Pirouettes in my Brain

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 26, Verse 4-5

"When arguing with a rebel, don't use foolish arguments as he does,

or you become as foolish as he is!

Prick his conceit with silly replies!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

As I was driving to work this morning, I was treated to a story about botched young adult circumcisions in South Africa.  Not just bungled procedures, but inept aftercare by "very young, inexperienced female nurses."  Call me what you will, but, if I were a young adult who had just been circumcised, I'm not sure having my mutilated genitals and my wounded pride tended to by a nurse of that description would necessarily be unenviable.  

Of course, I suppose it would be if said nurse wrapped the bandage so tight that it ceased all blood-flow to my penis, resulting in tissue death, gangrene, and, yeah, amputation.

In 2013, these incorrectly-performed and dubiously cared for circumcisions resulted in 43 deaths, and countless disfigurements and irregularities.  Out of how many, I don't know, but that seems to be a pretty significant failure rate for a procedure that was executed on my son by an octogenarian on my parents' dining room table in front of a not wholly insignificant audience, many of whom, I hasten to add, were armed with iPhones.  No photographs were permitted by the mohel during the actual procedure, and I cringed when he said that, because I'd like to think that nobody in the room, at least nobody who was related to me by blood, would need such an admonition but, sadly, I knew that probably wasn't the case.  I wish he'd said "no eating", too.

And as I turned the wheel of my Volvo this way and that way, as I do on my automatically adhered-to meandering route to work, best performed when 75% asleep, I couldn't help but think about medicine-- how far we've come, how slow we've rolled, how much we know and how much we don't.  I was thinking about what would happen if a victim of one of these Dr. Tremblefingers operations stumbled somehow into a state-of-the-art American hospital.  He'd be all septic and infected and they'd administer drugs to stabilize all his functions and they'd drain puss and they'd save whatever inches they could so that, when they guy recovered and felt like hitting the clubs again, he might, one fortuitous night, end up taking a cab headed straight to Poundtown.

Because, when your dick's infected, and you take an antibiotic, you can pretty much tell if that's working.  Your pee-hole stops frothing, I mean, it's pretty obvious.  If you've cut your goddamn arm off with a grapefruit knife and somebody applies a tourniquet, the bleeding will stop, and you can pretty much see that, and that's good.  

I've been on Viibryd for a good few months now, and, when the psychiatrist or the therapist asks me if I'm working, I always feel slightly exasperated.  I want to say, "What?  You mean you can't you see my dick isn't throwing up anymore?"

But, of course, it's not like that, is it?  There's nothing really to see.  It's just me, cross-legged in that chair, staring absently at the carpet, or my therapist's knee, or at a pile of paperclips on the desk.  Or the guacamole stain on my trousers.  (Thanks, son.)  And I'm supposed to talk about how I've been doing for the last two weeks, or the last month.  Like I know.  I want to bring in supporting testimony from friends, family, and coworkers.  I want it to be a trial, and I want the medical professional to make a ruling.

I don't want to be the judge.  

Besides-- I can't see anything.  I mean, seriously: what the fuck is this?

Is that what Viibryd's doing inside my brain-- spinning the Christ around like that?  When the ads say "The way in which Viibryd works is not entirely understood," are they really saying, "We don't know why Viibryd does pirouettes in your stupid dysthymic head"?

So, when they ask me, I usually say, "I don't know."  But I suppose one thing I have noticed lately is more sillies.  More prancing and dancing around the house.  More goofery with the children, and with my wife.  More lightness of being.  More pirouettes 

And so I told my therapist that.  He doesn't take notes during session so, afterwards, in between me and the next guy, as he sips Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee and bites a piece of a Nutrigrain bar, I don't know if he checked off a box that said, "Eurythmic", or if he scribbled "more sillies" or what, and I know it's not an empirically valid estimation of, well, much of anything.  And I still think about death and brood about my shortcomings and I am terrified of the future and there's the hopeless insecurity of tomorrow and the dismal, petty failures of yesterday, and the incompetence of today that I haven't even processed because I'm far too entertained watching that blue and gray and white and red Viibryd spinning and twirling in the glow of my computer screen, too busy thinking about you and what you're thinking about me and what we're thinking about each other and I just spent ten minutes clutching my sweet, tear-stained son because he was crying in his crib in the dark and if I have passed on this little monster to him I will be very sad indeed, but at least his circumcision was a success so, you know, we've got that.

And that's something to dance and be silly about.

A Good Vomit

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 12, Verse 25

"Anxious hearts are very heavy, 

but a word of encouragement does wonders!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Scott Stossel, already the editor of "The Atlantic", and the nephew of the mustachioed TV journalist John Stossel (not sure which of those two distinctions is more meretricious, depending upon the quality of John's uncle-tude) is on the road to getting appreciably more famous.  He just wrote a book about his anxiety, his innumerable therapeutic and psychopharmacological interventions, and his significant phobias, the most severe, according to Stossel, is emetophobia: a fear of vomiting.  

Stossel hasn't vomited since 1977 (he knows the exact month, day, date, and time-- I don't) and he also knows that he hasn't vomited since then, and he also knows that the fear of this thing he hasn't done since Gerry Ford was in office is irrational.  He knows all that.  He's a pretty smart guy.  Funny, that the editor of "The Atlantic" is a smart guy.

Isn't it?

My former best friend was, and, I'm assuming still is, an emetophobe.  I lived with him for a few years and, as far as I can recall, it didn't impact our friendship too much.  It's interesting, looking back on it, that, for someone with a deathly fear of rauwlfing, he sure ate Papa John's pizza a lot which, just thinking about it, makes me want to throw up every inch of my intestines.  

As I was listening to the interview with Stossel on "Fresh Air" today, I, of course, thought about my former best friend.  My ex.  Whatever he is.  And I was intensely annoyed that I couldn't enjoy a simple radio interview with this intelligent, very talented, not altogether funny freak without that enjoyment being intruded upon by memories of my former best friend.  I can picture him, standing in our dorm room, grinning, the same way he used to when he was in fourth grade, when we first met.  He has big teeth, and big, black hair.  I wonder if any of it's gray now.  I can see him in his black jeans, white t-shirt and white socks.  He wasn't exactly a fashion plate.  Black sneakers.  Black Tague watch. 

I remember.

I guess he won't ever get his chance to write his book about emetophobia.  Of course, I'll never get to write my book about anxiety, about obsessive compulsive bullshit, about dysthymia, about worrying I'll be found out as a fraud and a phony and a bastard and a mean, yucky meanie man.  

Stinky butt.  

I don't want you to know the truth about me, and yet, it seems like all I do is graffiti it all over your face.  And mine.  There's graffiti over the map of Israel and it's telling my terrible story and I hope it diminishes my glory so you will finally know and stop reading this blog and leave me alone and think to yourself, "Jesus, he really was right."

Maybe that's the only thing that would make me truly happy: for you to go away.

Please, don't go.

I wasn't just annoyed, of course, about being forced to think about my old best friend, but because Scott Stossel's bankrolling his mental illness, and, gee: I'd like to do that.  That'd be swell!  Sign me up.  I want.  He's smarter than me, but I'm funnier.  I'll even pull down my pants to prove the point.

Christ, he's not even really Jewish.  Where does he get off anyway, pretending to be anxious?  Come on, man.  

I want to show him.  I want to teach him a lesson.  I want to go to his book signing in my neighborhood.  I'll sit in my car in the Barnes & Noble parking lot with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (dark meat) and eat that shit in under two minutes flat, wait in line with his book clutched to my chest and then, when I get up to him, I'll fucking throw the hell up all over him.  Then we will see what's what.

Then I'll have something to write about.  You know, for money.

A grand adventure.  A good vomit.  A tall tale.  That's what my life's missing.  It has all the typical stuff, the peaks and the valleys, but there's nothing there that's really ZING-KA-ZOING, you know what I mean?  Nothing that really grabs you by the lapels or the taint and pulls you closer and says, "Now, listen here, my darling; this is a tale that ought be told for approximately a $250,000 advance."  

And maybe that moment will come and maybe it won't.  Maybe I won't need a Colonel's Original Recipe bucket to make it all come true for me and for my family, and, if it doesn't happen to me, for me, for us, well, I will have to be okay with that, like I've had to be okay with so much.  Like we all do.  We can't all have John Stossel for an uncle, and we can't all hide our stinky butts from the world or hang onto our best friends like our childhood dollies forever.  All we can do is what we can do, and that will just have to be enough.  It will have to be enough for you, and, I guess, for me, too.  I suppose, as long as I have you, I'm good.

Anxious, but good.       

The Comic Javert

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 7, Verse 4

"Love wisdom like a sweetheart; make her a beloved member of your family."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

People think I'm wise, but I'm not.  If you're reading this blog to soak in the words of a sage, well, there's more wrong with you than there is with me, and I suggest you see a doctor and get rid of it.

I was, at one point, however, wise enough to know that I should be seeking wisdom from people who probably had it.  My criteria for people who have wisdom is admittedly narrow in scope.  They have to be men and they have to have white hair.  

When I was lost in my life at one point, I think it was 2003 or thereabouts, I wrote to Andy Rooney.  A friend of mine who worked in show business got me his email address, and I wrote to him to ask him what I should do with my life.  It's kind of embarrassing to tell you that I did that, but he wrote back.  He told me that advice was like spinach, and that, if I wanted to be a writer, that's what I should do.  His email, I hasten to add, was absolutely littered with punctuation and spelling errors.  I suspect that, if it had been a letter, banged out on an old Underwood typewriter, it'd have been letter perfect.  

Before Andy Rooney, I aimed a little lower, one might say, and wrote to James Best, who played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on "The Dukes of Hazzard".  While Best himself acknowledged once in an interview that "all I'll be remembered for when I'm gone is 'cooo cooo cooo!'", he is himself a Shakespearean-trained classical actor, was once a very handsome leading man type, and also not too bad of a painter.  This was in my should-I-be-a-cop-or-an-actor phase-- probably 2002, just after graduating college and breaking up with my girlfriend and moved back into my old room in my parents' house and feeling the bottom of a monkey cage.  I figured he'd be a good person to write to, being an actor who, for years, played a police officer, albeit a terrible, corrupt, and inept one: the comic Javert.  James Best told me I should give acting a shot because, "there is no career this side of Heaven more rewarding".  I guess he must have seen Catherine Bach naked in her dressing room once.

I didn't do that.  I did buy one of his paintings, though.  And, more than ten years after writing to him, I adopted a basset hound.  In memory of Flash.  

The fact is that I've always been more reliant and more trusting of the advice of people I respect and admire than my own intuition, which I have to believe is faulty, flawed, unfortunate, disordered, and dopey.  My poor office mate at work, who has the misfortune to be older and white-haired, is constantly peppered with and judiciously fields what he (I hope) affectionately calls "mother-may-I" questions from me as I sit hunched over in my chair, fidgeting, staring endlessly through the screen of my laptop, nervously sipping from my brushed aluminum decaf coffee dispenser, clearing my throat, crossing my legs, changing a word in a proposal, as if that word, that fucking word will make the difference between getting a project funded or not.  As if one word will somehow offend the recipient.

Is this alright?

Do you think?

What if I said?

Should I?

Could I?

Is it okay if I?

Will?

Won't?

Why?

Does?

Know?

No?

One day I'll show up to work and the lock on the office door will be changed, and I'll understand.  

It's funny to me to think that, some day, maybe thirty or forty years from now, some naive little pup with dubious evaluative standards will look upon me as someone to go to, someone at whose knee to gaze up and ask questions and expect answers with meat on their bones.  If I've gained any wisdom through the decades I'll tell the guy or gal that I'm having a stroke and to come back later.  

I do know some things-- but I don't think they make me especially competent or wise.  Here's a summary of what I've learned to date:

* Don't be a theatre major.

* Alcohol is guaranteed to make you an idiot, but not drinking isn't guaranteed to make you not an idiot.

* Marry for love, not because you're worried about what people, especially your parents, will think or say.

* Once in your life, drive, if not own, a huge, old American car that gets less than 15 miles a gallon.

* Short cuts are meaningless-- take the route you like the most, just drive fast.

* The skin on the chicken might shorten your life, but who cares?  Eat that shit.

* People who have been dealt a terrible, striking blow by life are special, even if they're kind of assholes.

* Listen to a Howlin' Wolf album really, really loud in the car in the summer with all the windows down.

* Women in tank-tops are a lot hotter than women who are naked.  Generally speaking.

* If your father's ever hugged you tightly while you're both sobbing, you're both doing something right.

* Humor is very, very powerful.  

* Writing is very, very dangerous.

* Live as far away from other people as you can reasonably afford.  People are horrible.

* Golf is completely fucking stupid.  So are most sports, but golf's at the top of the list. 

* Bowling's okay.

* Don't be afraid to write to old guys with white hair.  Just try to keep the mother-may-I's to a minimum.

Good Old Sergeant Chevalier

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 27, Verse 20

"Ambition and death are alike in this: neither is ever satisfied."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

"The Pink Panther Strikes Again" is, arguably, his best Panther.  Peter Sellers absolutely shines in what is a pretty poorly-constructed film.  Its plot is outlandish and ridiculous, though criticism of the plot of "Pink Panther" films is, in itself, as ludicrous as critiquing the plots of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, or, frankly, soap operas, but the slapstick comedy is some of the best you'll sever see on film.  This film boasts the quintessential Cato vs Clouseau fight-- it's as long as it is hilarious, and very creative-- and one of the best pratfalls performed by one of the best prat's (and the best prat's stuntman, too, no doubt).  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 33 delicious seconds of Sellers: 

Beautiful, wasn't he?

One of the quieter moments of the film takes place on the pastoral grounds of a psychiatric hospital where Chief Inspector Clouseasu's former boss and rival Chief Inspector Dreyfuss has been involuntarily committed after Clouseau made him crack.  I know, I know, no one can make you crack.  Anyway, Clouseau and Dreyfuss are making a painful attempt at congenial small-talk, and Dreyfuss asks after some old colleagues.

"Sergeant Chevalier sends his regards," Clouseau says, trying for conversation.

"Sergeant Chevalier?  Ha ha ha-- good old Sergeant Chevalier.  How is he anyway?" asks Dreyfuss.

"Ah, well, you know, there are some who will be leaders, and some who will be followers.  Sergeant Chevalier, I'm afraid," opines Clouseau, "will always be a follower."

Dreyfuss can't help laugh at this, with a maniacal twitch of his eye.  

"And you, Clouseau, a leader?  Eh?  Always a leader?  Onward and upward to the top?!"

"It is my destiny," says Clouseau, "my karma."

I believe more in Peter Sellers than I believe in destiny or karma-- at least I know he existed once.  My mother is a big fan of "everything happens for a reason" which is kind of like the poor man's destiny.  I can remember, a short time ago, interviewing for a job and telling the Executive Director, "Look, I don't have designs on your job.  I just want to come in, and do a good job for an organization I care about.  I don't mind being a cog in a wheel.  I just want it to be a good wheel."  And don't you know she offered me the job?  I told her that "I basically have no ambition", and she offered me the fucking job.  Gotta love America, right?

Ambition is a funny thing.  Those of it who have too much scare the shit out of everybody, and those who have too little everyone writes off as an ass-scratch nail clipping.  I'm somewhere in the middle, but definitely closer to the ass-scratch nail clipping than, say, Mussolini.  In everything except theatre.  If there was a part in a show I wanted, I prepared for that audition.  I am an aggressive auditioner, and I will try everything I know how to do to charm my way into a director's heart.  Pants.  Whatever.  And, unlike smarter actors, I won't take another part if it's offered to me.  I am a child.

I want THAT one.

WAAAAA!

And, usually, I get what I want where the footlights are concerned.

Life is a different story.  Since college, I haven't run or walked so much as crawled.  My occupational path hasn't been linear or logical or luminous.  It's been what it's been, and I'm tired of apologizing for it.  There is a cadre of boys with whom I was very friendly back in elementary school, and they're all doctors.  They all went to the same college, and the same medical school, I think they fucked some of the same chicks and now they're all doctors.  And that's fine for them.  That didn't happen to me, partially because I didn't want it to, and partially because I can't do math without counting on my fingers and the scientific extent of my life is occasionally contemplating watching an episode of "NOVA".  But I went off that show when they re-did the theme music. 

I suppose I'm a little bit like Sergeant Chevalier-- a follower, but I'm not always sure who I'm following, and I don't know if that makes me better or worse off than the fictitious Surete police sergeant spoken about by Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers on that insane asylum bench.  I got a new position at work-- a promotion, we can call it, because I suppose that's what it is.  And I am extraordinarily grateful for it but I'm also terrified of it.  I know that I will disappoint a lot of people if I fail to perform my duties-- not that I'm even all that sure what exactly my duties are at the present moment-- and I know that the stakes, for me and for my family, are too high to crash and burn on the runway. 

Things change as you get older, and I'm not just talking about the cartilage erosion in your knees. It used to be that my ambition was to not say something idiotic during a date, or to get through a shift on the ambulance without ripping off the light-bar at a drive-thru restaurant.  Back then, that was a big fucking deal.  Today, everything feels like that.  Every second of every moment of every breath of every footstep is terribly, dreadfully important, and my ambition now is to make it to the next moment, the next foothold, the next sip of coffee and we're striving and it's furious and the wind burns the cheek and the desert goes on forever, at least, I hope it does.  Because good old Sergeant Chevalier will always be a follower.  

And I was known as the Pavlova of the parallels.     

Everything's Alright

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 14, Verse 13

"Laughter cannot mask a heavy heart.  When the laughter ends, the grief remains."

 

---

 

CHIPPED WISDOM:

 

I admit that I picked this proverb to start tonight with some trepidation.  After all, much has been said about humor as a coping skill, and how so much comedy and so called "light entertainment" comes from a place of darkness and pain.  You don't have to look very far for comedians and performers who light up a stage, command an audience and enthrall even the most hardened cynic, only to return to a dank motel room or cold home to brood and mutter despondently into a highball.  I decided that I didn't want to write about comedians or actors that I know of and respect and admire. 

 

Instead, I decided to write about my mother. 

 

Since my brother-in-law died of cancer last year, my mother has lived in the shadows.  Well, existed.  To say that she has lived wouldn't quite be so accurate.  She has been seen at work, and at birthdays and dinners and such.  She has been seen.  Seen.  Not heard.  This has been sort of the story of her life.  My mother, before she lived in the shadows since my brother-in-law's death, has lived in the shadow of my father for just about thirty-nine years.  His shadow is enormous.  He is larger than life, Israeli, effusive, profane, impulsive, uprorarious, gregarious and hairy.  My mother is none of those things.  Maybe she was once, (not hairy) but I doubt it.  She's said as much.

 

"I used to pretend that my name was 'Cynthia' and I told my teacher on the first day of elementary school that that was my name, and she'd call on me and I'd never answer." 

 

When old friends from school see me and we catch up, the question I'm invariably asked is, "How's your dad?" as if my mother had died when I was a child, or perhaps she never existed anyway.  And I get it-- he's memorable.  He makes sure you remember him.  He doesn't exactly slide beneath the radar.  She's the stealth bomber.

 

Back in college, I wrote a short play about me and my parents, and, at the urging of the chair of the theatre department, it became a trilogy.  After reading the first play, his big complaint was, "You know there's a lot of your father in this play-- and he's a great character-- but I think the real gem here is your mom.  There's a real quiet intensity to her, and a dry wit, that I'd like to hear more from."  So the last play was just me and her, talking in the kitchen.  And it was good.  I might not think that anymore if I went back and read it, but I remember it being good, and that's the way I like to remember it.

 

Those nights in the kitchen, waiting for my father to get home, "at 6:37", were good, too.

 

I've never known my mother not grieving.  She lost her mom to lymphoma when she was maybe nineteen or twenty. You're never not grieving after that.  My mother's humor is as dry and wry as the coarse desert my father comes from, and her jokes are tinged with the smell of death.  She's always told me, during my anxious, crisis moments, that everything will be alright "in the end" and she gives a smile, because she knows that I know that she knows she's talking about when we die, and that she's really saying that nothing will be alright, because how can it be?  How can things be alright?  I love how, when my son falls and bonks his head, I scoop him up and tuck him close to me and say, "It's alright-- everything's alright," and if that poor schlep could talk in sentences he'd say, "What are you, fucking dumb?  Of course everything isn't alright, my fucking head is pounding and it happened because you're a negligent asshole."

 

One day last month, I was taking the babies out in the stroller, and this spindly old bat stopped me on the sidewalk and engaged in some polite banter, which I hate. 

 

I know your mother from the libary, she says. 

 

Wonderful, I say.

 

Your babies are thus and so, she says.

 

Yes, thank you, I say, they are.

 

Your mother's starting to come back, she says.

 

Who the fuck are you to say something like that to me, you don't even know me, or her, I want to say.

 

Is she, I say.

 

She is, she says, she's really very funny, your mother.

 

She is, I say.

 

She says, did you know that about your mother?

 

I want to rip out all of your veins and make a spider web out of them, I want to say.

 

Yes, I say, I do.  I know that.

 

I can only make my mother laugh when I'm being bad.  That's the kind of humor I learned from her.  Pushing the envelope, being slightly uncomfortable, surprising, desperate and true.  I don't know what she finds funny in movies and television, but that's what she laughs at in person.  When I make my mother laugh, and it's never very hard for for very long, I feel powerful.  Like the playwright I thought I could be in college.  Like the man I pretend to be when I fix some dumb thing in our falling down around our ankles house.  Like the father of twins who changes diapers and feeds and calms and plays.  Like the man who's going to be alright in the end. 

Wrong, Sir, Wrong!

"What's wrong with the world?"

That's how it begins.  I mean, who wouldn't want to read on, right?

I suppose you'd like to know what's this all about, what is he doing here, what does he want from us, and why should we stop by here to visit?  Well, these are all good questions, and I want to be up front with you right from the start that I don't have very many answers.  At least, the answers that I do have aren't very good.

After two tries at anonymous blogging, I've decided to out myself.  To go public.  All natural.  Less sodium.  Full retard.  Why?  I don't know, because I'm stupid, I guess.  Because anonymity was too easy, too safe, too... fun?  Well, I'm a married man with twins, and Christ knows I shouldn't be having too much fun.  Or sodium.

Anyway, I was sitting at home one night this week picking my feet in Poughkeepsie when I had to pee.  "Bodily functions are so annoying," my wife frequently opines, and she's right.  They get in the way.  They're tiresome and routine, more so for some than others, and they interrupt moments of brilliance.  I know, I know, you're going to say that your bowel movements have inspired moments of genius, right?  You realized you just had to propose to so-and-so in mid stream, or you had that idea for invisible, razor-flavored chewing gum while you were straining for glory.  Well, you're just silly, that's what you are.

And I'm silly, too-- cuz it happened to me.  There I was, standing before the toilet when I looked up at our shelf that contains several literary offerings.  There's "What's Your Poo Telling You?" which is more reference guide than light reading, and there's a book I stole from Muhlenberg College's health center back in 2002 before I graduated called "Making Responsible Decisions About Sex", there's "Instant! Maori" and I've looked at that several times and I don't know what the fuck that's all about or how it got into our house much less our bathroom.

And then there's that other book.

Before my wife and I had kids, we used to do silly stuff together.  I don't mean stuff with Saran-Wrap and dental floss-- I mean quixotic adventures, stuff that every young couple does when they're all lost in schmoopiness and they have no clue about the cost of a tank of gas.  One day we decided to take a field trip to the Herr's Snack Factory in Nottingham, Pennsylvania, a mere 47.2 miles away from where we lived at the time.  We were the only adults on the tour not attached to any children, but that was not an experience totally unfamiliar to us.  We tagged along with the random, tow-headed, mulleted kiddies.  We saw the big machines and the ladies in hairnets and surgical-style booties, we tasted chips that probably came off the factory floor and we were unceremoniously dumped off at the gift shop where we were expected to plunk down five times the price of our admission ticket on shit we can buy at WaWa on the way home.

But the best thing that you could possibly take home with you from the Herr's Snack Factory wasn't on sale at the gift shop at all-- it was free.

Fucking.  Free.

While my (not-quite-yet) wife visited the ladies room-- see?  bathrooms feature prominently in life, I'm telling you-- I wandered around the large waiting area between the restrooms and the gift shop and there, on a bench of sorts were strewn hundreds of little pale blue books that featured the Herr's logo on the bottom of the front cover, and the words

Chips of Wisdom

in the middle.

I picked one up and leafed through it.  Scanning the pages, I saw a lot of stuff about Proverbs, quarrelsome women, and prostitutes.  An eyebrow warily raised, I put it in my pocket.

A few minutes into the drive home, I pulled the book out of my pocket and tossed it over to the passenger seat.

"Here," I said to my short haired, bespectacled companion, "this should keep us entertained along Route 1."

And it did.  We laughed.  We wept.  We learned that we shouldn't visit our neighbor too often, or we might outstay our welcome.

Well, neighbor-- you'll never be able to outstay your welcome here.  You can visit as often as you like, and I encourage you to bring your friends.  You can even bring your Friends.  I hope you Like my new blog.  I hope you learn a thing or two about neighbors and prostitutes.  For instance, did you know that, "a prostitute is a dangerous trap; those cursed of God are caught in it"?

Well, apparently, it's true.  I know because I read it in a book I got at a potato chip factory.

Jim Herr, in his introduction to "Chips of Wisdom" states that he frequently referred to the Book of Proverbs when making important decisions in life and in commerce (I guess there aren't too many "quarrelsome women" in the Herr's Snack Foods empire, probably not too many prostitutes either) and he sought to edit and compile some of his Proverbs favorites into this neatly packaged, accessible little book.  Yes, I find some of it funny, and that will be reflected in this blog, but I hope I come across as genuine when I say that the goal behind this blog is not to poke fun at Jim Herr or "Chips of Wisdom" or Proverbs or Christianity or God.  If I poke fun at anyone here, it's going to be at me, because that's sort of what I've been doing ever since I learned how well self-deprecating humor fit my skin.

I want to use the Proverbs, and Jim Herr's quest and desire for wisdom, as springboards for my own personal wrastlin' with faith, existential issues, my religion, my professional and social struggles, to make sense of my family and my life-- and, sure, to have a little fun, too.

But, not too much, remember?  Because I am a devoted husband and a father of two fifteen-month-olds and a soon-to-be-again dog owner, we're going to limit the fun to Monday and Thursday postings, and see how it goes.  I hope you like it here, and I hope you come back for more.  Otherwise, you're WRONG, SIR, WRONG!  You LOSE!  You get NOTHING!

Sorry.  Jim Herr, Willy Wonka, same thing.

"Chips of Wisdom" seeks to answer "What's wrong with the world?".  I suspect you already know, and that's good.  That means you're going to be my friend.  So hold on.

Here we go.