Personal space & Phil Collins's face

I imagine one day soon it’ll be like a switch is flipped and my daughter is going to tell me to get out of her face.

Who could blame her? Nearly everything my youngest and I say to one another is from a distance of about six inches, well inside the traditional boundary respecting personal space.

She’s perfectly cuddly. She has long eyelashes, perfect skin and big brown eyes warm and inviting as a cup of steaming cappuccino. Except for first thing in the morning where she has the death breath, her every exhalation recalls fresh baked cookies.

She’s at the age when children who have no real grasp of basic math are somehow adept at understanding one fraction.

She’s 5 and a 1/2.

Me, I’m 48 and 9/10. My eyes are bloodshot and my breath often recalls Milwaukee. From six inches, my pores look like facial kiddie pools.

Yet, our nearly every conversation comes at a distance which would cause any other two people to instinctively recoil from one another. And she’s fine with that.

Part of it comes from the compulsory affection I impose. If she asks me to do any little favor -- pour her some cereal -- I’ll arbitrarily sing out, “Eight and 12!”

She knows that means she must crawl up onto my lap and gives me eight kisses and 12 hugs, counting each out one by one.

Then I imprison her with hugs for the next five minutes. I ask her about kindergarten, her classmates and if she thinks one day the dog will learn to talk.

And the whole conversation takes place practically nose to nose.

It’s such a unique relationship, one I couldn’t duplicate with anyone else, not her older sister and certainly not her mother.

Like if Val said, geez, can you finally get around to re-tiling the bathroom floor, I might shout, “Two and three!” I know she’d respond with sarcastic scorn because she’d know I wouldn’t be talking about hugs and kisses.

Either way, that floor’s not getting done ‘til at least the Fourth of July.

So I’m going to enjoy this playful intimacy with Lucy while I can because I know one day she’s going to start to feel about me the way I felt about Phil Collins.

With me and rock stars, it’s rarely complicated. I either like them or not.

But Phil Collins has always troubled me.

It started in the 1980s when he released a series of about four strong solo albums and was the de facto face of mega-band Genesis.

He’s the voice of catchy hits “That’s All,” “Invisible Touch,” “In The Air Tonight,” “Abacab,” and “No Reply at All.”

But unlike Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen or Mick Jagger, he seemed to mope through rock stardom. His utter lack of swagger turned me off. He’d write an album of sappy ballads and say it was about his latest divorce when he could have easily written an upbeat collection about his newest mistress.

Worse, in a day when album cover art was something that mattered, all his solo albums featured facial close-ups so extreme you could detect without magnification the unevenness of that morning’s shave.

It was appalling. One I could maybe see. But four? It would have been one thing if it had been Olivia Newton John, but not Phil Collins.

He significantly faded over the past decade until he issued a surly retirement notice last year, saying, “"It's hardly surprising that people grew to hate me. I know people are sick of me.”

I imagine I’ll say something along those lines to my daughter when she realizes she can get up and pour her own damn cereal.

But what if it doesn’t? What if she and I share a special bond that endures through even the tumultuous dad-hating teen years?

Phil Collins would probably say that’s against all odds. He’d be right and one day I’ll have to face the music.

And when I do, I promise it’ll come from a distance respecting its personal space.

Change your headshot every 5,000 miles

I changed without fanfare my headshot to this blog for the third time this year. I knew it was time to switch because I’ve decided to alter it every time I refresh the oil in my vehicle or about every 5,000 or so miles.

If I were an interstate truck driver, the procedure could become tedious. But these days I have little occasion to stray far from home. My commute to my office/bar where I work/guzzle is 3.2 miles. Once they fix the damn bridge that commute will be shortened to 2.1 miles and the periods between new photo sessions will be even fewer.

See, I went about eight years without ever once changing my mugshot. I used the same one whenever some magazine said they needed it for their contributor’s page. It was a picture of me with a smile I’d characterize as wry.

When they added the little editor’s note exaggerating my accomplishments, I’d always consider the pairing on the page ham on wry. Those things are always designed to trick readers into believing they were really, really lucky to read something by a guy like me.

But that only happened maybe a couple times a year, not enough to bore either me or any reader alert enough to know I’d roused myself from my usual professional stupor to create something print-worthy.

Then I began to blog.

I’d see that face, that same face with that same wry smile, three or four times a week. The guy started looking like a stranger to me. Plus, I began to resent him for all he was that I was not.

He was youthful with no gray hairs. He looked more carefree, like he didn’t have two kids. Plus, and this drove me nuts, I could tell by looking that the 2001 me had at least twice as much in his 401-K plan as the 2009 me does.

I decided to kill him off.

For my most recent picture, I’d had a beard, scraggly hair and wore a thick gray pullover hoodie. This was okay for winter, but it started looking increasingly silly as spring warmed to summer.

One day I got so sick of it I got in the car and drove 328 miles just so I’d need to get the oil changed.

For now, I’m liking this one, especially the shirt. The smile’s nice, too. The dimples shadow nicely and the closed lip grin conceals the ragged skyline of chipped ivories.

One thing I’ve noticed is that as time continues to rake my face with its cruel claws, I keep backing further and further from the camera. A really honest warts ‘n’ all mugshot should be taken about two feet from the subject in a well-lit place.

But that might lead people comparing me to troll-like singer Phil Collins. He released about four collections in the 1980s with album covers showing pictures of his pumpkin-like noggin inches from the camera.

You’d see gaping pores, stray nose hairs, age spots. It was one of the most repulsive events in music -- and that was before you’d drop the needle on songs like “Su-Su-Sudio.”

There are lots of great headshots of lovely bloggers at places like www.RedRoom.com. One of my favorites shows author Matt Benyon Rees wearing a spy overcoat, a grim expression and brandishing a gun. Very cool.

He writes crime stories so the prop is appropriate.

What’s a guy like me, a self-professed humorist, supposed to do? Wear a fright wig and a big red clown’s nose?

Some people have such lovely headshots I can understand their reluctance to tinker.

Still, I believe it’s important to keep our pictures current to avoid any Dorian Gray revelations. I know it wouldn’t do for someone like me to show up -- cross your fingers -- on Oprah looking vastly different from how I look on blog pages and book jackets.

I want people to be happy for me and eager to hear what I have to say.

I don’t want them confused by my appearance and asking questions like: “Say, when did Phil Collins start writing books?”