Hanging by a Moment

My university has two gyms. The one that I use is the smaller of the two, and I go pretty early in the morning, so it is usually empty. There is an undergrad who sometimes overlaps with me in the morning. I generally find his presence to be irritating. He structures his workout in a circuit, moving from one exercise to the other, and he will say “hey dude, I’m using that” from across the gym if I start to work in on a piece of equipment that, unbeknownst to me, is part of his circuit for the day. This kind of imperialism is a pretty strong breach of gym etiquette. He has also dropped some terrible undergrad beer farts in my face as he walks by my treadmill, dooming me to several minutes with no escape from deep inhalations of colon-processed Natty Light. I mean, I fart in public as much as the next guy, but I generally do not crop-dust the only other person in a fairly large room. In short, we are not friends.

This provides a bit of background to an experience I had yesterday morning. I was laying on the ground in one of the auxillary rooms of the gym, stretching and doing situps. This room is sort of a multipurpose group exercise room with some mats and floor-to-ceiling mirror along one wall. As usual, I am the only person in the room on this particular morning.

After about five minutes, the guy who likes to use all the machines and fart in my face enters the room. He is carrying a small stereo. What happens next is perhaps the strangest experience I have yet had in a gym. That is saying something, considering I have had conversations with naked professors, dealt with an old man putting his penis twelve inches from my fourteen year old face, and had a middle aged man with a mustache hit on me regularly at my parent’s gym when I was in college.

I am kind of watching him out of the corner of my eye. He takes off his shoes. “Alright,” I think to myself, “I guess he’s going to do some kickboxing (the room has a couple of heavy bags for this purpose). Then he removes his shirt. “I guess he is going to do some shirtless kickboxing. Not my style, but hey, different strokes.” Then he removes his shorts, and the only thought that my sleep-deprived mind can conjure is “Oh god.”

“Do you mind if I put on some music?” he asks me. I normally wear headphones, but had misplaced them on this particular morning, proving that whatever mystical force holds the universe together has a sense of humor. I would probably have been oblivious to the man standing before me in bikini briefs if I had been plugged into my mp3 player. “That’s fine,” I say.

He turns to his stereo and suddenly a song that can best be described as the product of a one night stand between Oh Fortuna and Final Countdown fills the room. Then, he locks eyes with himself in the mirror and begins to pant. “Oh god.” As his eyes widen, he pops and locks his right arm and then his left, like a white, awkward Michael Jackson. “Oh god.” When he clenches his hands into fists and brings them both down in front of his pelvis while flexing his biceps, I finally understand what is happening. This guy who likes to use all the machines and fart in my face is practicing poses for a body building competition. Apparently Walmart, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, and Lowes, colluding in a way that would appall the Federal Trade Commission, stopped selling mirrors, so this man has no choice but to hone his craft in a public place.

I have about three minutes left in my sit up routine, so I decide to just power through. And in any case, what is unfolding before me is a spellbinding display of pure id. The best moment comes when the Gregorian techno song comes to an end. I expect another shapeless slop of synths, chants, and bass beats to be next on the docket. Instead, this inexplicable man has chosen Lifehouse’s 2001 radio ballad “Hanging by a Moment” as Super Flex Track Number Two. His eyes widen, his grunts deepen, and he nods his head furiously at his image in the mirror as he hears the opening chords.

What happened to all that money?

KC is the only member of our immediate family with any musical ability. I can remember him playing the piano and guitar when I was a little kid, but I never had any inclination to join him, probably because my mom contributed 50% of my DNA, and she has to practice her Zoomba moves in front of a mirror. My sister likes to sing, but liking something and doing it well are two completely different animals. I don’t think KC minds it when my sister sings, however, because it gives him the opportunity to execute the most fossilized joke in his playbook. Whenever my sister finishes croaking out the misheard lyrics to another one of her favorite songs, KC invariably asks “What happened to all that money?” The first several hundred times he asked his question, my sister dutifully responded “What money?” These days, she remains silent, so KC jumps right to the punchline: “The money we spent on singing lessons.” ZING! *Side note: My sister did not actually take any singing lessons. As an analogy, consider that infants who crawl do not typically have sprinting coaches.

KC will tell you that being the only musical member of the family has its cost. For example, we went to visit my grandmother in the nursing home one Christmas, and KC started playing Christmas carols on the piano. The nursing home did not have any sheet music, so KC was playing from memory. Soon, he ran out of songs, but the three of us did not understand. We thought “knowing how to play the piano” meant “knowing how to play all songs on the piano, particularly all Christmas carols.”

“KC, how about Silent Night?”

“I don’t know that one.”

“How about O Holy Night, then?”

“I don’t know that one, either.”

“Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer?”

“I AM NOT A JUKEBOX.”

Because KC is the only one in the family with any musical skill, it is somewhat ironic that he is also the only one in the family who has not updated his musical library in any substantial way since 1973, the only exception being the Wallflowers, to whom he clung like a life preserver against the tidal onslaught of Hootie and the Blowfish, Phil Collins, and Ace of Base during family road trips. When Napster came out in 2001, KC gave me a list of 25 or so songs that he wanted me to download for him. I suspect that if Napster had come out in 1981 or 1991, his list would have been exactly the same. I am certain that his list is the same in 2011. This year, he and my mom bought a subscription to Rhapsody, thus giving them access to millions of tracks. And yet KC listens to approximately the same 25 songs on his mp3 player. I will now attempt to list, from memory, these songs. I may get some of the artists wrong. But here goes

1. Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones
2. Sweet Melissa by the Allman Brothers
3. Whipping Post by the Allman Brothers
4. Soul Man by Sam and Dave
5. Fire and Rain by James Taylor
6. Suite Judy Blue Eyes by Crosby Stills and Nash
7. Bluebird by Buffalo Springfield
8. Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits
9. All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix
10. Hurricane by Bob Dylan
11. Stormy Weather by Poco
12. Carolina in My Mind by James Taylor
13. Smackwater Jack by Carole King
14. Life’s Been Good by Joe Walsh
15. Ordinary Average Guy by Joe Walsh
16. A song by the Temptations.
17. A song by the Four Tops.
18. Well Known Gun by Elton John
19. Wooden Ships by Crosby Stills and Nash
20. For What Its Worth by Buffalo Springfield
21. All Right Now by Free
22. You Can’t Catch Me by Stephen Stills
23. Whiter Shade of Pale by Procul Harem
24. The Weight by the Band
25. Moondance by Van Morrison

Please take this time to note that despite coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, my father does not particularly enjoy the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. I did not hear much of either of these groups until I went to college, and still now I know less about the Beatles than most people who speak English and enjoy rock and roll. My father kept from me the most important band of his (and probably any) generation. Why is this? I can speculate. KC told me recently that he did everything he could to keep me from reading comic books. I did not realize this as a kid. KC enacted this passive censorship because a boy that he grew up with read comic books, and KC thought he was a weirdo. I am guessing this kid also listened to the Beatles.

Now that I think about it, KC has in fact begun to incorporate new music into his life. But the type of music that he is incorporating leads me to believe that his expansion of taste is more a sign of budding madness than personal growth. For example, he made multiple requests for my mom to play her Lady Gaga CD the last time our family took an extended road trip together. Also, he started playing guitars with one of his friends, and soon he was watching Youtube tutorials wherein adolescent males in V-necked t-shirts were teaching him how to play songs by the Dave Matthews Band. No to the Beatles and yes to Dave Matthews Band? I just realized that KC is more secure in his manhood than I ever thought.

THE GOAL IS ZERO

Ted Haggard ministered to a 14,000 strong conservative Christian congregation while smoking crystal meth and having sex with male prostitutes in his free time. Alan Page played All-Pro defensive tackle for the Vikings while attending law school at the University of Minnesota, eventually rising to become a state supreme court justice. And KC, sorcerer of death’s construction, gets paid in large part to make sure that other people do not get themselves into industrial accidents.

KC works in a manufacturing plant that is full of massive machines that would like nothing more than to crush the bones and sever the limbs of their operators. Part of his role there is to make sure that this does not happen –his salary is tied in part to the plant’s accident rate. His laptop computer has stickers bearing pithy slogans like “Make Safety First – And Make it Last”, “Be Safe, Not Sorry”, and “THE GOAL IS ZERO.” He teaches seminars on safety. When I was a kid, he would receive calls in the middle of the night to go to the emergency room when his subordinates would forget their KC lesson and lose a digit or slip a disc. The place where he works advertises (or at least used to) the number of accident-free days on its front sign.

So professionally, my father is a safety-first, by the book, measure-twice-cut-once Miley Cyrus. But when he comes home, he transforms into the safety version of Hannah Montana, dangling his long blond hair over the exposed gears of an industrial conveyor belt.

The same man who beeps his car horn twice before backing up in his plant’s empty parking lot (standard procedure) painted a hard-to-reach piece of drywall by standing on a piece of particle board that he placed across an eight foot precipice. The same man who demands that his wife hold the railing while descending an average staircase at an office building (that our protocol) also thinks it is perfectly appropriate to put his life in the hands of a strand of half-centimeter rope tied to a tree branch while reshingling the peak of his rooftop. My sister and I were about four and six years old when he undertook that particular project. My mom took us to the neighbor’s pool so that we would not bear the scars that come with hearing the crunch of your father’s bones as he slams into the front yard after a thirty foot drop. But now that I think about it, we would have still heard him scream because the neighbor only lived across the street.
Another time, he was trimming some pretty large tree limbs in the backyard and he was concerned about hitting the house, the garden, or the fence when the limbs dropped to the ground. So he again developed an ingenious rope-based solution. He deputized me, his twelve year old son, to tie a rope around the tree limb. As a limb started to fall, my job was to pull it away from the areas where it would cause the most property damage. In other words, pull the gigantic limb, which outweighs me about eight to one, towards my slow-footed, squishy self as the limb tumbles to the ground. I am sure he would have promoted one of his subordinates for devising such a well-reasoned, belt-and-suspenders type of approach to lawn maintenance.

Later the same summer, my friends and I bought bottle rockets and took to our cul de sac to shoot them at each other. While this might be considered unwise, we were only twelve years old, and after all, I share some of my father’s pyromaniacal DNA . We were using citronella candles for ignition, and at some point one of the candles went out. We had a few matches, but the match book had been stepped on or something, so we had nothing on which to strike the match. I presented this problem to my dad. I think that many 42 year old fathers would say something like, “sorry ol’ Sport, looks like you’ll have stop shooting those explosive devices into each other’s faces.” Instead, KC rubbed his chin, fired up the stove top, and lit the match on the glowing red griddle. KC did not do this to try and be the “cool dad.” Rather, I think he disliked one of the neighborhood kids, and he figured that extending this bottle rocket war increased the chances that the kid would experience some pain and stop coming around. Measure twice!

KC spends a good part of his day ensuring that his plant’s machinery will not fail and cause injuries to his colleagues. And yet he drives a Ford Bronco whose chassis is so corroded that you do not have to be Miss Cleo to see how things are going to end. KC will be driving down the highway, he will hit a solid bump, and his floorboards will splinter. It will make for one hell of an obituary: “Industrial Safety Expert Killed When He Is Run Over by the Very Car that He Is Driving.”

Turkey

Perhaps the best way to summarize my family is that we make two turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And there are only four of us. Forty pounds of poultry should last four people for at least a week. However, the leftovers are usually gone by the end of the Mizzou-Kansas football game on Saturday afternoon. This is disturbing even when you factor in the meat eaten by relatives who often come for dinner on Friday evening.

The two bird strategy requires multiple steps. Step one is the purchasing of the birds. Materials science has Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double every two years. Animal science has Frankenstein’s law, which suggests a similar exponential trend in the amount of flesh that can be packed on the frame of a farm-raised turkey. Some consumers are alarmed by this trend. Not KC, whose mustache and Swedish heritage dictated that he search the grocery store freezer for the most Biblical birds he could find.

KC's enthusiasm was tempered circa 2005, however, when a particularly Leviathan 23 pounder almost did not fit into the outdoor smoker. I think that he now sticks to a strict 21 pound limit.

KC buys his turkeys frozen, so step two is thawing out the birds. A 21 pound turkey takes a while to reach room temperature, so this step requires prior planning—the birds must be removed from the freezer at least a day or two before Thanksgiving. Still, this is a relatively easy step. All you have to do is take the turkeys out of the freezer. But if you know KC, you already know that he will make this as difficult as possible. Despite multiple gentle reminders from his wife and children, he often forgets to thaw the turkeys. The first time this happened, we were in a particularly rough spot. It was probably midnight on the night before Thanksgiving when he realized that the turkeys were still frozen. After tearing asunder the peacefulness of the neighborhood with a cacophony of unprintable oaths, he summoned the combined knowledge of his food science degree from the University of Missouri plus 25 years in the in the industry and put the turkeys in the Jacuzzi bathtub and turned on the air jets. My mom was a little surprised when she got out of the shower and saw headless turkey corpses pinballing in the bathtub, but I think she connected the dots pretty quickly. “Ken must have forgotten to thaw the turkeys.” Fortunately the gambit worked. Now, KC leans on the Jacuzzi like a crutch, and I am certain that more turkeys than humans have used that tub in the last 5 years.

After thawing, the next step is to stuff the birds. As a little kid, I thought this was a very impressive process. My dad was chopping up vegetables, boiling things on the stove, sharpening knives, all the while referring to hieroglyphic recipe sheet. The glamour evaporated very quickly the first time I reached my hand inside the raw turkey’s wet, semi-frozen body cavity to remove the gizzard and organ bags. Instead of giving me a knife, KC handed me a jar of Crisco, and directed me to cover the uncooked turkeys’ slimy skin. “Lube it up good and make sure to get in the folds,” he said. Because I was not an altar boy, I had never heard this sentence before. I will repeat it to myself thirty years from now when I am sponge-bathing an octogenarian, gurgling KC in my basement.

After shoving the turkey full of vegetables, apples and breadcrumbs; rubbing its skin with lard; and covering it with a butter-soaked t-shirt, the turkey goes in the oven or the smoker. It comes out eight hours later, and it is always delicious.

Deelish

I think that most families that get along have some sort of string that links them all together. It might be intergenerational love of a sports team like the Chicago Cubs. For my family, the common thread is food.

I think the centrality of meal time started with my grandmother on my mom’s side, who never met someone that she did not try to ply with a roast beef sandwich. No matter what time a visitor arrived at her house, the first thing she would ask was “Aren’t you hungry?” She probably decided that my dad was a suitable mate for her daughter when they were in high school, and he ate one of her cheesecakes for dessert. Meaning that my dad sat at his girlfriend’s kitchen table and ate an entire 12-14” cheesecake by himself in one sitting while her mother looked on. Most parents would be horrified by such a display. My grandmother was smitten.

Petroleum is the lubricant that keeps the world’s economy moving. There is no doubt that butter played a similar role in my grandmother’s kitchen. She buttered deli sandwiches. She made a coffee cake called blueberry buckle that probably had 2-3 sticks of butter in the main ingredients, and ceremony dictated that you include an additional tablespoon of butter on each slice of blueberry buckle that you consumed. My god, how delicious. My grandmother was a smoker for most of her life, and I suspect she soaked her cigarette filters in butter. The broccoli casserole that she made for Thanksgiving every year basically consisted of butter and breadcrumbs with a few broccoli florets sprinkled on the top. You know, for color. Unsurprisingly, it disappeared from the table and into our stomachs very quickly.

My mom clearly had a solid culinary foundation when she started her own family. Keep in mind that she married a cretin who distinguished himself among her suitors by consuming 4,000 calories of sugar and lard in one sitting without entering a diabetic coma. My mom tinkered with her craft over the years, and by the time I got to high school, she was producing meals with more kilocalories than weapons-grade plutonium. Of course, this is precisely what was needed for a growing boy like myself. A lot of moms make ham and potatoes for dinner, but only a select few think to put those ham and potatoes in a casserole dish, drown them in a quart of heavy whipping cream, and cover them in cheddar cheese. Another signature dish was called four cheese pasta. It contained all the primary food groups—sausage, heavy starch, whipping cream, and yes, four different cheeses whose identities are unimportant because there are four of them. It was one of the finest flavor symphonies that Germantown, TN has ever seen.

My mom’s cooking has had a profound effect on some of my friends. In middle school, one of my friends like her tortellini covered in bacon and gorgonzola cheese so much that he wrote down the recipe and strong-armed his mom into adding it to their meal rotation. When was the last time you saw a fourteen year old writing down a recipe that did not come from the Anarchist’s Cookbook? The gateway drug for one of my college roommates was my mom’s barbecue baked beans, which will cleanse your palette and your colon with equal effectiveness. Soon he was emailing her for recipes like a dope fiend looking for a taste.

I was too lazy to make a proper lunch in high school, and these meals were more delicious than cold cuts and potato chips, so I would usually bring the leftovers with me to school the next day. It is no wonder that my after-lunch Algebra II teacher called my parents because I was sleeping class. It is difficult to stay awake when your blood-butter level is hovering around .50.

A good coach adapts his system to his players, and my mom has done the same over the years. She made those sumo dishes because I was too immature to eat fruit and vegetables. When I finally realized that healthy food is delicious (my sister made this realization much earlier), she applied her genius to salads instead of starches. I think that this development has been disappointing to KC, who would eat fried chicken and white rice every night if left to his own devices. He often lobbies for the high-octane meals of yesteryear. “How about that pasta with the four cheeses that you used to make?” Of course, he is not taken seriously.

Rufus

KC is the quintessential dog person. He is loyal and values loyalty. He generally respects authority and expects the same in return from his subordinates, though he does not always receive it when those subordinates share his DNA. In fact, I am probably alive today because we owned dogs. With the number of times that I ask him such deferential questions as “Do you know what you are doing?”, “Are you sure?”, “Wouldn’t it be better to do it this way?”, etc., KC would have cracked my skull long ago if he were also dealing with an aloof, self-governing cat on a daily basis.

Our family has always owned yellow Labradors. My parents got the first one in the early 80s when they were living in Belgium. KC purchased the puppy at a pub. It is not uncommon to wake up the morning after a night at a bar and find a stranger in your bed. Only in my father’s case would this stranger have a tail. When it came time to name his new friend, KC , a stranger in a strange land, wanted to flex his ample American nuts and give his dog a name that would leave no doubt about his red, white and blue bona fides. So he gave the dog a quintessential American name— Rufus after bluesman Rufus Thomas. His Belgian friends, however, took the dog’s name as a proud sign that my parents were really trying to assimilate themselves into Belgian society. This was because Rufus was the name of Belgium’s ruling king. Apparently a civics test was not part of the application process for a Belgian work visa in 1982. KC tried to save face by extending the dog’s name to “Rufus T. Bubba.”

Rufus T. Bubba quickly endeared himself to my mom, eating through a wall in their apartment.

My parents eventually moved to Memphis. When spring came around, Rufus would inevitably dash out of the yard. Sometimes we were able to track him down. Other times he would return home several hours later on his own accord and sleep for a couple days straight. It is important to note that KC did not have the heart to get Rufus neutered. We suspect that Rufus is the Wilt Chamberlain of Hickory Hill, his baby mamas stretching from Winchester Ave to Hacks Cross Road.

While KC was happy to let Rufus keep his coconuts, there was one time that he probably wished that he had put him under the knife. My sister was about four years old, sitting on the kitchen floor playing with Rufus, when she reached up and absent-mindedly grabbed a fist full of his nuts. Amazingly, Rufus merely froze, his eyes as wide as dinner plates. He then blinked a Morse code message to KC that went something like “KINDLY GET YOUR DAUGHTER’S HAND OFF MY GENITALS AND ONTO A ROSARY.”

Rufus was a big Lab, well over 100 pounds in his prime, so he took shits that were large enough to stop the lawn mower. He wielded his poop as a weapon against foes both human and canine. When we changed routines and kept him in the laundry room instead of the kitchen, he willed piles of revenge poop out of his colon until we relented and returned him to the bigger space. There was a neighborhood dog that Rufus despised. I think they had opposing personalities: Rufus was calm and collected, while this dog was a bundle of yipping energy that would go apeshit whenever we walked by. When we took a walk, Rufus would conserve his ammunition until we got to this dog’s yard. Then, with a placid look on his face, he would drop an eight pound turd right next to the fence while his nemesis barked helplessly behind the barrier. In hindsight, being respectful neighbors, we should have cleaned up after the dog. But let’s be serious. KC was proud.

He is the Firestarter

I think the rest of the family would agree that KC’s most valuable skill, aside from paying the mortgage, is his ability to barbecue. His status as the Potentate of Protein allows my parents to achieve a high-efficiency division of labor at dinnertime that delivers tasty results for everyone involved. While KC’s love of the grill is motivated in large part by the satisfaction he gets from watching the family enjoy the fruits of his labor, I believe that KC also barbecues for a more simple reason: he is a pyromaniac.

KC abhors propane like nature abhors a vacuum. He claims that this is because charcoal gives the meat a smoky flavor. Again, this functional, normal-human reason is partly true. But the root of KC’s adherence to the charcoal creed is that it better allows him to indulge his impulse to Light Shit on Fire.

KC has generously passed his bbq knowledge on to me. Of course, the first step in my education was learning how to light the fire. As a child, I did not question my father’s instructions to use enough charcoal and lighter fluid to kickstart a nuclear reactor in order to cook a few pounds of ground beef. I also did not realize that welding gloves are not part of the average grillmaster’s toolkit. But KC has a unique style that requires him to move the coals when they are at their white-hottest, so the welding gloves prevent him from melting the flesh off of his hands. Only when I grilled with outsiders did I realize that these approaches are not standard practice.

I was also too young to appreciate the irony of KC--a man in charge of safety at an industrial plant, a man whose laptop is papered with stickers like “Make safety first, and make it last”--instructing his young son to douse the charcoal with gasoline when we ran out of lighter fluid. But really, why would anyone knock on a neighbor’s door or drive five minutes to the grocery store when you have transportation-grade hydrocarbons sitting idly in the garage? Plus, it’s not every day that you can throw a match across your patio and ignite a four-foot high tower of flame with a satisfying whoosh*.

Many supposed grillmasters only operate in spring, summer, and fall. They claim that the cold prevents the fire from getting hot enough. KC, on the other hand, welcomes the winter because the need to overcome subzero temperatures gives him license to operate at the intersection of food preparation and pyromania. First, the cold weather gives him an excuse to use his outdoor fireplace. The pretense here is keeping warm, but the true objective is to Light Shit on Fire. This is best exemplified by a particular winter night when KC was multi-tasking, raking leaves while grilling meat and tending the outdoor fireplace. He finished up the job by using a leaf blower to clear the patio. To the average homeowner, a leaf blower is nothing but yard-cleaning machine. To arsonist near an open fire, however, a leaf blower is a ten horse-power inferno accelerant. KC, chomping on the stub of a Swisher Sweet with a pyromaniacal gleam in his eye, used the leaf blower to pump oxygen into the outdoor fireplace until the flames climbed several feet above his head. The rest of the family watched this unfold from the kitchen window, completely unsurprised by what we were witnessing.**

KC overcame an unusually cold Memphis winter by drilling additional air holes in his smoker. The smoker got so hot that it glowed like the Eye of Sauron, liquefying its exterior paint and melting all of the snow within a six foot radius. This past Christmas, when a cold day threatened to stymie his turkey smoking, he wrapped the smoker in beach towels for insulation. When I pointed out that he likely would have fired one of his employees for executing a similar maneuver, he said “This ain’t the plant, Alice.”

*Really, I am making this out to be worse than it really is. I would do the same thing. But I don’t know any better; my job does not require me to visit employees in the hospital when they have accidentally set their hair on fire.

**Kudos to my mom and her amazing memory for recalling this and many other stories.

Pencil Neck

The beautiful people have their vanities. Matthew McConaughy refuses to co-star with a man who is taller than himself. Tom Cruise has a personal eyebrow stylist. And KC owns one of these.



I considered my father to be a man of science until he bought this contraption. Despite appearances, this is not a device intended to spice things up with the missus. Rather, it was once KC’s weapon of choice in his ongoing battle with Father Time. Allegedly, this thing helps build neck muscle. You see, KC’s vanity is the Fear of the Pencil Neck.

Like any red-blooded American, KC equates looseness in the shirt collar with lightness in the loafers. And really, the Fear of the Pencil Neck is probably rational when you are dragging fifty and sport a noggin whose circumference rivals that of a sewer lid. Any atrophy in the neck area will be amplified.



But this device is not the answer. A first-grader can recognize the undue stress placed on the vertebrae when one uses the neck as a hinge to lift copious amounts of weight. But the quest for beauty can cloud the mind.

Fortunately, KC abandoned this contraption after a while, but not because of its potential to harm his fragile, aging spinal column. He gave it up because it did not produce the intended result, i.e. an eighteen inch headstump with the power to enslave all cubicle workers within a 300 foot radius.

But the battle against the Pencil Neck continues. In his newest strategy, he plants his forehead in the middle of a Swiss exercise ball that is balanced against the wall at shoulder height. I believe the theory is that his neck must support his body weight and thus receives some sort of benefit. I cannot use photos to provide a visual display because this technique is so cutting edge that the internet has not even heard of it yet.

Hold the Light

Many father-son relationships can be defined by a single group of words.

“Luke, I am your father.” (Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, 1980)

“Daddy’s gonna kill Ralphie.” (Ralphie Parker and The Old Man, 1983)

“You can’t see the line, can you, Russ?” (Clark Griswold and Rusty Griswold, 1989)

“Hold the light.” (KC and myself, 1987*-present)

When something breaks around the house, KC generally tries to fix it. Oftentimes, the fixing must take place in a dark, hard to reach location where his mole-like nearsightedness and sausage-like fingers prove to be extreme handicaps. Fortunately for KC, two things happened. One, his wife bore him a son. And two, Conrad Hubert invented the flashlight in 1898. So when the going gets dark, I get going. Meaning that I shine a flashlight on whatever it is that KC is trying to fix.

Over 20 plus years, Holding the Light has evolved into a ritual. KC tries to do the work without my aid, but realizes that he “can’t see shit.” He finds me somewhere in the house and asks me to Hold the Light. I dutifully Hold the Light. After about three minutes, my mind wanders and the flashlight beam does the same. KC, usually lying on his back with sweat pouring down his face and the blood rushing to his head, calmly reminds me to Hold the Light on The Work. The beam continues to wander. Then he breaks down and shouts, “Seth, HOLD THE LIGHT. ON THE WORK” and I re-engage for another three minutes.

Really, these situations are more than a ritual. They are an allegory for our entire father-son relationship. KC proactively struggling against Mother Nature, his heels on the edge of the abyss. Me adding to his insanity by not exactly doing as I am told and second-guessing many of his decisions.

“Are you sure you want to use that wrench?” “It would probably be easier if you sprayed WD-40 on it first.” “Are you sure you want to take that off?” “Why didn’t you do this first?”

I have no business back-seat driving these situations. Despite years of Holding the Light, I know very little about home repair; certainly less than KC. But the man has a track record which suggests he could use some help from time to time.

Like when he was working on the underside of his Ford Bronco but forgot to engage the emergency brake. Our basketball pole was the only thing that stopped the car from plowing through a fence and coming to rest at the bottom of our neighbor’s swimming pool. Or the time he tried to remove an axle head from the same Bronco. The greasiness caused his hands to slip, and he punched himself in the face with a closed fist. Or the night he tried to turn off the water valve in our upstairs bathroom. The toilet overflowed. Everyone was in bed, and the front of the house was a swamp before my mom heard the water running down the inside of the walls . Or the time. . .


*Date is an estimate. I was born in 1985, and I figure that by age two, KC would have judged my hand strength sufficient to hold a flashlight.

Balls

When I first started going to the gym, I was under the age minimum so I did my best to keep a low profile. I kept my eyes to the floor, and I did not talk to any of the patrons. One old man, however, went out of his way to talk to me. He was a regular at the gym, known among the patrons for wearing shorts so short that he exposed his balls while stretching.

The first time he spoke to me, I was sitting on a bench in the locker room, bending over to tie my shoes. A pair of feet suddenly entered the top of my vision, and a voice began to ask me a question. As I raised my head to mumble a reply, I almost swallowed my tongue. The old man was standing in front of me, completely naked. And since I was sitting down his wad of balls and dick were at eye level, about two feet from my face. I do not recall the contents of our conversation; I only remember keeping my head permanently inclined in order to avoid contact with his meat eye.

Since I was relatively new to the world of locker rooms, I tried to take the incident in stride. Maybe that’s just how it is, I thought. However, eleven years of subsequent locker room experience indicate that normal men do not approach 14 year old boys in the locker room while naked and offer their junk as an olive branch.

Of course, that is just my own interpretation of locker room etiquette. Others might disagree. Such as one of my undergraduate professors. He and I arrived at the gym at approximately the same time and happened to select side-by-side lockers. We struck up a conversation during which he began to change his clothes. This would be completely unremarkable but for the fact that he never completed the task. He just stood there naked for the entirety of our conversation, which seemed to last an infinite number of minutes.

Other examples abound. Like the fat guy at my gym in Urbana who would practice his golf swing in the nude while staring at himself in the mirror. Or the people that lie on the locker room tiles and stretch while naked. Or the two or three guys that I have seen engaging in meticulous, open-forum crotch-scaping. A man’s face is the only thing that he should shave in public.

Unfortunately, I am not without guilt in the keep-yourself-to-yourself department. One day about two years ago, I was at the gym, bent over at the waist in front of a treadmill with my legs about shoulder width apart, trying to stretch before I went running. I was standing in front of a mirror, so I wound up staring absently at my own ass. I slowly began to realize that something was not right. There was a weird pink splotch on the back of my pants. At first I thought that I had spilled bleach on my clothes. Then a horrifying realization washed over me. I could not remember the last time I had cleaned my apartment, much less used bleach on anything. This was not a stain. This was my balls. My shorts and my underwear each had gaping holes which apparently lined up perfectly when I bent over. My insistence on wearing my clothes until they disintegrated had finally caught up with me.

No Ticket

My sister attended the University of Missouri. When it was time to move her to campus, the family did just about everything right. Stockpiled Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons. Bought her a coat that would hold up against the Missouri winter. Built a loft for her bed. Bought a miniature refrigerator and a fashionable red plastic microwave. We did not, however, remember to reserve a truck to transport these items from Memphis to Columbia.

Prince Ali arrived in Jasmine’s city with 75 golden camels. Hannibal marched on Rome with the aid of hundreds of elephants. Genghis Kahn and his Golden Horde swept across Eurasia on the backs of thousands of horses. All of these beasts could have fit comfortably inside of the 25 foot straight truck that my father rented from Ryder at the last minute.

If you get in a wreck on a motorcycle, there’s a decent chance that you will die but it’s somewhat unlikely that another driver will get hurt. But if you get in a wreck behind the wheel of a 25 foot straight truck, you’ll probably survive but the road will be littered with innocent corpses. Yet somehow you must have a special license to operate a motorcycle, and Uncle Sam only required that KC breathe on a mirror in order to rent that 25 foot behemoth. In hindsight, the Ryder employee manning the rental desk probably did not even go that far. He likely took one look at KC’s moving day outfit, which consisted of a red t-shirt and mid-thigh jorts (cut-off jean shorts), and knew that KC was eminently qualified to operate heavy machinery.

Despite rolling up to a campus where she knew no one in a truck that screams, “I BROUGHT MY PONY WITH ME TO SCHOOL!,” my sister managed to make friends. I met some of them a few months later when my dad, my mom and I returned to Columbia to watch Mizzou play Nebraska in football.

The game was on a Saturday morning in mid-season. It takes about six hours to get to Columbia from Memphis, and we had to depart late on Friday night so that I could fulfill my princely duties slanging water for the Houston High School football team. Our plan was to open a vein, fill it with 6 hours of Wallflowers, Hootie, and Phil Collins; get to Columbia about 4 AM; sleep fast; and hurry to the game. We hit the road, and the plan seemed to be going well. Then, about two hours into the trip, just south of Cape Girardeau, KC shattered the southeastern Missouri silence with a sudden, thunderous “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”

At first I thought Hootie’s uninflected droning of “Ionlywannabewithyouuuu” had finally, after seven years of family trips, broken my father’s will to live. Unfortunately I was wrong. KC had left the tickets to the game in the kitchen.

We turned around. We got the tickets. Ten or eleven hours after we first hit the road, we arrived in Columbia. We slept for a couple hours at the hotel and went to the game. I know that I was very tired at the game because I actually laughed when KC told me for the 76th time that the N on Nebraska’s helmets stands for knowledge. We dozed in the stands, but we were awake long enough to see Nebraska quarterback Eric Crouch embarrass the Mizzou defense with a 105 yard touchdown run. The play was the cornerstone of Crouch’s Heisman-winning season and remains the most impressive athletic feat I have seen in person.



It turns out that ticket misplacement, along with size 8 cranial circumferences and inability to color inside the lines, is a genetic trait that can be passed from father to son. To read about my own ticket problems, click here.

Coach KC

When I was a junior in high school, I put together a recreational basketball team with some of my friends. After a broad national search, we enlisted KC to be our coach. He brought impressive credentials to the position:

1. As a young man, lettered for the Kirkwood High Pioneers basketball squad that finished second in the Missouri state championships in 1973.
2. As an old man, he founded the Beer Nuts, a men’s recreational team whose name was inspired by the sign listing the offerings in aisle six of the Germantown Kroger grocery store.

The search committee was particularly taken with KC’s aggressive approach to the game. For example, while playing for the Beer Nuts as a 40-something-year-old man, he tackled another 40-something-year-old man into the bleachers as retribution for a seemingly dirty foul on a Beer Nuts teammate. This tackle took place several minutes after the offending foul while the teams were lining up for free throws, displaying KC’s ability to develop a plan and wait patiently for the right opportunity to execute it. The search committee knew that these qualities would serve KC well in his position as the coach of the Grace Evangelical Church’s 17 & Under Boy’s Team B.

Like any master craftsman, KC knew that he needed to build his team from the ground up. Naturally, he started with our warm-up drill, which he borrowed from the 1973 Kirkwood Pioneers. The Pioneer’s warm-up drill, full of complex passing patterns and thunderous slam-dunks, mentally deflated their opponents before they even stepped on the court. While some might have questioned the ability of Grace Evan’s 17 & Under Boy’s Team B--composed of millennial white boys--to execute a warm-up drill intended primarily for 1970s African Americans, KC was undeterred. Knowing that intimidation was the key to victory, he devoted two full practices to teaching us the warm-up drill. He finally gave up when he realized that only two of us could make a layup and exactly none of us could dunk.

Having assessed the talent at his disposal, KC decided to focus the fundamentals of the game. He started by teaching us how to pass the ball.

“No arm-high passes,” he said, “Those will get stolen. You have to put it where they can’t get their hands on it. Seth, stand over here with your arms out like you are playing defense. Now, you can either do a bounce pass,”—he bounced the ball underneath my outstretched arms by way of demonstration—“or you can whizz the ball past their ear.” To demonstrate this approach, he fired a robust chest pass right into my face.

To further hone our passing skills, KC trotted out a timeless drill known as the Three Man Weave. In this drill, three players start on one baseline, run the length of the court while passing the ball to each other, and finish with a layup at the opposite basket. The Three Man Weave quickly became the bedrock of the Grace Evan’s 17 & Under Boy’s Team B practice regimen. I estimate that 50% of total practice time over two seasons was devoted to the Three Man Weave. This devotion was not exactly because of the drill’s effectiveness. Rather, it was because of KC’s insistence that we make three layups in a row before stopping the drill. This requirement was problematic for a team on which only two of players could make a layup with any amount of consistency. And one of those players enjoyed smoking marijuana more than playing basketball, so he did not make it to every practice.

In order to increase the drill’s difficulty and keep himself from going insane while we bricked, airballed, and otherwise aborted layup after layup, KC wandered around the center of the court with his eyes shut and his arms outstretched, attempting to swat the ball while shouting “Ray Charles defense! Ray Charles defense!” Fortunately, he never received any OSHA complaints from the blind, black, or musically-inclined members of the squad.

When we weren’t taking chest passes to the face or running the Three Man Weave, we scrimmaged. We usually had an odd number of players, so KC would participate. The consummate teammate, he rarely shot the ball. Except for one time when he got the ball on a fast break. That time, he tried to dunk the ball from the free throw line.

I was supposed to be guarding KC on the play, but I was hopelessly out of shape and trailing the action. For this I am thankful, because I was afforded a panoramic view of the following: KC received an outlet pass at midcourt. His head on a swivel, he dribbled toward the basket. As he approached the free throw line, he left his feet, looking to execute a jump pass. However, all of his teammates were also out of shape and trailing the action. Now he was in midair and had to make an effort to score the ball. His legs trailing behind him like the tail of a tube-socked comet, KC extended the ball toward the basket with his right arm. He executed what can only be described as a half-dunk, half-finger roll. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), he was still three feet from the rim. The ball drew no iron and bounced harmlessly to the floor while KC landed in a heap in the middle of the lane. He was unguarded.

KC and I would ride to practice together in my car. This provided me with a prime opportunity to torture him with the rap and butt rock that were staples of my music library at the time. He did like one song, however--a live version of Sister Hazel’s 90s chart-topper “All for You,” and it became a tradition for us to listen to it while we rode to and from practice. I associate that song very strongly strongly with rec basketball, and I make sure to keep a copy on my mp3 player. That way, I am regularly reminded about Dr. KC rising to the rim with a wild look in his eye and his mustache fluttering in the breeze.

One of those days

It has been one of those days.

I woke up early this morning in order to drag my sorry self across town to Virginia in order to attend a conference at the US Patent Office. I did not want to attend this conference, but my boss is the sponsor so I was making the trip in order to show solidarity. I did not adequately shake the cobwebs from my brain, and I walked out the door of my apartment with my bike but not my backpack. The door to my apartment automatically locks behind me, and my keys were in my backpack. My phone was also in my backpack. This becomes important later.

It is early enough in the morning that no one was working in the apartment management office, so I just say, "ah fuck it," and figure I would collect my stuff later in the day. Not having my keys means I cannot not lock up my bike. I had originally planned to ride my bike to the subway station. However, now I have to execute a time-consuming maneuver in order to drop off my bike at my cubicle and walk to the bus that would take me to the metro. I am now running behind schedule, and my anxiety was marginally increased because I do not have a phone and therefore had no idea what time it is.

Anyway, I get on the subway knowing that I needed to switch trains once in order to get to Alexandria, VA where the conference is being held. This is approximately a 40 minute trip if nothing goes awry. Unfortunately, I get crossed-up with regard to train switching, and I try to switch trains at the wrong stop. This costs me about 20 minutes of waiting for another train. At least I think its 20 minutes, because I have no clock.

I finally get to Alexandria, get off the subway, and walk to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Though the directions to where I was going were inside of my backpack which is now inside of my apartment, I am fortunately able to locate the building. Or, I should say, buildings. The USPTO is an enormous place. I was sort of counting on being able to walk in and ask someone where I needed to go to find the conference. But there is no centralized desk. There are only security desks manned by dead-eyed bureaucrats who have not heard of my conference and would rather stare into the middle distance than give me any information. And I don't have a phone with which to contact any of my coworkers who might know what's going on.

After about 30 minutes of rigamarole, I find a nice person who lets me use her computer in order to find out where the conference is located. Turns out I am in the right place. But at the wrong time. The conference is tomorrow. I want to unzip my skin, run into a wall, and explode my bones into a pile of dust. I locked my keys in my apartment about two hours ago. It has been a long journey, one which I did not want to make, with no reward.

But my day was just beginning.

I take the subway back to campus. The only reason I go back to my office instead of going straight to my apartment to get my bag is that my bike is in my cubicle, and I can ride it back to my apartment. As I am walking to my cube, one of my fellow students says, "Seth, are you ready for the meeting?"

"What meeting?"

Turns out today was the day that PhD students were supposed to "pitch" their research to a venture capitalist in order to make sure that we can make sure that we can explain why what we are working on is useful to people in the real world. This is a very worthwhile exercise. I have trouble extemporaneously describing my research, and this will be good practice. But I am completely unprepared. It is 11:21 and the meeting starts at 11:30. I am just lucky that I came back to campus to get my bike, or I would have missed the meeting entirely.

My research "pitch" is not humorously disastrous, but it does not go well. I stumble over my words more than usual, and I have difficulty answering the man's questions. So by the end, I am feeling more dumb than I usually do.

After this, I have a meeting with a professor about a project that I am not convinced is going anywhere but is taking up a lot of my time. The meeting is long and frustrating, but again, not humorous. It just sort of adds to my frustration level.

Then I check my email. It contains the editor's decision letter for the only paper that I have under review at an academic journal. This paper has been rejected at one journal, and has now been under review at this second journal for about 5 months, which is a pretty long time. I was been pretty sure that this journal was also going to reject my paper, and I just wanted to get it over with. The editor's decision letter will tell me whether the paper has been rejected or invited to be revised and resubmitted to the journal.

The corporate analog to the decision letter is the performance review. Now, I said that I was pretty sure that the paper was going to be rejected, but publication, like performance appraisal, is a random process that heavily depends on who is evaluating your work. So, like an employee who knows that he is a bum but is still holding out hope for a 10% raise, before I open the decision letter, I think to myself, "Maybe I am lucky."

The first lines of the letter suggest that perhaps, yes, I am lucky. They read, and I quote:

"I like the topic of this paper. Here [sic] is a growing realization that the intersection of organizations, careers and entrepreneurship is an important and fertile field for research. We need ambitious theories and careful empirical documentation of the key patterns and processes at work."

Yes! I think to myself. This is exactly what me and my coauthors want this paper to be about--the reviewer gets it! The random element has worked in our favor!

Then, uh, I read the next sentence.

"This paper does not deliver on that, unfortunately, both in terms of the theory and the empirics."

Then the reviewers go on to cut the paper open from groin to sternum, highlighting all of the flaws that me and my coauthors already know existed as well as pointing out some new ones. It's like telling a fat person that he is fat and then saying, "oh by the way, your breath smells horrible." Needless to say, the paper was rejected.

I go home, and the first thing I do is console myself with a Sports Illustrated and a bowel movement. It's my first of the day and, as the reviewers of my paper alluded to, I am full of shit. And I clog the toilet. And I don't own a plunger. Luckily, I have a slotted spoon and a cooking pot.

Nowhere to go but up. But first, I must go back to Alexandria, VA in the morning . . .

Cub Scouts

I learned a variety of lessons from my time in the Cub scouts. You already know that none of these lessons have anything to do with Survivor Man skills. In high school I nearly burned our family’s house to the ground on Christmas day by starting a fire in the fireplace and forgetting to open the flue. I am basically unable to operate a screwdriver. How about knot tying? Negative. I tie my shoes with bunny ear loops like a kindergartner.

One lesson that the Scouts did teach me is the value of technology. I learned this lesson by participating in the Pinewood Derby. If you don’t know, the Pinewood Derby is contest where Cub Scouts race wooden cars the size of a TV remote down a sloped track of about 50 feet. In my first Pinewood Derby I bought a little wooden car at Hobby Lobby, covered it with yellow and blue tempera paint, and waddled naively to the Farmington Elementary gymnasium for the race.

On the entry form, I should have listed my name as Seth Carnahanski. My cutesy-tootsy blue and yellow tempera block of wood was crushed like a Polish horse in the face of the German blitzkrieg. Shame and the passage of time cloud my memory, but I don’t think that my car even made it to the finish line. My competitors had glossy paint jobs, flame decals, and a firm understanding of the concept of gravity. They weighted down their cars to the contest limit in order to make them move faster down the track. This strategy had not occurred to me.

The second lesson that I learned from the Scouts is that adults do not unconditionally love and respect every single child on the face of the earth. Up to that point, I thought that disagreements and dislike magically disappeared when you turned 18 and that maturity compelled adults to get along with everybody, especially kids. Then I observed Scout Master KC try to tame a particularly shit-headed member of Troop 362.

That’s right, KC was the den leader for my second grade cub scout experience. Miraculously, no fatalities, losses of limb, or even property damage occurred under his watch. This is probably because the den was mostly composed of pretty calm kids. One boy named Eric, however, needs to donate his brain to science. He was insane with ADHD. I wish I could go back in time and watch KC try to tame this stallion. At the time, all I could tell was that KC did not like this kid. What were the clues that alerted my eight year old radar? Maybe it was when KC tied Eric to a tree. KC claims that this was to keep him from running away into the woods while we were camping. Or perhaps it was when we lined up along my fence to play dodgeball before every meeting, and I watched KC tattoo the child-demon with multiple well-placed fastballs. Or maybe it was when KC took the troop to a fire ant farm, buried Eric up to the neck in sand, and coated his head in honey.*

* One of these is untrue.

Tostitos and BBQ Sauce

My father has a unique approach to nutritional balance. Left to his own devices, I suspect his diet would consist of equal parts red beans and rice, nacho chips with barbecue sauce, and Spaten beer. This is the diet he traditionally adopts when my mom goes out of town and he lets his culinary hair down. I remember one night when my mom was out of town, I must have been a junior or senior in high school because my sister was not around, I came home kind of late and I was surprised to hear the TV was still on in the living room. I figured my dad would be in bed. Turns out he was, sort of. Let me redraw the scene. I walk into the living room. The Addams Family movie is blasting through the television (I am trying to imagine the thought process that went into that selection by a solo 45 year old man, but I am at a loss). KC is not in the room. There is, however, a half-eaten bag of Tostitos and a plate caked with BBQ sauce residue lying on the couch. I walk through the living room and enter the guest bedroom. I find KC. He is passed out in a white t-shirt and white skivvies, kneeling next to the bed, his upper body sprawled across the mattress. I am unsure how he came to assume this position. Though my father is not a particularly religious man, it appears he felt the need to thank his Creator for the bounty of Tostitos, barbecue sauce, and PG-rated home cinema that he had enjoyed on this particular Friday evening. I did not wake him up, figuring that I should not trifle with a Tostitos coma that was strong enough to literally bring a man to his knees.

Were KC to adopt the red bean, Tostitos, and Spaten diet, he would not survive very long. Not because of the obvious health effects. Rather because he would likely burn the house to the ground while enjoying a post-Spaten nap and forgetting to prevent his red beans and rice from exploding on the stovetop. I believe that this nearly happened once or twice during another of those brave weekends when I was a kid and my mom went out of town and left the King in charge of the Castle.

Anyone for spaghetti?

Like many Germantownians, my family has vacationed in Destin, FL on a yearly basis from the time I was two years old. For the first 15 years, we saved money by staying in a bare-bones cabin which required a coating of chlorine bleach before my sister and mother would step inside. Eventually, KC said, “Hey, we’re making pretty good bucks, it’s time we move up a notch.” So we rented a more expensive condo that provided a variety of modern amenities which were not available at our previous place, including pots and pans and a sofa that did not require the covering of a bed sheet in order to be safe for contact with human skin.

The drive from Memphis to Destin takes approximately 9 hours. To know my father is to know that he experiences approximately four bowel movements per day. So, in the average 18 hour day, he visits his congressman about once every 4 hours. Thus, after the 9 hour car ride, he was carrying more than beachware into the shiny condo. His first stop was the restroom. I am sure he was enjoying the peace and quiet that he had earned after absorbing 9 hours of Madonna and Hootie the Blowfish. He was probably also reflecting favorably on the new condo and our family’s ability to stay in such a nice place.

Then he flushed the toilet. And the water began to rise. And the water continued to rise. He hurriedly shut the toilet’s water spigot. But his dilemma had only begun. While this new condo had two televisions, it did not have a plunger. I am not quite sure what happened next. But decisions were made under extreme duress. The sum of these decisions resulted in my shirtless father bending over a poop-choked toilet, ladeling feces into one of the condo’s kitchen pots with a massive slotted spoon.

The condo had two bathrooms, so KC gradually emptied the turd pot into the other commode like a criminal destroying the evidence, making sure to flush after each dallop. You may be asking, “Seth, if the condo had two bathrooms, why not leave the clogged toilet alone and go purchase a plunger?” This is an excellent question for which I have no definitive answer. My guess is that KC did not want to waste valuable beach time by going to the grocery store. “Goddammit, we got up at 3 AM to get here in time to get on the beach. Patty, get me a pot and slotted spoon.”

The Young Bull and the Old Bull

KC and I built the fence in my parents’ backyard the summer after my freshman year of college, when my parents moved from Memphis to St. Louis. Though my father claims to adhere to the slogan “measure twice, cut once,” we approach many of our jobs together by not measuring at all and subsequently cutting many, many times.

This job was no different. Standard procedure is to place fenceposts eight feet apart in order to accommodate standard two-by-fours, which are usually eight feet long. I don’t remember how KC and I decided to measure the post placements, but suffice to say that our approach was faulty. We placed them ten feet apart.

We did not realize our error until the postholes had been dug and the posts had been sunk in concrete. Even if we had recognized our error prior to setting the posts, we were not about to re-dig 15 or so postholes, the completion of which had required two weekends, the rental of two augurs, and obscenity-earmuffs for all children within a 100 yard radius. So, what are two men to do when forced to span a ten foot gap with an eight foot board? Why, purchase twelve foot boards and saw them down to ten feet. This was another painful and profanity-laced operation. Incredibly, no appendages were lost.

Assembling the fence required carrying stacks of wood down a short flight of stairs into our backyard. When I reflect, at a very general level, about the work that I do with KC, I find that I usually have two goals, no matter what the project may be. The first goal is to finish the job as quickly as possible. The second is to remind KC of his physical and mental frailty. With these two goals in mind, I started carrying as many wooden boards as possible in each trip, challenging KC to keep pace. KC responded with this regal bit of fatherly wisdom.

“Have I told you the story of the young bull and the old bull?” he said.

“No.”

“The young bull and the old bull were on top of a hill overlooking the valley,” KC began, “Down in the valley were a dozen heifers. When the young bull saw the heifers, he started jumping up and down

‘Old bull! Old bull!’ the young bull said, ‘Let’s run down there and fuck us a heifer!’

‘No,’ said the old bull, ‘ Let’s walk down there. And fuck ‘em all.”

Two things were remarkable about this story. 1) I had never heard it before. KC has about 6 jokes in his inventory. He has not updated his inventory since 1977. 2) It was actually appropriate for the situation at hand.

As a side note, when our neighbors did a property survey several months later, they discovered that we had built the fence on their land. I was holding a razor blade over my exposed wrist, ready to end the misery before it began, when KC informed me that a professional builder would move the fence.

What is this blog about? What am I writing it?

This blog will consist of humorous stories involving members of my family. The title of the blog refers to the first story that I will post.

This blog has two purposes. The first, and most important, is to entertain my family. The second is to develop my writing skills, particularly the ability to write quickly. I am in grad school, and writing and using my time efficiently are requirements for success. I enjoy writing, but I do not write efficiently. I spend too much time editing instead of writing. I am going to try to use this blog to work on this weakness by limiting my use of the backspace button when creating my posts. The result may be some sloppy writing, particularly in the beginning.

My goal is to write one post per week, but that is probably too ambitious.