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.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
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.
“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.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
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.
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.
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