Blunt Wit

Some days insight fills you like helium does a balloon.  You float along with a merry lightness of being.  And sometimes the signposts of life light up in bright neon and suddenly you know where you are going and why you are here.
Sadly, my tale today describes the other sort of day.  The one where you are lost, dazed and confused.  Where you finally realize you are mortal, your days are dark, aimless and possibly numbered.
It started out looking fine.  By early afternoon, a bright sun toasted the crisp fall air to a comfortable 65 degrees.  A light breeze blew out of the south.  Trees swayed with a lazy carelessness.  And the river ran ominously high but decidedly fishable.
My Mom brought us to the baptismal pool because, you may find this hard to believe, I have never fly fished before.  She of course ties her own flies and is known as a trout whisperer.  Old timers round these parts say she can talk the spots off a brown brook trout.  And, hell, even the color off a rainbow.  Anyway, she had begun to teach those gifts to my son.
Me, I was a hopeless cause.  As an unabashed spin caster, I had always looked down on my cane pole whipping, fly tipping brethren. As opposed to tricking them with fake, manmade womanly wisps, I preferred to lure my fish into my possession with brutal honesty and real manly bait.
Anyway, all becomes clear on the river, or so they say.
I wandered out to some rippling rapids where the trout loved to frolic and cast up into the froth and let my fly float down aimlessly.  On my inaugural cast I landed a huge red maple leaf then broke out into a frighteningly loud rendition of ‘Oh Canada.’
By my third cast, I had tangled my line and began cursing.  By my forth, I had hooked myself and nearly fell in.
I noticed the water running swifter now but lazered in on my goal of catching Old Nellie, the spotted brown trout everyone round these parts dreamed of catching.
Then, yoo hoo, I got a nibble.  Reeling it in, I realized I had caught an apple.  I mean, really, how good do you have to be to snag fruit out of a raging river?
Finally after what might have been the 10,000th lame cast something came after my fly with a vengeance.  I heard the reel scream as she took the line out hard.  I fought to regain control.  Then she turned on me like some sort of shark trout.  Old Nellie for sure!  As I labored to reel the line in, she wriggled off.
Then I suddenly realized the water seemed to be rising with a purpose.  Some gosh darn engineer up river must have decided hours earlier that he or she wanted to make some piddly electricity and put me in grave mortal danger.  There I stood in the middle of the river, like a gosh darn fool.  My Mom and son hugged the shore a few hundred meters, or was it yards, away.  Unlike me, they knew and respected the fickle nature of nature.
With the water now threatening to sweep me away I made a beeline for the shore.  I screamed and waved but they thought I was just being right neighborly and waved back.
I could have sworn I saw Old Nellie eyeing me hungrily as I almost slipped once or twice on the slick rocky bottom.
Well, needless to say, I made it back to tell this tale.  But I wonder if I’ll ever fly fish again.  Too much realization of mortality in too short a time span can bear down heavy on a man.

What mundane activities spawn high drama for you?
Have you ever been fly fishing?
Or in grave, mortal danger?  How did you escape?

So you might have heard a piece that runs occasionally on National Public Radio called “This I Believe” in which Americans from all walks of life share their personal philosophies and core values that guide their daily lives. That show itself is based on a similar show from the 1950’s. I really enjoy the show and spent some time bumping around their website and thought to share a few gems I uncovered.
First there is the one done by John Updike entitled “Testing the limits of what I Know and Feel”. Thoughtful and interesting.
Another is by Isabelle Allende about the life lessons her dying daughter imparted to her entitled “In Giving I Connect with Others”. Quite moving actually.
Another really good one is by Azar Nafrisi entitled “Mysterious Connections that Link us Together“. She makes a rather compelling case for empathy.
And one of my personal favorites and totally my style (I promise you’ll laugh if you click) is by Jason Sheehan entitled “There is No Such Thing as Too Much BBQ.”
So after reading and listening to these I began to ponder the question for myself. I came up with the following for myself:

Always Look on the Absurd Side of Life

I am physically nondescript. Boring, really. I don’t really stand out in a police line-up. And, knock on wood, I’ve survived more of those than it is probably prudent to share here. I don’t have any good stories to tell about my experience to tug at your heart strings or mist over your eyes. Although I have been known to contract curable cancer on occasion and carry around stray puppies in seek of sympathy. I don’t even have a discernible philosophy of life. Well, that is if you discount the ultimate redeeming spiritual value of soccer and beer. In fact, I don’t know what crazy idea possessed me to try to answer that question.
Ah, wait, I do know, there is one thing that I believe in! I believe in the absolute absurdity of life. I mean how else do you explain the world today: grand triumphs such as the microchip or edible underwear; and sullen tragedies like abject poverty, war and Reality TV?
Having grown up down south, middle class in the 1970’s I am unabashedly a child of the earlier TV generation. I grew up on a steady diet of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and M.A.S.H. I have never wanted for much of anything. But conversely, I have never given that much either. I have drifted through life like Huck Finn down the Mississippi - without so much as a care bout nothin. But along the way for some unexplainable reason, I developed a deep affinity for this world and its inhabitants.
In my late teens I traveled to China and saw great suffering up close and personal for the first time. Later I visited other countries and saw other people a thousand times less materially well off than me. I taught English as a second language in Japan and made more money in a day’s wage than half this earth’s population made in a year. The only rational reason I could come up with to explain this was, well, looniness.
Later still, I married and we had kids. And now my daughter and son are growing up in a post 9/11 world. A much more dangerous world where wacko terrorists kill and maim innocent civilians; and where we traipse off to war in faraway lands full of bravado.
I fear that a group of nations is ultimately like a class of unruly kindergarteners. And somehow we’ve cast ourselves as the class bully. I fear the hubris of our generation today will only beget sorrow and suffering for that of our children’s generation tomorrow. And that makes me a bit sad.
But hey, I try to never despair too much while thinking about these things that remind me the ludicrousness of life. Why, you say? Because, in the immortal words of Eric Idle, “Always look on the bright side of life!”

Now for today’s question, I’d like to create a new ‘this I believe’ tag. Hell why not! So I would ask anyone who reads this and feels so inclined to please write an any-length essay on what they believe. Hell you could even submit it to NPR! I think I might even submit mine.

Here are the NPR stated guidelines: “Tell a story: Be specific. Take your belief out of the ether and ground it in the events of your life. Consider moments when belief was formed or tested or changed. Think of your own experience, work, and family, and tell of the things you know that no one else does. Your story need not be heart-warming or gut-wrenching—it can even be funny—but it should be real. Make sure your story ties to the essence of your daily life philosophy and the shaping of your beliefs.”

So consider yourself tagged - what do you believe (be sure to link back here)?

Brian (Eric Idle) on the cross …

So on a recent flight I felt queasy and slid the little white bag out of the seat pouch in front of me and drew it to my mouth.

This sent my two seat mates into rapid, perpendicular leans away from me. No feigned concern registered on their faces. Just abject terror. As the spasm subsided, I figured I might as well milk it and spent the next few moments moaning theatrically.

Finally, the woman to my right, a tastefully dressed, frizzy haired blonde with a vacuous stare and slippery black boots managed to find her tongue.
“Are you OK?”
“Musta been the salmon mousse.”
“Huh?”
“I’m fine, really.”

The businessman on the aisle had the hardened look of a wronged road warrior.
A barfer. I was his worst nightmare personified.
I could see him frantically scanning for an empty seat, however, being a full flight he unfurled a monster scowl

he had probably perfected from years of his wife’s relentless hen-pecking.

Around this time I felt something kicking me through the back of my flimsy chair. At first it felt a bit like a tickle. But after several minutes of incessant booting I managed to twist a view of the young girl behind me merrily pedaling her little feeties into the chair in front of her. She kept this up the entire flight and after an interminable passage of time, I began to empathize with pregnant women the world round.

Then I noticed something on the bag.
It read Patent 7041042. Damn, some son of a britch somewhere is collecting a check every time one of those bags swells up with barf. What a life. Getting rich off the misfortune of others. (Well, sounds like most of the successful business models of the world!)
Which got me to thinking. What simple device could I patent that harvests others’ pain for my own personal gain? What invention would allow me to sit back and rake in the bucks on the backs of other poor schmucks?
And then it hit me.
A kid taser!

No, I’m not talking about a Mattelesque taser FOR kids, but rather a souped-down version to use ON kids. Just think. I could have zapped goody miss two shoes behind me and enjoyed relative peace and bliss the entire trip. She would have gotten just a minor shock and her parents would have been glad to have her unconscious for the duration. There is no end to the potential uses. Teachers, parents, aggrieved travelers can all zonk unruly tykes into stunned obedience.
Now to file my patent.

So do you have a horrible travelers tale to tell?

Have you ever been tongue tied, rendered mentally or emotionally vacant; found yourself searching, praying for an excuse for your own insouciance?
Well, I have.
And to assist you in coming up with that ‘just so’ pretext for any transgression, big or small, I have decided to give up a few of my exculpatory gems for your general use.
Behind this veritable curtain of charitable largesse lies no small amount of guilt at my lack of blogging consistency these past few weeks. I have been AWOL, MIA, and unplugged from the world at large. You might think I ran off to some distant ashram. And you might be right. I wouldn’t want to misdirect any rationalizations you might be self-generating, imagining if you will, in your fertile imagination.
Truth be told, I was …
1. Abducted by aliens.

This is good because it is generally unprovable and establishes you as bit of a nut job. Once you establish this precedent you can use it over and over with relative impunity. The downside is you lose valuable street cred as a responsible human being.

2. Receiving a guided tour of Gitmo.

If my name, Joe Blow (note, changed here to protect my true identity), makes the terrorist watch list (which sadly, it does) then you can easily claim that yours does too. This way any random airport screening or innocent traffic infraction can result in a special rendition where are whisked off the sunny Cuba for a ‘debriefing’. In this day and age who would not believe you had your basic rights trampled in the name of the GWOT.

3. In a drug (or alcohol) induced fog.

Use this when life has dragged you into the gutter and your only coping mechanism is chemically induced euphoria. Think of it as the excuse of movie stars! You can further imply that you went to some faraway ‘treatment center’ and got all better. The beauty of this one is the well documented relapse.
So I hope you find my excuses valuable. Remember, two wrongs don’t ever make a right, but they make a damn good excuse.

What’s your best excuse? Did it work?
Have you ever been abducted by aliens, whisked to Gitmo, or lost to a chemical fog before?

I’ve come across several characters recently and had been struggling mightily to figure the impetus to write them up in a blog when my daughter came along and sparked my imagination. I’ve long since learned to take fickle inspiration whenever and wherever she strikes.

So I had dropped my daughter and her friend Jessica of at the watering hole. And by that I mean the lake and not the local dive bar. They were there just long enough for me to drive the ten minutes back into town when she called.
“Can you come pick us up?”
“What? I just dropped you off.”
“Yeah but the beach is covered in goose poop and the entire place is crawling with sketchy characters.”

I imagined a prison break and all the escaped inmates frolicking in puddles of grey-green goose droppings. Then the image in my mind morphed into Bill, the friendly neighborhood lunatic and The Walker, the Forrest Gumpian older gentleman with the flowing white beard that pops up power-walking all over town. Maybe they were the ones harassing her and swimming with the minnows out at the lake.

Normally, Bill can be heard slurping on a small coffee while amply filling out one of the wide chairs in the corner of Starbucks. He talks to himself incessantly and on rare occasion to the other patrons. But mostly he burps. Not ‘excuse me’-one-off burps, no, he averages a good solid five burps a minute. Kind of like a symphony of digestive genius.

In between burps, he also carries on rather interesting conversations with himself. I must admit to eavesdropping on occasion. While sometimes the topics range into the absurd, at other times, he scores good points in an intellectual debate with himself.

The Walker, on the other hand, is all over. It’s almost as if there he has four identical twin Santa Clause brothers ambulating all over town. He is everywhere. I see him traipsing resolutely by the hospital one moment and in front of Long John Silver’s the next. He always looks straight ahead, arms pumping forward, legs churning. Like a vagabond postman, he walks rain or shine (though I’ve yet to verify him in sleet). His long flowing silver beard hangs down over the same sweat encrusted white t-shirt.

I often wonder what motivates him. What drives him pace after pace? Is he running away from something or perhaps towards something, some destiny perhaps? Or does he simply walk for walkings sake?

Have you run across any sketchy characters of late? Care to expound?

So if you have never heard of CL or Craigslist then you are probably not of this earth. I even heard whispered they are currently in the process of setting up a CL for the moon, although the only listings so far are a few used golf balls and a couple of old tattered flags.

Contrary to popular wisdom, CL was not founded by Jenny Craig, the uber-dietress, as an online swap mart for plus-sized clothing. No it was started by Craig Newmark, a Jenny Craig devotee no doubt, whose primary motivation was to access erotic services at rock bottom prices.

But of course you know CL is so much more than a cheap call out service for sleazy strumpets. You can make actual platonic friends, find your very own best friends with benefits and buy used stuff. In fact CL has almost single handedly put the newspaper classifieds and exotic call girl operations out of business.

So, recently I entered the market for a mountain bike. As you know I am frugal (a nice way of saying CHEAP), so I found the (used) bike of my dreams on CL. It was a brand-spanking new Trek 8500 that had only been driven by a little old Grandmother to Church on Sunday mornings. I arranged to meet her at a local pick up joint (Home Depot). At the appointed time she didn’t show.

Stood up!

How dare she!

Later when I reached her on the phone she said her husband had vetoed the sale.
“Well, then why did you put it up on Craigslist if you weren’t interested in selling it?” I perplexedly queried.
“I thought it would be fun.”
“Ack,” as I coughed up a hairball.

My estimation of CL took a major hit.

Then, a month or so later, tired of the incessant extortion at the gas pump, I decided to invest in a (used) scooter for puttering around town. I located the perfect bike – sleek, fast and cheap. This time I asked the owner 40 questions to establish general sanity and we agreed on a price and a time the next morning for me to swing by pick it up. Wouldn’t ya know, I drove 45 min to her house and she wasn’t home, or at least wouldn’t answer the door after much ringing, knocking, cursing and screaming.

Damn!

Stood up yet again!

I guess the only consolation was that I hadn’t been calling folks in regards to erotic services … that would have really sucked.

Have you ever been stood up?
Have you ever used CL?