Lamenting the inaugural mow

(754 words)

I have some disappointing news for those of you who live vicariously through me and my edgy existence.

Yesterday, I betrayed both you and everything for which this blog’s stands.

I gave up. I surrendered to grinding conformities.

Yes, I mowed my lawn.

You didn’t think I was going to say I accepted a full-time job, did you?

In some ways, cutting my grass May 7 is the far greater capitulation.

Getting a job, an aspect of living also popular among conformists, would make a lot of sense.

Cutting the grass makes none.

First of all, it burns gas and we still import a lot of fossil fuels from regimes hostile to America. So every time I cut the grass I believe I’m helping fund jihad.

Second, cutting it now only accelerates the need to cut the grass again. By cutting it yesterday, I’ve ensured it’ll need cut again in just four days.

That means I’ve cheated my happy existence out of two hours I could otherwise devote to either blogging, napping or sitting in a darkened tavern chatting with cheerful inebriates, the trio of non-productive pastimes that give me ample time to brainstorm theories like: “routine lawn care equals jihad.”

Third, and most important, the news that I’ve cut my grass bestows bragging rights upon friend Paul.

We’ve for years had a contest to see which of us is the last to mow our respective yards.

It’s maybe the silliest endeavor in which I participate all year — and that’s coming from a guy who answers, “Blog!” when asked what he does for a living.

Last year’s contest ended in controversy when Paul’s neighbor got so revolted over the appearance of his yard that he came over and did it himself while Paul laughed maniacally from behind the curtains.

He contended that since he didn’t cut it, it didn’t count.

It was the most divisive outcome since the year our electric garage door malfunctioned and my John Deere was for three weeks marooned like some wheeled green ship in a bottle.

But last year profoundly affected me. I didn’t cut my grass until May 27 and wound up cutting the lawn just nine times all summer. 

It was an epiphany. I realized the longer I could hold out, the less it’d need cut.

I only wish the same logic applied to things like toenails and nose hairs.

Emboldened, I figured this year I’d try and go clear through Flag Day before the inaugural mow, not to be confused with the inaugural Moe, which Stooge purists consider “Soup To Nuts.”

But I didn’t anticipate the residual and still-seething vitriol from last year’s triumph.

Josie, 14, said, “Please tell me you’re not still doing that stupid lawn contest again. It’s really embarrassing.”

That this hurt is obvious. What’s worse how poorly it bodes for her eventual reaction to my annual beard growing contest.

Val was more subtle. She asked if I could please at least trim around the front so she could enjoy seeing the Lilies of the Valley she planted in the mulch she spread (she has no trouble conforming to prevailing homeowner mores). 

I sensed she’d eventually ask if I could please trim around the front because it looks from inside like someone’d painted all the windows green.

My buddies were all involved, too. They were cutting their grass once every four or five days. 

One neighbor keeps his property looking just like an immaculate country club. That he just so happens to be Arnold Palmer and the property is Latrobe Country Club is besides the point.

Pressure was building.

It felt in my gut the way it feels when you’re blazing down the interstate with the needle hard on E and decide — screw it — I’m going to see if I can make it just one more exit.

In play in all this, as always, is my precarious financial situation. I’m booking speaking engagements, but those are months off. Times are hard.

I won’t prove my family worth until I return from the hunt and toss the slaughtered meat on the table.

What can I say? Some husbands secure understanding by plying their wives with jewelry and fancy clothes.

Me, I mow the lawn.

What stinks is the realization the one made most cheerful by this awful emasculation isn’t even anyone in my family.

Doggone it, it’s Paul.

Because he above all others knows that Thursday I severed something more important to guys like us than the top of our grass.

Related . . .

Victory lap in Mow-town

I may never cut my grass again

Growing concerns about grass, toenails

Reduce deficits: grow grass (not that kind)

My neighbor, my Deere

Stuck in a loveless marriage: Story of Randall & Joan

(875 words)

My eyes darted back and forth as I crept up the aisle of the Boeing 737 Southwest flight from Pittsburgh to Las Vegas.

My initial eagerness for an unassigned aisle seat was overcome when I was surprised to see a vacancy right behind the bulk head. Those extra six or seven inches is a veritable legroom extravaganza.

One problem: it was the dreaded middle seat.

Who’d be at my elbows would decide.

Window seat was a gruff looking old babe, maybe just north of 60. She stared out the window the way convicts who’ve been screwed by chump public defenders stare through the cell bars. 

Aisle seat looked even more standoffish. About the same age, he had the bearing of  someone who’d been in the military maybe 40 years ago.

As I was to learn somewhere over Nebraska, he was a war veteran, all right.

So with my choice of seats, what did I do?

I dove right into that middle seat between two people who appeared to have perfectly sour dispositions.

Why? Because I find sourly disposed passengers make perfect seat mates.

Although I prefer chatty folks in most any other situation, one next to me on a trans-continental flight would give me kinks in my neck, so I’d rather just stare into my book.

And that’s just what I did for the first 90 minutes when window seat piped up and said, “Randall, get my purse.”

At this, aisle seat got up, reached into the overhead bin, pulled out a big purple purse and handed it past me.

“Here,” he said.

They were married! To each other!

I couldn’t believe it. 

I tried to think of any reason my wife and I would sit separate on a cross-country plane ride and not acknowledge one another for nearly two hours. I came up blank.

Then I thought of a million reasons why we’d want to sit together, everything from making sly fun of the parade of absurd hairdos to wanting to hold hands in the event of a white-knuckle emergency.

So now I’m fascinated and attuned to any communication, verbal or non-verbal.

She pulls a book out of her big purple purse, but the cover jacket is reversed to conceal the book’s title. I squint out the corner of my eye and catch the title on a page: It’s “12 Words Can Change Your Brain: 12 Conversation Strategies to Build Trust, Resolve Conflict & Increase Intimacy.”

I wonder if one of them is, “Sit next to each other on the plane so you don’t have to grunt through strangers.”

I learned her name was Joan when the drink cart pulled up next to Randall. She was too immersed in her book about improving communications to notice he was trying to get her attention.

“Joan?”

She looked up and said, “Tomato juice.”

Those were the last words I heard either of them speak in either’s direction the remainder of the flight.

It’s a pity I’m a stoic on flights because it was an historic missed opportunity for me to stick my nose in someone else’s business.

I don’t know what I would have said to them, but I would have tried to help them focus on the sunny side of being together for so long, and that’s my assumption. 

What’s odd is I think because of my book, I’m being approached by people who think I have the answers to a happy marriage.

These people think I’m wise. That I’m well-adjusted and deserving of austere respect.

Note: my own wife never looks at me like that and she’s the inspiration for Colorful item No. 322: “Understand that a long marriage is a terrific antidote to excessive ego.”

I’m guessing these people aren’t reading the book carefully enough or they’d appreciate that the over-arching lesson of “Use All The Crayons!” is that most of us could benefit from a little less work and a lot more bourbon.

Just the other night a friend who was feeling a little down about life said he’s been morose because he realized that this might be all there is to life.

I think he wanted me to turn fortune teller and say, no, there’s so much more! And it’s just right around the corner!

You’re future holds harems! Gas back to $2.25 a gallon! The advent of the 20-hour work week and bosses who appreciate your endeavors with weeping bestowal of bonuses!

But, no, I’m afraid this is all there is. 

Life is short, riven with disappointment, each one greater than the last, leading inexorably to the grave.

That’s the most pessimistic line I’ve ever written -- maybe the most pessimistic line anyone’s ever written. And I believe it’s true.

I also believe that’s why you need to celebrate the many moments when life doesn’t suck.

Revel in your friends. Squeeze the ones you love. Laugh while you can. Understand that throughout the history of mankind life’s been a historic struggle and that at least most of us born in the 20th century had access to Three Stooges re-runs.

Enjoy it while you can because, man, that’s all there is.

You’re lucky in life if you have just one person who’ll sit next to you on the plane and hold your hand when you hit some turbulence.

Related . . .

• Travel writer hits the road

• Plane truths from a real road warrior

TV-holics prepare for bender (from 2009)

It says something about how topical the news has been that I've yet to write about a devastating personal crisis: our TV, the big boy, broke two weeks ago. But I can't blog today because, hallelujah, it's repaired and I'm bound to pick it up.

So I thought I'd re-post this lovenote to lowbrow television from 2009 in case anyone is missing my blog posts the way I miss having the TV (not possible).

Thanks for checking in!

My wife and I are the worst kinds of insufferable snobs who are always telling people at parties we never watch much TV. For some reason, this makes us feel culturally superior or at least equal to the people who lie back they never do either.

It’s all hooey, of course. We watch all the time. Not only do we watch, but we take it all so seriously that we’ve gotten into vicious public shouting spats in highbrow restaurants about whether Jack Bauer’s brutal tactics will unnecessarily cost fictional lives. She screams that national security gives Jack moral sanction to conduct interrogations that involve lopping off the fingers of enemy combatants and I scream that she doesn’t know Jack about Jack.

The fights will start all over again Sunday with the long-awaited return of Bauer and “24.” That will kick off a run of must-see viewing for us that will likely lead to reduced productivity, sleepless nights and months of neglect for the poor kiddos who’ll exist solely on the dubious sustenance of Pop Tarts, Cheetos and Fresca.

Within the next month or so, our nights will be filled with “American Idol,” “Lost,” “24,” and “Survivor.” Sure, they all fall in the lowbrow category, but they all look like “Masterpiece Theater” compared to my very favorite show of all time.

That would be the magnificent “3rd Rock from the Sun.”

You can stuff M*A*S*H in Major Frank Burns’s rat-infested foot locker. Take the gang from Seinfeld and have them spend a Twilight-Zone sort of eternity looking for lost cars in endless parking garages.

Sure, those are great shows, but there’s never been a funnier, more laugh-out-loud hilarious show than “3rd Rock,” which is currently making the evening rounds on TV Land starting at 11 p.m. EST.

The absurd premise is based on four aliens -- Tom, Dick, Harry and Sally Solomon -- who take human form and come to earth to study our habits. They end up in Rutherford, Ohio, where Dr. Dick Solomon, played by John Lithgow, teaches incomprehensible physics to dimbulb students and craves earthly delights with his office mate, Dr. Mary Albright, played by the wonderful Jane Curtin.

The cast is uniformly excellent, but the peerless Lithgow steals the show.

The so-called great actors of the day leave me utterly cold. To me, acting normal isn’t acting. I sit mere barstools away from six guys who on any given day can out-surly the acclaimed Sean Penn. These guys act like they hate their jobs, their ex-wives, the man we elected president and anyone who cheers for the Chargers to beat the Steelers on Sunday (I’m right there with them on that last one).

If they ever give an Oscar for chronic misery, I have a barful of nominees ready for the red carpet, a unwelcome stroll they’ll reflexively say they hate.

But my pulse races anytime I see truly great overacting. And there’s never been more over-the-top overacting than that which is done by the incomparable Lithgow, in my opinion the greatest overactor ever.

The episode where Dick Solomon takes over as the relentlessly pompous director of the high school version of Romeo & Juliet should be required viewing in acting schools that have been churning out generation after generation of robotic actors who’ve been brainwashed into thinking guys like Moe, Larry and Curly are lowbrow.

Watch for it. That particular episode is called “Romeo, Juliet & A Dick.”

That’s another thing. What must have been intended to be a great subversive inside joke is now splashed all over the screen anytime a viewer checks out the program guide. Nearly every episode includes the name Dick in the title.

Some examples: “Father Knows Dick;” “Will Work For Dick;” “Eleven Angry Men and a Dick;” “I Brake For Dick;” “I Enjoy Being a Dick;” “Angry Dick,” and the monumentally relevant, “These Dicks They Are A Changin’.”

For those of you raised by sensitive sorts in cloistered environments, each of these titles is intentionally freighted with a double meaning. And to lowbrows like me, each is uproariously funny.

I doubt the brilliant producers of the show ever imagined the viewers would see the actual titles flashed up on the screen of a station watched by children, but youthful innocence has a short shelf life these days.

So, no, we don’t watch much TV. Just the shows mentioned above supplemented with near-nightly viewings of “3rd Rock.” I purchased the entire six-season run (1996-02) when it came out on DVD three years ago. It remains one of my most cherished possessions.

Val loves it, too, but she takes exception when I say the “Romeo, Juliet & A Dick” episode is the best. She prefers “Dick ‘The Mouth’ Solomon” where Tommy and Sally fall under the sway of a guido they mistakenly believe to be a vicious mob hitman. She insists it’s the funniest “3rd Rock” ever.

On this point, we disagree.

You should see the gape-jawed stares we get in highbrow restaurants when I scream at her that she doesn’t know Jack about Dick.

I hate my dog

I wonder if there is a hell for dog owners who are mean to their pets.

I don’t mean like Michael Vick mean.

I’d never put my dog in a pen to fight another suitable opponent, which in this case would be an ill-tempered hamster.

I’m not inhumane to my dog. Just rude. I treat him the way people used to treat dogs before they started treating dogs like children.

We live in times of rampant venom. Hostility reigns. There are wars, ethnic hatreds and daily assaults on refined manners that makes life such a heartbreaking endeavor to those of us not raised by wolves.

Yet, I never stoop to incivility. I treat all my fellow man with high regard. I encourage their success, sympathize with their failures and cheerlead their every effort.

Not so with Snickers, the dog with the two-syllable name I never fail to address with fewer than six. We were told he was a little pug, a little shih tzu, maybe a little terrier.

The best I can tell is Snickers is composed of a little Moe, a little Larry and a little Curly. Individually, I love them, but imagine if you combined Moe’s meanness, Curly’s violence and Larry’s stupidity.

You’d have an unholy mix like something old Doc Frankenstein would have conjured in his lab.

He’s high-strung and nervous, the Andy Dick of dogs. As I’ve said before, he’s the kind of dog more likely to ignite blazing fires than cuddle up beside them.

Still, I know many humans who behave like that and I tolerate them with equanimity, albeit an equanimity softened by multiple bourbons and mindless nods meant to mislead, yes, I’m listening and, yes, I care.

The girls love him.. But I’ve never been as frustrated with another creature in my entire life. I’ve had angry run-ins with DMV clerks, surly mechanics and idiot editors.

But, even in the heat of dispute, none of those bone-headed miscreants has ever expressed their contempt by waking me up out of a sound sleep to pee on my bare foot at 5 a.m.

Please, send no tips, no advice. We’ve done it before. We have the crate. We have the bell by the door. We have the treats. And the only time I ever say anything positive to the 16-pound doggie is when he successfully targets the yard for his relief.

“Yeah, Snickers! You’re the best! Good boy!”

I’ve never cheered for Penguin captain Sydney Crosby as enthusiastically as I do for Snickers when he craps in the yard.

We’ve had the dog in the parks and are often met by friends and strangers who say how adorable he is. The girls all gush in agreement.

“I hate him,” I say. “He wakes us up every night at 5 a.m. He’s wild. He barks when a single leaf falls to the ground. If I’m out having fun someplace, I have to arbitrarily end the fun so we can go home before his thimble-sized bladder bursts.”

What’s been heartening to me is how many people share my hatreds. Here’s a little secret: in every partnership, one person or the other hates the dog and how much the other fusses over it.

In rare successful marriages, the hatreds merge.

“We got rid of our dogs when our daughter was 2 and it was just too much,” confided one friend. “I felt sad for about 40 minutes, then felt a zen-like peace. I told my husband how I felt and he high-fived me.”

My wife was away this week and it was hell. I’m not cut out for the Mr. Mom routine, especially when the baseball playoffs are on.

My mother came out to give me a break and by the happiest of coincidences it happened the night of Roy Halladay’s historic no-hitter. When I got home from the bar, the house was in chaos. Snickers was loose and had peed in the kitchen.

Val called later and asked if my mother hated Snickers as much as me.

“Ah, honey, nobody hates Snickers . . .” I said.

“How sweet! I knew a little bonding time would do the trick.”

“You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say, ‘Nobody hates Snickers . . . as much as I do.’”

In some corners of the world, calling a person a dog is the most vile insult.

It goes to show how I can find human harmony with all cultures.

Snickers is a real dog.

I just can’t fathom what kind.

Obama's bow wow

President Barack Obama is returning from an overseas diplomatic mission in which he’s now being criticized for being too diplomatic.

Yes, it’s true.

His courtly bow before Japanese Emperor Akihito was deemed demeaning by that Miss Manners of international relations, Dick Cheney.

Cheney said it “showed weakness” for a U.S. president to observe such formality with one of our closest allies, overlooking the fact that Cheney’s old hero, Richard Nixon did a similar shoe stare in 1971 before Emperor Hirohito, a man who personally ordered the dastardly Pearl Harbor attack.

I’m a fan of the formal bow and do it whenever I can. I prefer it for sanitary reasons to the hand shake or, gadzooks, the buss on the cheek, social intimacies with which we’re all about to be bombarded during the holiday season.

It would be so cool if at some upcoming Christmas party instead of greeting everyone with a weak, “Hey, man,” handshake, I instead with a graceful flourish broke into a sweeping bow that charmed all the ladies and made the men simmer with resentment.

Of course, if I were to do that properly, I’d require polished knee boots, a sword scabbard and a hat adorned with a big spread of peacock feathers. The sum result would guarantee I’d be ostracized and forced to sit in the corner for the duration of the party all by myself watching football rather than making microscopic small talk with tipsy sorts of strangers.

I know. I don’t see a downside either.

The Cheney rebuke was surprising in particular because Cheney was mum during one of the oddest diplomatic dosey-does any of us had ever seen. That happened in 2004 when George W. Bush and King Fahd held hands like nervous virgins on prom night during a garden stroll across Bush’s Crawford ranch.

The hetero hombre in me was unsettled and wanted to break out in nervous laughter, but the romantic in me couldn’t help but notice, yeah, they made a really sweet couple.

People less sophisticated than I disparaged it as “gay.” That again puts me at odds with the general public.

I encourage male-to-male handholding in times of spiritual tumult, like when the Pittsburgh Steelers have a long third down and goal. For years, I alone have stood up in the bar during pivotal game moments and exhorted, “Alright, there’s lots riding on this play. Let’s all hold hands and channel positive thoughts out to quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Who’s with me!”

No one’s ever picked up that communal baton, but I think I’m making progress. Fewer and fewer bullies are outright suggesting they pause the action and take me out in the parking lot to beat the living crap out of me.

All this nitpicking over simple gestures overlooks what for me is the best ice breaker. Yes, I’m from the pull-my-finger school of diplomacy.

Sure, this works great with uncles and children. But no one’s ever tried extending the finger to our allies on an international level -- and for the sake of clarity I don’t mean George W. Bush and that finger.

Just imagine if instead of bowing, President Obama slyly asked, “Emperor, I invite you to partake in a beloved custom from my country. Go ahead -- wink, wink -- Pull my finger.”

This works because he’ll either laugh hysterically at the result, thus guaranteeing a requisite level of humanity we seek in an ally, or else he’ll be mortally outraged.

I’d be ready for the reaction. If laughter ensued, I’d embrace my ally and anticipate a long and fruitful relationship.

If anger or embarrassment was the result, why I’d have no choice but to immediately sever ties.

And for that you need some really, really big scissors handy.

When I say cut ties, I mean cut ties.

Yes, there’s no international situation that couldn’t benefit from an injection of a little Three Stooges mentality.

Nyuck, nyuck.