Kids say such wonderful things as they seek to find their way with language. I asked our eight-year-old, whose birthday is today, if he feels any different. He said, “Not really. I feel like I’ve been seven my whole life. But I’m sure I’ll feel like I’m eight by lunchtime at the latest.”
Don’t you love the precision and analytical quality of that kind of reasoning? Not long ago I asked him about what it felt like to be standing by and looking into an empty Texas DKR Memorial Stadium where the Texas Longhorns football team plays. Speaking with an economy of words I never seem to achieve, he remarked, “I’ve never laid foot in a place like this. I’m gonna lay foot.”
One of daughters once asked, when riding in the car while we passed a no parking sign, “Why does it say no ‘P’s?” Clearly, she thought the letter was banned from use in the space around the sign. Another of our sons had a knack in his early years for asking very pointed questions and sometimes using terms uncommon for a 5-year-old. When a friend arrived ahead of his wife for dinner one night, our youngster inquired, “Hi Jeff. Where’s your woman?” And later, when encountering another single friend who was accompanied by a different woman than we had seen him with a few days before, our young Dan Rather inquired, “Is this your wife?” “No,” replied our friend. “Well, is (name withheld) your wife?” “No,” came the friend again, shifting uncomfortably. Our son finished the grilling session with, “I don’t understand?”
Sales is a tough job. Watching the best at it can be like watching great theatre, or better yet, great focused reasoning. But there are so many things to sell and so few employers unwilling to pay for the art of it. So we get a lot of unintended comedy shows instead. I tried it a few times and really stunk at it. I wasn’t thrilled with the products and was unable to make myself push people. I would just say, “I have such and such which is good for such and such,” and they’d say, “I don’t want it,” and I’d say, “Cool. See ya.” In most sales settings, that is not how you move a lot of product.
In the last few days I’ve heard some doozies. A roofing tile sales guy told me the price of asphalt shingles has gone through the roof “because the primary ingredient, plutonium, is so scarse!” Plutonium? I thought the tiles were made out of paper, oil and ceramic gravel? The primary ingredient of asphalt roofing tiles is “a rare transuranic radioactive chemical element with the chemical symbol Pu and atomic number 94?” Thank you Wikipedia. I know that it’s used for nuclear weapons and reactors. I had no idea it was all over my roof. I’m not replacing the roof. I’m moving.
Then another traveling salesman shows up yesterday, and as he spins a personal tale more fantastic by the second, he gets to the part where, being a UT football alum, he receives 500 free tickets per season. 500! Even at the cheap seat price of 60$ that comes out to 30 grand in free tickets annually. So why is he selling frozen chicken in my neighborhood? When I asked him what he does with all 500 he said, “I give many away. No way I have time to go, myself, 500 times!” HOLY COW! Do you mean the Longhorns are now playing a 500 game schedule? Quite frankly, I think Mack Brown and company are working cheap.
Gotta run. Here’s comes a Kirby vacuum salesperson wearing a “Gig ‘em Aggies!” t-shirt underneath a hazmat suit. I think I know where this is going.
I dislike most everything on television these days. Actually more than dislike. I distinctly, decisively dislike television these days. And two shows I do not watch, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are right up there in the upper eschelon of disliked. I will not watch these programs. Tonight I caved and watched the last 20 or so minutes of The Bachelor, which I will now call The Weasel. I do not know how Jake has behaved so far. Tonight, in my mind, he forfeited his citizenship as a Texan and a man. Actually, I don’t know how many of those are even left.
As one of the remaining, aspiring Mrs Jake’s, Ali, struggled with a decision to leave the show and save her dream job or stay and lose it with no guarantee of winning Jake, the Bachelor chose to whine and cry on her shoulder and think only of himself and his continuing harem pleasures. What should he have said?
Ali, you’re a wonderful woman and your happiness is so important to me. As much as I would like for you to stay, I think you need to go and keep that job which means so much to you. If it is right for us to be together, we will some day. We have to trust. I cannot just think of myself in this. I have to think of you. After all, selflessness is the bedrock of a successful, long-term relationship.
Have I always lived up to that standard? No. But I know it is right. And when you have a stage as large as a network TV show, you’ve got to be thinking about the message you’re sending out there. Jake dropped the ball so hard tonight it cracked the North American tectonic plate. All kinds of self-centered young men must have felt very empowered by Jake’s whining, complete with sappy music underscore. Ali kept apologizing. He never did.
Shameful. And he claims Texas as his home. Hopefully, Texas will forgive him. Even if she does, there’ll be an emotional butt-whuppin’ waitin’ for him back home someday. It’s unavoidable.
Life in sports talk can be grueling. After an extended period of mourning following the BCS Title disappointment, we bring you our Superbowl preview show.
On this day of the grand unfurling of the Apple Tablet –which is a pretty cool product — my attention has been diverted back to the majesty of the natural gas hot water heater. This device, a pillar of modern civilization and depicted in all of its newly installed glory here, is every bit of uber-hightech to me, today. Why? Because I lived without it for three days in a house with 10 people, some of who continued their daily roll in the yard with the dogs inspite of a lack of an end-of-day hot shower to restore their bodily atmosphere to a life-sustaining state. Yes, the new tankless heaters are cool and a greener option, and if they weren’t three times the cost of the old-school unit I would have installed one. But for now, this one is, to me, my very own cutting-edge piece of tech. I have looked into the no-hot-water-heater abyss, and believe me when I say that the gray tank over there is an Apple Tablet, thorium-powered nuclear reactor, Bugatti Veyron all wrapped into one.
NOTE: If you live in the Austin area and have hot water issues, these guys installed mine and they were great. They have the tankless too.
Today, our hot water heater passed away. It had been clinging to life support for days, maybe weeks, and I didn’t even know it. My wife discovered the hot water leak. It was flowing out through a breach in the top of the 50-gallon tank, down the sides into the overflow pan, out through the overflow pipe through the outside wall and into our garden. She saw birds having a lovely warm bath and wondered how that was possible. Then we pried open the swollen door to the water heater closet in the garage and witnessed the result of warm moisture allowed to do its thing in a dark enclosed space. I’ll just say some sheetrock is coming out, and we can leave it at that.
But the thing that really scares me is young boys without a bath for 48-plus hours. This is not something that modern suburban life prepares you for. Strange odors multiply rapidly when soap with the stripping power of paint thinner is not applied to a young boy’s body ever 24 hours. And since most pre-10-year-olds seem determined to wear the same clothes at least three days in a row, some clothes our house will soon start walking around on their own without the respite of shower time and a clean body every 86,400 clicks of the second hand. What will I be able to say to the boys tonight when they scream, “Dad, there’s a monster in the corner!” with the knowledge that it is not their imagination. We will both be screaming.
While on the subject of the civilization-sustaining miracle of hot water, what is going on in that shower with the teen girls, and boys, who take 30-minute vacations in there? Maybe the term sabbatical, defined by Wikipedia as “a rest from work, or a hiatus, often lasting from two months to a year,” is derived from the original Greek Sabbathical. Strangely, it is the young atmosphere-altering boys who actually need 30-minute showers with multiple soap and rinse cycles but who would just as soon step in, shoot water around the shower stall for a few minutes, do some hieroglyphics on the glass, and then get out, still wet and dirty, and put their pajamas on inside-out and backwards.
What is it about retirees and maracas, especially when the old bossa nova tune “Blue Spanish Eyes” is playing? I think maracas were actually invented for this number in order to appease the country club octogenarians who, without fail, spring to life and forcefully gesture an unrelenting desire to provide a spontaneous hundred-man percussion section whenever the tune is called. I have witnessed this time and time again. Blue Spanish Eyes starts playing, everyone starts playing air maracas and does that little hip swivel thing. I remember one time, back in the late 1970s, when I was playing with a society band called Tiffany Brass in Amarillo, Texas. All I can say in comment on that memory is, there are few spectacles in contemporary leisuredom comparable to the adrenaline-pumped 87-year-old retired vinyl salesman in plaid blazer, maroon golfing slacks, and white Hushpuppies sashaying with Phyllis Diller’s twin while surrounded by a maraca-sporting mob of AARP militants.
This chapter of my life is largely over. I’m more selective about the gigs I take, and fortunately, can afford to be. But you never get fully beyond impressions and memories like these, and now and then a wisp of lounge will make it’s way around the corner. Then you have to decide whether to run, or stick around as a witness so you can write about it later. Curiosity always seems to make me chose the later. You can now read the results in one long, multi-chaptered rant on my blog. Just look for the tab labeled “My Life In Gigs,” or click here.
The Jetsons and everyone associated with that show are liars. So is (or was) Stanley Kubrick, although not in relation to flying cars but about the whole Pan Am space taxi thing. When I was around 10 I looked to the dawn of a new century for flying cars, not world peace, although at this point I’d gladly settle for the later. I just knew, certainly by 2010, that we would go to the garage, unplug our beautiful space-aged machine from the wall unit fed by solar panels on our roof, fire up the 4.1 jigawatt super hepcat nuclear fusion powertrain, and lift off with the noise equivalent of a mouse flossing its teeth. Then we’d take off as the crow flies to any place we want at up to 3xs the speed of sound with no Gs and cars smart enough to miss each other in the process. True, a bold and slightly ostentatious vision. But some where along the way all our priorities got out of whack because I see a gasoline powered, hail-damaged, earthbound, egg-shaped weenie machine sitting in my driveway, and it makes me sad. Oh, what could have been. That we have all wasted the equivalent of years driving at subsonic speeds, weaving around roadways, waiting at traffic lights, all while passing the boredom by Twittering from our virtual iPhones in our virtual cars (flying ones, mind you) from Second Life while eating a Taco Supreme and changing CDs, is almost as disheartening as the 2009 decision by Spandau Ballet to regroup.
At least the person in this YouTube video had the guts to strap a rocket to their (I think) Mercury Marquis and push the limits way back in 19-something, although from the looks of the body parts exiting the vehicle upon reaching takeoff speed, the preflight thinking did not include what would happen once they left the ground.
I only hope that bold minds like the one behind this grand experiment someday join forces with those who know something about aerodynamics and structural engineering so that we may all begin flying to the grocery store in the manner we were meant to.
So this is called the Momotaro Modern Jazz Opera and it’s on YouTube and someone sent it to me. Of course, I don’t know what they’re saying which puts me at a disadvantage, but even then I’m watching and just making that jaw open frozen face look. Then there are moments that are just so funny that the face unfreezes and the laughter commences, followed by back to jaw open. This kind of artistic bizzarity cannot be planned. It has to result from the intersection of many disconnected things — a plan here, a perspective there, a Denny’s double chili dog platter after midnight, some time working in the equivalent of a lounge in Roswell, New Mexico. Whatever it is, it is an amazing natural phenomenon to behold and sometimes celebrated intentionally in art like that of Christopher Guest. All I know is, I’m grateful that it happens. It says to me that God has an enormous sense of humor.
he grand unfurling of the