're my friend or not, I'll be emailing this URL to everyone that I consider my friend, because I want them to know how I feel. I don't do that nearly enough. I guess we can consider this the latest in a series of long overdue oil changes.

Happy Brainaversary, my love.

Why the fuck isn't there a Happy Friend Day?

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Cop Eyes

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 18, Verse 3

"Sin brings disgrace."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

"See that guy, over there? See that bulge in his left gym sock? That's drugs," said the one in the driver's seat, with dead certainty as they waited at the red light.

"Drugs?" the rookie passenger replied incredulously, "how do you know? I mean, you sound so sure."

"See his shorts? They have pockets. What the fuck would he need to carry in his sock if he's got pockets?"

"Wow," said the rookie, "you're really something. Now take a right when the light turns green-- and don't forget to signal."

With the exception of that last sentence, this could easily have been an exchange between two cops in a squad car. However, this conversation took place between me (driver) and my driving school instructor (passenger) in 1996, when I was preparing to get my driver's license, and it wasn't inside a patrol car, it was inside a gray Chevy Lumina with an auxiliary brake pedal.

"You've got cop eyes," my instructor said to me, almost with a little bit of envy. Maybe he wanted to try them on to see what I saw-- a world where every felon somehow lights up in neon green to me, but nobody else.

My driving instructor, we'll call him "Marty" because that's probably the name of most driving instructors, if you think about it, was a spindly man, bald on top with a neatly trimmed mustache. He wore plaid short-sleeve dress shirts and khakis. They must have paired him with me because they thought, "Well, this is what this kid is going to look like, and probably be doing for a living, in thirty years-- might as well give him a front-row seat to his future."

My lessons were an hour long and we would pull over three times during each of the four sessions so Marty could get out of the Lumina and light up. Marty wasn't just addicted to nicotine, I think he was in love. He chewed the end of his cigarettes while he smoked, I presume to increase the speed at which the nicotine surged into his salivary glands and his gums. I guess, if Marty is still alive today, he has no jaw, which makes me sad, because the words that came out of his jaw were funny-- they had a sardonic, nervous energy to them.

"So," he said to me one day while we were hopelessly stuck in traffic on a road that was adjacent to a local college, "if you got into trouble here-- like, if shit went down-- what would you do?"

I glanced at him and furrowed my brow, "If 'shit went down'? Are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm goddamned serious, like if someone tried to ram you or if someone ran up to your car with a gun, what would you do?"

(These kinds of things are always happening to sixteen-year-olds in suburban southeastern Pennsylvania, just so you know.)

"I'd cut it hard and floor it up onto the college quad."

"Yes!" Marty yelled, giving the Lumina's plastic dash, and then my shoulder, an enthusiastic thump, "That's right! Do you know how many idiots I teach who'd be like, 'Uhhh... I dunno?' Retards!" he exclaimed, shaking his head. "Now find a parking lot-- smoke time."

On the way to my test, I reminded Marty that he had neglected to show me how to parallel park.

"Shit!" he exclaimed, "uh-- okay, pull in here."

He popped the trunk, lit a cigarette, started chewing and pulled out some orange cones and set them up. He gave me a couple pointers and then told me to try it. I immediately backed over one of the cones, wedging it between the rear passenger tire and the muffler.

"You'll be fine."

Turns out, even though I hit an orange barrel during the actual test, Marty was right. I was fine. I passed. Maybe Marty paid the test administrator off. Maybe he just didn't give a shit. Maybe he didn't have cop eyes.

I hadn't thought about Marty for years and years, but I thought about him today. When I got into my car this morning to go buy a new hedge trimmer, I noticed that my glovebox was open.

"Hmpf, that's weird" I thought. But my wife opened it and rummaged around in it just yesterday looking for Advil for me because I had a headache. She must have forgotten to close it. Then I opened the center console and noticed appreciably less coinage in there than there had been the day before. Ah-- sometimes, when I go into a store, my wife takes a lot of the change and puts it in her wallet so she has some, because she likes to have exact change when she pays for things."

The cop eyes looked, but they didn't see. And they certainly didn't see the GPS missing. It wasn't until hours later, when a patrol car slowly rolled down our street and parked at a neighbor's house did my next door neighbor tell me that his car had been ransacked last night. Then it hit me. Hard. I went out to the car and, lo and behold, no GPS. Cop eyes, it seemed, were failing.

So they got a GPS unit. Some spare change. Fortunately, they left my I.D. badge and the keys to the psych hospital where I work (that would have been a LOT of paperwork...) but they also stole a bag of theatrical make-up used to make me look like the bitter, crippled, wizened old monarch King Gama in the production of "Princess Ida" I was just in. Maybe those druggie bastards are running around North Philly with age lines and gray hair and tooth-blackener. Or maybe they're just snorting the setting powder. Either way, I hope they drop dead. It's hard to feel victimized when I'm the idiot who left his car unlocked, an unheard of rarity for Mr. Paranoia, but, nevertheless, I don't like that things are going bump in the night right outside my house and I don't hear it happening, or notice when it does. Somehow it's not the drug-addled miscreants who are to blame, it's me who is deficient.

What would jawless Marty say?

Saturday, May 31, 2014

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:

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.

Monday, May 19, 2014

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.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

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.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Stuck

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 21, Verse 10

"An evil man loves to harm others;

being a good neighbor is out of his line."

---

I'm stuck.

I'm stuck and I'm sticking to a mood of a funk-- of a glowering, lowering mess of a rut. Don't try to help me, though-- if you offered me your hand, I'd probably drag you down into the sinkhole. That's what I'd do, and do it I would.

I think I want you in here, down here deep with me in the dark. I think I want you here with me. I thought I didn't, and so I said to my wife, flatly, in the kitchen, in my pajama pants with hearts on them, "I'm not going to blog tonight."

It was a grand pronouncement, though made in that deflated, deadpan, Wes Anderson way.

"Okay," she said to me in equal reply. Two yellow Reese's peanut butter egg wrappers lay in tatters in front of her on our red kitchen table.

"Oh-- you ate both of those?"

"What, did you think I was going to save one of them for you?" she answered with a smile.

I love being married to my wife. Which is rather a good thing, you know, since I'm married to her. Other people are married to people who aren't my wife, which I hope is working out for them, since they can't have her. I have her. And she has me. Whenever our children point to the rings we wear on our fingers, we always tell them, "This ring means that Mommy and Daddy belong to each other." I love that we say that, because it's true, and because it's rather a nice way of putting it, and I'm glad that's what our children see. When I kiss my wife, my daughter's face lights up and she coos, "Ooh, Daddy love Mommy!" No dullard there.

In case you weren't able to tell, recounting colorful anecdotes like these is a strategy I'm trying to use to lift myself out of my shitty mood, even though I am caked in it to the eyebrows, and I don't know if it's going to work, I don't know if it's having an effect on you, because I can't see you or hear you. It's a wonder that any stage actor ever decides to write-- in a way it's so anathema to performing on the stage. There, you have instant feedback, and you can turn it up or dial it down depending upon the reaction you're getting. No offense, but writing for you is kind of like performing in front of the residents of a local town's mortuary, or at a cat shelter. I have no idea if what I'm doing matters a damn to you in any way, and it's frustrating. It's why, the one time I went on the radio, I was terrified. All I could see were little needles on little dials going from right to left and left to write. And they weren't laugh-o-meters.

A girl at the Apple store was flirting with me today-- she had no reason to talk to me, I was waiting for my OS to reinstall and I told her that, but she kept the conversation up, joking and inquiring, excessively, I think, about my line of work. I even had the perfect opportunity to let her know that I'm married, but I didn't. Why? I guess I liked the attention. She had nice glasses but was otherwise only passingly attractive. As in, if I passed her on the street, I would have thought, "Oh, she's attractive," and continued on my way quickly changing thoughts to death or my current financial lamentations or fantasizing about how a night's unbroken rest might aid my welfare.

When I came home, I told my wife about my transgression, which she laughed off. "That's why you're telling me about this," she said, "it's your incessant guilt-- you can't keep anything from me." And she's right. Years ago, when I worked on the street as an EMT, a nurse gave me a piece of paper with her phone number on it, which I immediately threw out as soon as I was out of her sight and I told my wife as soon as I got home. She laughed. She was glad "other people saw things her way". Why won't someone punish me already?

I want to write about work, but I'm too afraid that, if I start to do that, I'll cry. Not that you'll be able to see it, but still. I'll know. And my wife, who's sitting across the room from me happily thumbing through endless screens of palaver and folderol and fiddle-dee-dee would have to deal with that, and I fail to see how that would aid her welfare.

Or yours.