A Kinder, Gentler Space Man

It was brought to my attention Tom Leahy, Jr. died recently. I am sure a lot of people reading that sentence are not sure who Mr. Leahy was, but if you were a child living in central or western Kansas (or southwestern Nebraska) during the 1960s you would recognize his face immediately. Tom Leahy, Jr. was Major Astro.

Major Astro hosted an afterschool cartoon show on what was at the time KARD television. He introduced Yakky Doodle Duck, Snagglepuss and Astro Boy (no relation) from a set designed to look like a space station. Astronauts were the ultimate in cool during the Major’s heyday, the sixties into the early seventies. My memory isn’t what it used to be but I really think he also showed that truly odd marionette adventure series Thunderbirds. Now there was a meeting I wish I could have attended.

“Hello, Mr. Producer, we would like to have you bankroll a new show we are developing. It features a family, a former astronaut and his five sons, who are super smart scientists and adventurers. These guys have space ships and submarines to fight evil all over the planet and even beyond our atmosphere.”

“That sounds marvelous, but it also sounds very expensive. I mean six adventurous male leads and all the hardware you describe would require a lot of money.”

“Ahhh, but there is the brilliance of our plan. We don’t use people.”

“What do you use?”

“Marionettes!”

“I get it! James Bond meets Pinocchio.”

I loved watching Major Astro’s show. I remember one of the few times I got in big trouble and was sent to my room I was OK with the punishment until I realized Major Astro was going to be on. I used every stealth tactic I knew (which at the age of seven probably was comprised entirely of being quiet and crawling on the floor) to position myself just outside of my room behind a living room chair so I had a mostly unobstructed view of the television. This is a testament to my love for cheesy cartoon TV anthologies and to the truly uncontentious childhood I led as this was probably the biggest act of rebellion I ever displayed toward my parents.

My family had a brush with Astro greatness. My dad was the city manager in McCook, Nebraska before moving to Hutchinson. We got Major Astro from the Oberlin, Kansas station. Well, the Major was coming to McCook as part of a promotion for the opening of a department store or some such festivity and for some reason passing understanding my dad was the guy picking him up at the airport. I was not very old so I have no memory of this, but my oldest brother was allowed to accompany my dad and even got to hold Major Astro’s space helmet, an unparalleled thrill for a pre-teenager during the height of the Space Age.

Really, think about it. A kid from a small town in Nebraska gets not only to meet a guy who is on television five days a week, making him a star of greater magnitude than even Adam West who only managed to be on two nights a week, but also gets to share a car ride and HOLD HIS SPACE HELMET! Talk about everything being “All systems go”! That had to totally rock.

Here is the real kicker to this whole story. While McCook was getting all stirred up because Major Astro was visiting, all its children abuzz with excitement and all sorts of pomp and circumstance planned for the day somebody else was arriving in that sleepy Nebraska town. Somebody who would go virtually unnoticed. Somebody who was just there to go pheasant hunting. Somebody whose name would go unrecognized by nearly the entire 4 to 12 year old demographic being catered to with the visit from the 40-something-year-old announcer turned kiddie show host.

Who was this stranger you ask? Only a real freaking astronaut. Only the first American to go into space. Only one of the original Mecury 7 astronauts. Only a man who would soon walk on the moon, actually walk on the moon, and return to Earth. Alan Shepard was in McCook and nobody paid any attention to him. We were all too busy with Major Astro.

I do not tell that story to denigrate Major Astro. He really was more important in the lives of thousands of children. His show was something we don’t see anymore. He was calm, polite and fatherly. Kids programming today seldom values such attributes. Thanks, Mr. Leahy.

Maybe not what, but rather who

There are days I am not terribly happy with all the circumstances of my existence. It’s human nature to look out into the world and think others have it better than I do. The conundrum is just who would l want to be.

People think being stinking rich would make life as good as it gets. If that’s the case I guess I want to be Bill Gates. It would mean I would never have to worry about anything, and I do mean anything, breaking ever again. You can accuse me of an epic lack of imagination but really that is all I wish for in regards to monetary wealth. I want everything I own to work and if it breaks I just want to be able to call “the guy” to fix it. Better yet, I could buy a new what ever it was without having to worry about getting to the end of the month and realizing fixing the air conditioner meant having Ramen noodles for breakfast and lunch and dinner. I make a decent living but I also have three children so poverty at a moment’s notice is not out of the question. Tapping into Mr. Gates’ savings account means if the power steering goes out I buy a new car. The computer the kids use goes belly up I buy them each iPads (which is rather sacrilegious if I am using Microsoft money to buy them). My refrigerator goes on the fritz I fly ice in from Finnish glaciers. Both legs break I just hire guys to carry me places.

I don’t think I want to be Bill Gates. Too much pressure having all that money. You’re always expected to do things with it…finance the solution to global warming…finance the re-design of the American education system…finance a series of plastic surgery improvements for our 45-year-old third cousin, Myrtle, who is convinced she could be a movie star if she looked a little more like Sandra Bullock as opposed to the movie star she is more frequently mistaken for, Ernest Borgnine.

Maybe I should take my cue from good old Myrtle. I’ll trade places with a big time movie star. Who? I could go young and heartthrob-like and be Ashton Kutcher. He is popular across multiple generations and that is just in his own bedroom. I am about the same age as George Clooney. He seems smart and comfortable in his own skin. I don’t think I’d be as comfortable. I’d spend all day looking in the mirror thinking, “dang, I’m good looking.” Why not make a much bigger leap and be a famous actress? I could be Julia Roberts. That wouldn’t work (see the statement about Mr. Clooney and multiple a hundred fold). How about Charlie Sheen? Excuse me, I think I need to go take about seven showers..ugh..icky.

I am not flamboyant enough to be an above-the-title movie star, but making a living working in the creative arts is attractive. Rather than aim into the Brad Pitt stratosphere I think I’ll trade places with Kevin Pollak.

I am sure there are many of you out there thinking, “Who is Kevin Pollak?” Mr. Pollak started his career as a stand-up comic which has always been a profession I admired. (I tried it once and since I stopped there you can make an assumption how it went.) He became an actor and was in some pretty big movies (Willow, A Few Good Men, The Usual Suspects). I recently rediscovered him on the internet. He hosts an interview show which is streamed live on the web and later available on iTunes. He interviews creative, funny people and he does so for well over an hour. These interviews are interesting and cause more than their fair share of giggles and laughs, but best of all they are not the four and half minutes of fluff we see on most every talk show. They are opportunities to understand how talented people became talented people and how talented people got others to see they had talent and get into the show biz world.

So, if I were am asked what I want to be when I grow up the answer would change from when I was nine-years-old (starting running back for the Kansas City Chiefs) to a mid-level actor, extremely able comedian, with his own talk show on the interweb (his phrase) who seems to be playing as much as working.

Christopher Pyle would like to say to Mr. Pollak if he happens to see this: If I cannot be you I am willing to work with you. Maybe if your legs break I can help carry you places. Kevin can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Kids to Adults...Lost in Translation

A very random and somewhat classless thought occurred to me when I got home from work today. I was the first person home, well that’s not true, my oldest daughter had been home a great part of the day so let’s just say I was the first person home who thought the dogs would need to go outside since they hadn’t been out for several hours. I took them outside and the older, larger, smarter (but only because the younger, smaller, dumber dog has the IQ of a jar of paste) dog took about three steps to get all four legs in the grass and then proceeded to undertake the task for which I brought him outside in the first place. That is when two thoughts went through my mind. The first thought was I had been correct in my assumption that the eldest child had not taken the dogs out for quite a while as the number one undertaking (pun intended) proved a certain amount of canine leg crossing and dancing about had been taking place prior to my return home. The second thought and this is the not-so-classy bit I referred to earlier, is I should have been a tad more selfish and made absolutely sure I did not have to go myself before heading out into the back yard with the dogs as witnessing this process suddenly added a certain amount of urgency to my own world. Lesson learned.

Now on to our regularly scheduled column…

Last weekend I was an audience member for a dance recital. This featured dozens of children ranging from seventeen-years-old on down to learned-to-walk-about-twenty-minutes-before-curtain. Even though the older kids were much more adept at the actual dancing the tiny kids were my favorite. Most of them made it appear finding the beat of the songs to which they were dancing was harder to find than a shred of decency in a Goldman Sachs executive. They stood there watching the teacher go through the choreography. Some of them realized their task was to ape the movements of the bigger person, others randomly moved various body parts in an asynchronous manner and still others stood there transfixed, like a Precious Moments doll in headlights. It didn’t really matter though. Each and every one of them exuded a preternatural level of cuteness.

The auditorium had to have over three hundred people in it for what had been billed as a three hour dance recital. I am sure there were many people who remembered Gilligan’s group was just going on a three hour tour and ended up stuck for 98 episodes. I have to admit I snuck in my iPod in case the afternoon drug on just a bit too much because my own personal kid was part of the very first dance and then would not be on stage again until the second to last routine. I never resorted to my contraband entertainment because the kids had obviously worked very hard in preparation and they were truly fun to watch.

We are often told our most precious natural resource is our children and afternoons like this one bring that idea home to me. I like children, most days. The wonder the younger ones possess is so much fun to observe. They think things are cool. Why else would they constantly demand you look at each and everything they notice or do? “Daddy, look at me riding my tricycle!” “Daddy, look at that rainbow!” “Daddy, look at me smearing peanut butter all over the computer keyboard!” “Mommy, look at Daddy crying in the corner!”

Let’s look at other natural resources. Water is the very life of the planet and if you mix it with a certain granulated powder you have Surfin’ Berry Punch Kool-Aid. Gold is a shiny rock that by itself is somewhat pleasing to the eye but mine it, melt it and shape it and it becomes jewelry which has ruined many a young man’s bank account.

This ruining of natural resources is what I fear we do entirely too often with children. We have such a large supply of them in their raw state but then we don’t seem to know how to process them properly. Like oil there is great potential for usefulness in the world but then instead of carefully collecting and refining them we willy-nilly go about the process and then we’re surprised when there are suddenly hundreds of thousands of adults spewing all over the planet making a frightful mess of things.

That's Gonna Sting for A While

A Cleveland man complaining of tightness in his chest was found to have an elephant standing on him. The man said he had experienced some discomfort, but had no idea there was a pachyderm perched on his pectoral muscles. Okay, I made that up. It is pretty preposterous, but is it any more outlandish than the man who had to go to the dentist to find out he had shot a four inch nail into his jaw? It was there for six days before he sought help. Not only should this guy never be handed a nail gun again but the most dangerous object he should ever be in control of is one of those Kentucky Fried Chicken sporks.

Most everyone has had an accident which resulted in an embarrassing injury. I broke my collarbone when I was in fifth grade. I told everyone I broke it high jumping, which was true. What I failed to tell them was the bar had been set about 15 inches above the ground when my Fosbury truly flopped and resulted in a clavicular fracture. At least I didn’t wait six days to seek medical attention. Actually, my mom made me go. Even at the age of eleven I had the male predisposition to “tough it out.”

Men don’t like going to the doctor. Many psychologists think it stems from a deep seated dislike for giving up control by admitting one needs help. Others think it grows out of a sense one is not a real man if he admits to pain. All men know it isn’t either of those reasons. It actually boils down to one thing – doctors are creepy. They use small metal implements which remind us all of that scene in Marathon Man when Laurence Olivier is asking Dustin Hoffman, “Is it safe?” (man, that still causes ever sphincter muscle in my body to squeeze tighter than then skin on Joan Rivers’ face). It is not unreasonable for men to do all they can to avoid medical attention. If a person told you he was going to make you wear a big paper towel, sit in a tiny cubicle for forty minutes with nothing to do but skim seven year old copies of Brides magazine, then tell you you’re overweight and to stop doing and eating everything you truly enjoy doing and eating, all for the low, low price of 100 dollars you’d tell him there was no way you would do that. The real miracle of modern medicine is not the advancement in technology or pharmaceuticals. It is the fact that whole cubicle scenario is something people do, frequently.

Early man survived without modern medicine. The fact the life expectancy of early man was just slightly longer than the number of weeks the Kansas City Royals can even pretend they are contenders in the division shouldn’t worry us. Can you blame men for having the somewhat Cro-Magnon mentality to just rub some dirt in it and walk it off? It is much simpler. Men like simple. Women like complicated. Whereas men look for the most direct solution to any problem, which is often ignoring the existence of a problem, women enjoy the twelve step programs. If admitting it is the first step, than men are definitely using the elevator.

The life expectancy of a man born in 1960 is just over 66 years, and the life expectancy of a woman born in 1960 is nearly 73 years. That seven year discrepancy might just be attributable to a woman’s willingness to go to the doctor and actually try to take care of herself. I suppose it might also have something to do with the fact that many men enjoy doing things like lighting fireworks with the cigar they have clamped between their teeth after having sucked down enough beer to founder Secretariat. Self-preservation is not the top characteristic for the average American male. Guys do not tend to think, “If I get the speedometer up to 110 M.P.H. and try to jump over that train blocking the street I might just die.” More likely they think things like: “It would be soooo cool if I could get my Festiva over the top of that Burlington Northern.”

I suppose it will take quite a bit to make men change their attitudes towards healthy living habits. Until then, guys, remember, “turn your head and cough” is better to hear than “it will cost $55,000 to remove that rearview mirror from your forehead.”

Is "Paternal" Latin for Clueless

This weekend my youngest child will turn twelve years old. I will not annoy everyone by typing in the full lyrics for the song “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof, but holy Tevye, Batman! Where did the time go?

Even though the term father could be used to describe me for 17 years now I make no claims that I know how to do this job. There have been fathers for generations. Actually, there have been fathers for as long as there have been generations. Even though people have been practicing the art and science of parenthood for ages nobody has all the answers. Oh, sure, Dr. Spock tried to write the owner’s manual for the little beggars but after a while even that book is more useful as a device to measure if the bars on the crib are close enough together to avoid injury than anything else. (Warning long-winded non sequitur may be closer than it appears: It is amazing I lived through my childhood. I had a crib with bars I could fit my head between. There where wall sockets in my house without little plastic prong thingees shoved into them. I played with an Erector Set which was totally comprised of sharp-edged metal bars. My Major Matt Mason action figures had accessories sold separately which could just as easily have been labeled choking hazards sold separately. And my favorite breakfast cereal was Lead Paint Flakes with its lovable cartoon mascot Brain Damaged Idiot depicted in bright colors on every box.)

I have been forced to look for guidance where the majority of people seek their role models for everything in life: television. I tried to be Ward Cleaver but the cardigan sweaters were too itchy. I thought about emulating Cliff Huxtable but those sweaters were itchy and ugly. Charles Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie seemed to be capable and had really great hair. That and the fact that he was light years more intelligent than the Pa in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (“There’s a blizzard a comin’ I guess I better go to town and leave my young children and wife to deal with it on their own.”) made him a good candidate until I found out I was going to have to follow that up with being in Highway to Heaven.
This was going to be harder than I thought. Full House Dad? Too wimpy. Family Ties Dad? Too in-touch-with-your-feelings-y? Eight is Enough Dad? Too oblivious of the real world? My Two Dads Dads? Too many of them in one house.

That’s the thing about being a parent; you can’t really use anyone else’s experiences to guide you. This is probably due to the fact no two children, fathers, or situations (even similar situations hours apart) are ever truly the same. That fact is really starting to tick me off.

I have to adjust to the fact that my children are starting to leave the truly childish existence I am used to, not good at, just used to, behind. This is just one of the myriad of things my wife is better at than I am. A while back I had between 7 and 249 teenagers in my basement. Okay, it was twelve, but that’s within the range I mentioned. (Hyperbole, a perfectly acceptable writer’s tool.) Anyway, my wife came into the room I was hiding, uh, working in. She was excited our house was the “go to” house for my daughters and their friends. She was focused on the facts that our kids were in our house, they had friends who were good kids, their friends saw our house as an acceptable place to be, and we knew they were all safe. I was focused on the facts that there were several hairy legged boys near my girls, I was paying for the snacks and soda pop they were drinking, and since I am an old man with a job I would be trying to sleep as they were raucously laughing below me.

I need to stop worrying and enjoy the ride. I am very lucky because I genuinely like my children. The more time I spend out in the world the more often I find there is a smaller and smaller percentage of people I really want to spend time with. Maybe that is why people have children. It is not some primordial urge to keep the species from extinction but rather a selfish desire to create people we don’t immediately want to smack across the cheek with a sock full of lard.

Does He Play Well with Others?

The longest gestation period for a land mammal is 22 months. That is how long it takes before Mama Elephant finally gets to met little Dumbo. (Little Know Fact #1: It isn’t until the 21st month that a pregnant elephant will say, “Do these ears make me look fat?”) That is in the world of natural sciences. In the world of artistic creation the gestation periods are often much longer.

It was April 17th, 2008 when I typed the first sentence of a stage play. Two years and one week later that play will make its debut on the stage of the Depot Theater in Dodge City, Kansas. (Little Known Fact #2: I also gained weight through this gestation process. It wasn’t from the retention of water but more from the soda pop and junk food which is a required part of a writer’s regimen.)

The actual writing is a lonely pursuit. You sit in a room all by yourself doing the work. In my case this usually consists of short bursts of typing punctuating longer periods of staring at the computer screen, reaching for snacks (see Little Known Fact #2), reaching for the keyboard and then not typing anything having though better of it, allowing myself one quick internet surf to see the score of the ballgame, bringing up iTunes and selecting a different playlist which might very well prove to be just the creative stimulus needed to start writing again and the occasional giggle when I actually think of something I think is funny. Hard to believe it took two whole years to finish the play isn’t it?

I used the word lonely to describe the writing process. That word has a negative connotation which doesn’t fit how I feel about it. I truly like being alone. I like being alone for prolonged periods of time. I spent a great deal of my young adulthood alone. Not in a pathetic lonely guy way or a creepy Ted Kaczynski treatise writing bomb construction way but mostly because there were not a great many people I wanted to spend time with. In the interest of full disclosure there was no line forming at my door of people wanting to spend time with me either.
This is a conundrum I would think many writers face. They like being alone and anonymous but they want their work to be out amongst large numbers of people. I do not want to be famous but I would love the stuff I write to be well known, and I would even hope that it would be admired. There is no pipeline I can tap into to make that happen. I have to engage in interpersonal activity to get what I write beyond the “documents” file of my computer.

The positive side of trying to work in a creative, or some might even say, artistic world is you often deal with people possessing a great generosity of spirit. The play being mounted at the Depot has given me an opportunity to get together a talented, giving, creative and guaranteed not to cause any nasty side effects group of people. The early rehearsals ran beyond the expected end time, not because we weren’t working on our common goal or because there was contention and argument but rather because we found ourselves giggling so much.

As much as I like to work alone when an endeavor so completely dependent upon effective collaboration is populated by people willing to pull their own weight, people who are dedicated to fully employing all their skills, people who value the other people they are working with, and people who can quote Young Frankenstein as easily as they can recite their own address the very oxygen in the room is enriched and all the positive endorphins go screaming through my bloodstream as if they are powered by rocket engines revving up to escape velocity. To put it in simpler terms: It is so cool!

At the end of the run I will return to my cave and hunker down with my computer, root beer and vanilla sandwich cookies to arrange and re-arrange words in hopes of making myself laugh. If I am truly lucky I will be allowed to share those words with others and give them a smile or a giggle and if the creative gods wish to bless me beyond what I deserve I will get another chance to experience a project like this with the caliber of people I am sharing my evenings with right now.

Not all scales stand for justice

I think I might have made a fatal error. Now that I am well on the “closer to fifty than to forty” side of the demographic charts there are things I am supposed to do in order to be sure I stay in good health. The fatal error I refer to is I have started to do those things. I now hurt.

I’m getting ahead of myself. It all started soon after the New Year. No, I did not make a resolution to be healthier but it seemed like everyone one around me at work had. They were all discussing diets and exercise plans and a bunch of people threw some money into a pot to see who could lose the most weight over a period of time. I stayed strictly on the periphery of these activities. Until one day, out of a curiosity born of hearing all the healthy talk, I decided to actually get on a scale.

Now, I am sure I am not alone when I say I prefer my weight to be some sort of theoretical number like something Fibonacci would work with or Euclidean algorithms or the number of fully rational, well-read individuals sitting ringside at a professional wrestling event. I harken back to a time when I was getting a new driver’s license. The DMV lady asked for my weight and when I paused, not so much out of embarrassment but more from genuine ignorance, she smiled and said the blank on the form did not, in fact, say actual weight. So I made up a semi-reasonable amount and that is the number on my license to this day. It was closer to being “actual” at that time, but today, not so much.

Anyway, I got on the scale and was surprised. I mean this was a number I won’t even represent in print using Roman numerals. It was a number larger than I had ever seen before in these circumstances. Don’t get me wrong. Richard Simmons was not going to show up on my doorstep with a work crew dedicated to cutting a hole in the wall big enough to winch me out of in order to get me to a clinic.

The charts for a person my height indicate my weight put me into the overweight category, not the “obese” category nor the “apply for your own zip code” category. However, when I looked at the optimum weight category for a man of my age and height it made me downright nostalgic. I remember being that weight. I was that weight when Bush was President. OK, it was the first George Bush. OK, it was when he was Vice President, but I can still remember it. So back off Jack Lalanne.

While I realize it is quite likely true that a much higher proportion of the general population of the United States is overweight there seems to be too much of an obsession with it. There is a blitzkrieg of marketing aimed at losing weight. There are exercise gurus, diet foods, diet programs, diet supplements, healthy foods, pharmaceuticals, and even a reality television show all revolving around going from bigger to smaller. Doctors have also gotten into the mix. Personally I am convinced they all got together a few years back and added a new sentence to the Hippocratic Oath. After all the “I swears” and “I wills” they stuck in the following: “and, oh, by the way, tell them they’re fat.”

After I saw my weight I decided I needed to just be smarter about things. I drink way too much soda pop. Yes, I know it is bad for you. Both of my daughters have done the science fair project where you put nails in dishes of pop and watch them get eaten away by the corrosive materials. Usually, I just told my kids I wasn’t held together with nine penny nails so I was fine. So the first step was to cut down on consuming the fizzy drinks.

Next I decided to get some purposeful exercise. I am bored with exercise machines and walking miles a day is not easy in Kansas weather so I started playing basketball. I do it by myself but since I am such a crummy shot it is very aerobic because I spend the majority of time running, chasing the ball after it caroms off the backboard at odd angles.

Now that I am so healthy can someone explain why my legs hurt and why I am always hungry. It might just be easier to be fat.

Self-Centered Doesn't Mean Properly Balanced

There are times when a person has to face harsh realities. This is one of those times. I did some soul searching recently and came to a conclusion which does not put me in a good light. I’m selfish. Truly, there are times I am a real clam and just last Wednesday I was a full-fledged mollusk. Wait a minute. I think I got that mixed up. Those things wouldn’t make me a selfish person. Those things would make me a shellfish person. Anyway, I realized I have stronger selfish impulses than I thought. The issue is not that these impulses exist or that I too frequently follow through with them. The friction in my emotional life is I hardly ever allow myself to act on them.

There are the selfish impulses that no member of a civilized society should act upon. Like the ones which occur when the person talking to you is blathering on about some molehill they have morphed into something of Everestian proportions. You know the selfish impulse I mean. The one which plays out in your mind like this: you take a sock full of lime Jell-O and give the person a solid clout across the chops. I would never behave in such a violent manner. (Well, other than that one time I socked a man in Reno just to watch him cry.)

The problem is I am a fully grown responsible upstanding member of society and we all know how much that stinks. There is just enough of the old puritanical work ethic existing in me to cause me to deny myself the base pleasures of life. This means I can’t buy the latest sports car to satisfy my desire to be genuinely cool (people who know me just giggled because the sports car wouldn’t do it). Instead I have to make sure my children have food, shelter and proper medical care. What a bummer.

All whining aside, I have to say I will never be in the major leagues of selfish behavior. I would have to go a long way to rival such top tier selfish people as the stars of reality television shows, your average toddler and what now seems to be the most myopic group of ego-centric folks moving amongst us, politicians.

(There will now be a slight pause as I climb onto my soapbox.)

My father had a way of describing certain folks. “They know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” This describes the Kansas legislature. They are consistently all excited about cutting taxes so they can appear heroic to the people who will vote them back into office. However they fail to realize government needs money in order to do the things which are of genuine value for the greater good of the state.

Case in point: education. The state has cut funding to education. Let me rephrase that. They have cut funding to children. The amount promised to each Kansas student was cut almost 13% and this was after districts made their budgets. (I don’t know about you but if my paycheck was cut 13% I’d have to re-do my budget quite a bit and we’re not just talking about eating out less often.)

The Kansas 2010 Commission was created a few years back, when the Supreme Court called the legislature on the carpet for shirking its Constitutional requirement of adequately funding schools. Its job was to investigate education in Kansas and describe its needs. The legislature authorized the commission and then promptly ignored everything it said. They ignored it because it stated in no uncertain terms that the legislature was derelict in its mandate to properly fund students in this state.

This brings me back to the selfish theme. The people we elect to do the unpleasant things and be the grownups are not squashing their selfish impulses. They want the sports car. They have created over a billion dollars in tax breaks over the last few years (according to the 2010 commission) which would have paid for much of the education budget promised but then reneged upon. I venture to bet that they did so to get re-elected not because it was the responsible thing to do.

My suggestion is if the people in Topeka decide to cut funding to children yet again (which is quite probable) we all get our Jell-O socks and knock some sense into them. I know this is a humor column but this time I’m not kidding.

Scare up some ideas

I have been thinking recently about combining the works of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Navin R. Johnson.

I have probably confused some of my readers with an unfamiliar name. One man is known as a brilliant speaker, a man of conviction dedicated to enhancing of the lives of millions of people, a man ahead of his time who brought the rest of the world forward with his sheer force of will and the other is Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Joke writing 101: the unexpected turnaround.)

For those of you who spent too much time in movie theaters in the late seventies you will recognize the name Navin R. Johnson as the character played by Steve Martin in “The Jerk”. There were dozens of fabulous quotes from that movie: “The new phone books are here!” and “He hates these cans. Stay away from the cans.” But my personal favorite soliloquy of silliness has to be when his life goes to pot and as he leaves his mansion he claims he doesn’t need anything from his former life and then proceeds to pick an odd variety of things that he really does need. It goes something like this:

Well I'm gonna go then. And I don't need any of this. I don't need this stuff, and I don't need you. I don't need anything except this. [picks up an ashtray] And that's it and that's the only thing I need, is this. I don't need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need. And that's all I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that's all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair.

This brings me to my idea of combining the philosophical musings of Navin and one of the most famous quotes from the 32nd President of the United States: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

If President Roosevelt were a practicing politician today he would have pulled a Navin and kept talking. I am guessing it would have gone something like this.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, and we should also be more than a little worried about global warming. Oh, and the health care system is in a right awful state. There are terrorists all over the place with dynamite sewn into their Fruit of the Looms. The stimulus package is full of pork barrel spending and none of it came to our state. We are inexorably changing into a socialist, communist, fascist, alarmist, anesthesiologist, chauvinist, contortionist, cubist, elitist, empiricist, escapist, existentialist, exorcist, hedonist, ichthyologist, imperialist, misogynist, narcissist, neoclassicist, nephrologist, nihilist, nonconformist, nudist, opportunist, orthodontist, pessimist, philatelist, plagiarist, pointillist, projectionist, propagandist, pugilist, recidivist, repudiationist, sadomasochist, secessionist, solipsist, surrealist, ventriloquist, nation. The government is out to take all your money with unreasonable taxes and then they are going to spend it all on ashtrays and remote controls and paddle games.

That was only slightly exaggerating things. It seems fear is the most important thing to invoke when talking to groups of more than six people. In the old days people subscribed to the “hope for the best expect the worst” methodology of planning ahead. We have now removed the “hope for the best” part and added to the “expect the worst” part with a side order of “and it probably causes cancer”. On top of that we feel compelled to make a seven step plan of action to deal with the inevitable doom coming our way complete with designing a staging area to coordinate all emergency first responders (firemen, paramedics, police officers, CNN reporters and psychologists to help us cope), drawing up escape routes to Canada and assembling public relations departments charged with spinning the apocalypse in a more positive light (each and every child can have his or her own pet frog since they are raining from the sky).

Wheeere's Johnny?

Jeff Zucker has been getting the stuffing beaten out of him by dozens and dozens of people in the press. “Who is Jeff Zucker?” you ask. Mr. Zucker is the president and chief executive officer of NBC, and he is the person who created quite a storm in the world of television.

Remember a few months ago when it was decided Jay Leno would host a Tonight Show-esque program five nights a week at 10/9 central on NBC? Remember a few months ago when 94% of the rational beings in the United States (which included most toddlers and a few really alert gerbils) decided Jay Leno hosting a Tonight Show-esque program five nights a week at 10/9 central on NBC was an idea so bone-headed it must have been created by a not so alert gerbil? Well, that not so alert gerbil was Harvard graduate Jeff Zucker.

Now there is another painful divide in a nation already torn asunder by liberal versus conservative, Chevy versus Ford, PC versus Mac, alive Elvis versus dead Elvis, and tastes great versus less filling. Are you a Jay supporter or a Conan man?

I don’t have an opinion. I liked Jay in his stand-up comic days but never watched his version of The Tonight Show. Conan is really unknown to me for anything other than his hair.

As of the writing of this column it looks like Jay will get the Tonight Show back and Conan will get 40 million smackers to stay home and perform for his wife and kids at the dinner table. I don’t care who hosts the Tonight Show for two reasons. The first reason is as I get older my bedtime keeps creeping farther and farther from midnight and closer and closer to dinner time. The second reason is I miss Johnny Carson.

I always felt a certain connection to Johnny Carson. He was from Nebraska. I am from Nebraska. He started on the Tonight Show in 1962. I started on this planet in 1962. Every anniversary show for Johnny had the same number as the number of candles on my birthday cake. He was funny. I always wanted to be funny. He seemed to have a kind soul. I strive for kindness. Humor for him was never mean-spirited. I find it difficult to make jokes that might be hurtful to anyone (even thought there are times I fight through that). He was a private man. I am naturally shy.

Holy cow! That’s it! I have the solution to Mr. Zucker’s predicament. Fire both Leno and O’Brien and hire me to host The Tonight Show. I always wanted to be Johnny Carson, I can have clever conversation with Hollywood stars and, if you hire enough writers, I can be funny five nights a week. And the best part for the embattled NBC CEO and all the shareholders of NBC stock (those who have not already sold it because it has become as attractive as dirigible stock after the Hindenburg), I will do all of that for one fortieth of what you are paying Mr. O’Brien to go away.

How’s this for my first monologue:

Well, Massachusetts has a Republican taking Ted Kennedy’s senate seat and the number of people in Hades looking for their mukluks just went through the roof. Really, the odds against that just a few months ago had to be longer than the New York Jets playing in the AFC championship game. What’s that? The Jets are what? I guess that means the snowball fight at Beelzebub’s house is definitely on for tonight.

James Cameron has another gigantic hit movie on his hands. First he makes a movie where everyone knows the ship sinks but we all go anyway. Now he has a movie which has everyone from the Vatican to the People’s Republic of China complaining about the subversive message he is trying to foist upon us. The only message I took from it was it takes $280 million of technological wizardry to make skinny smurfs.

I know NBC was in deep trouble. I mean they were getting beat in the ratings by cable networks that specialized in reality shows showing paint dry but did they really have to go for such a gimmick and hire some 47 year old nobody to host their flagship show? What could they have been thinking when they decided to put this overweight, gray-haired, talentless…uh, who wrote this joke?

Getting the cold shoulder...and everyplace else...

As I write this I am in my home office, sitting in my recliner, wearing a sweatshirt, sweatpants and my slippers all toasty warm while outside the mercury in my thermometer is doing some sort of Cirque du Soleil contortionist version of the Limbo. How low can you go?

I have always said I prefer cold weather to hot weather. One reason being when it gets cold I can simply put on another layer of something to warm up, but when it is hot there is a finite number of things I can take off before anyone in the vicinity starts shrieking and running like citizens of 1950’s Tokyo escaping Godzilla. (I suppose you could say the poor people of Japan being menaced by the giant lizard were suffering from reptile dysfunction.)

I do still prefer cold weather to hot, but this is ridiculous. When the high temperature for the day equals Billy Barty’s inseam and the overnight low is a darn good golf score there is something horribly wrong. (For those readers too young to get the reference, replace the name Billy Barty with Mini Me. It will make more sense.)

Weather like this requires new terminology. I’m sorry but “wind chill” just doesn’t cut it. A chill is something you get when the air conditioner kicks on and you’re standing over the vent. When the anemometer starts spinning in Kansas and the air temperature is already a pre-adolescent number calling it a “wind chill” is like calling Sean Hannity a little conservative or saying Tiger Woods plays a little golf. (I’m not going to make another joke here about other ways to describe Tiger Woods, but feel free to do so yourself before reading on. I’ll wait.)

What should television meteorologists call it? Tonight the “wind blast” will reach seven below. Or how about, with near record lows the “wind brrrrrrrr” will drop well below zero. Let’s make it rhyme. The “wind kill” may reach dangerous levels. Actually, when it is so cold that just peering out the window and contemplating going outside causes frostbite we should simply call it the “wind forget about it”.
Due to some quirk of thermodynamics my daughter Alice’s bedroom is not affected in the slightest no matter how hard the furnace works. I am not kidding when I say we could make a few extra bucks in the winter renting out her closet as a meat locker. Needless to say this winter she has been sleeping in her sister’s room quite regularly. Who knew the secret to getting teenage sisters to get along is making one of them live in a room which makes Lambeau Field in January look like Waikiki Beach in August.

“Hey, Alice, does your bedroom have wood floors or carpet?”
“Neither, it has tundra.”

Kindergarten teachers already have many tricky and time consuming aspects to their job but weather like this means there is just enough time after the morning bell to help the munchkins out of their various coats, boots, mittens, scarves and hats to send them to lunch and then the process of getting all the stuff back on must commence in order to assure nobody misses the bus.

On a side note: There is nothing quite like the experience of spending time in a room containing 60 kindergarteners because it is too cold to go out for recess. The fire marshal would re-think his maximum occupancy rules if he had to be in a room with 60 six-year-olds. There may not be a room big enough for a high concentration of these creatures of pure impulse and action.

“OK, kids, we’re going to all go in to room 196 and sit down. Then I’ll give you the instructions on what to do next. Wait, David, don’t climb on the table…no, Tina, I didn’t know your brother’s dog could open the refrigerator door all by himself…please let go of my tie…but we just took a bathroom break…Susie, give Joe his book back…no, no, no, just hand it to…Joe, go see the nurse…”

I guess I really should look on the bright side. At least when it is this cold outside I don’t have to worry about the ice cream melting while I’m driving home from the store, even if I take a route which includes a quick stop at Bismarck, North Dakota between Dillon’s and my house.

An Aught Time in the Old Town Tonight

The days of 2009 are dwindling down to a precious few. At first glance moving into 2010 means at least one truly excellent thing. Those novelty eyeglasses sold each New Year’s Eve with the double zeros acting as the lenses will no longer be around. Another good thing is there was no Prince (or The Artist Formerly Known as Relevant to the Pop Music Scene) song asking us to party like it was 2009.

Remember back ten years ago when we were waiting for all the computers to go haywire, the phone systems to stop working, the internet to stop in its tracks, and nuclear power plants to meltdown. Then as the clock ticked past midnight we all held our collective breath as absolutely nothing remarkable happened. That is pretty much how I see New Year’s Eve every year. Millions of people gather for parties and hoopla whether it be in homes throughout the world, hotels and nightclubs with music and dancing, or in Times Square with public drunkenness and the ensuing public “becoming unwell” on other people’s shoes in order to watch the clock go from 11:59 to 12:00. Since my clocks do that a lot I fail to see the reason for all that effort. I will most likely be in bed before the clock goes from 9:59 to 10:00.

I am not entirely unsentimental about the ending of the calendar year. I don’t mind waxing a bit nostalgic and taking a look back at the year that was 2009.

January saw the United States of America make history on inauguration day. No it wasn’t the obvious thing – having the first African-American sworn in as President. We officially started a new political era. One in which the Republicans and the Democrats behave in such a manner they make the Hatfields and the McCoys appear circumspect and reasonable, the Montagues and the Capulets seem positively chummy, and Red Sox and Yankee fans give the impression of being blood brothers to the very end. The two political parties have never seen eye-to-eye on all things, but they now seem to base their decisions on what would annoy the other side more than what makes sense for the electorate. Why don’t we just have Pelosi & Reid and Boehner & McConnell suit up for a rousing match of Rollerball to determine health care plans for the nation? (Admit it. You’d love to see old, rich, white people strap on roller skates and leather gloves adorned with flesh ripping spikes duke it out for political supremacy.) The ticket of Jett Li and Ray Lewis would win in a landslide if Rollerball became the way disputes were settled politically.

Stepping away from the world of politics (mainly because it is too depressing to keep thinking about) we look back on the year in pop culture. A forty-eight year old nobody from Scotland captured the world’s heart and became an internet sensation. Susan Boyle is now world famous and probably quite rich. It just goes to show you you don’t have to have the looks of a Britney Spears to become a recording star. It also shows you that Simon Cowell has more power than any one man should have, especially a grumpy man who seems to be devoid of talent himself.

The top grossing movies of 2009 show commerce and art can go hand in hand. The commerce of teenage boys buying movies tickets and the art of keeping just enough clothing on Megan Fox to avoid getting a rating which would keep teenage boys from getting into the theater worked very well this year. It was also proven once again the movie going public wants films which ennoble mankind and show the high moral ground people of the 21st century so frequently aim towards. This was shown by the high income for a film portraying how men bonding together in ritualistic manners are men to be revered, men to emulated, and men to be signed for a sequel because The Hangover made boatloads of money and that really is all they care about in Hollywood after all.

In 2009 the Pittsburgh Steelers won their sixth Super Bowl and the New York Yankees won their twenty-seventh World Series. In the year 2009 fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals surprised many in the sporting world by admitting they were fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals…in public…without shame.

What's So Special About Christmas?

Growing up I watched a lot of television. Frequently various Ph.D. types are trotted out to explain that prolonged viewing of television can have detrimental effects on children. For one thing it can cause damage to a person’s ability to focus attention on just one thing for extended periods of time. I disagree. I am perfectly capable of staying on task for protracted…oh, look, a squirrel! (OK, so that joke was telegraphed from the home office in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but that doesn’t mean I…oooo, shiny)

Anyway, this time of year for a child of 60’s and 70’s television was rife with “specials”. We had Andy Williams, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Perry Como and later Glenn Campbell, John Denver and The Carpenters. These were happy little hours of singing and jokes, no bitterness, no anger, no duplicitous actions in order to advance selfish goals. In other words they wouldn’t make it past the first executive meeting at television networks today.

I really liked those shows, because they were special – meaning different. It was a Christmas television special which brought Bing Crosby and David Bowie together to sing a duet. Bing Crosby, a crooner from the days of big bands, and David Bowie, a slightly androgynous glam rocker, standing side by side singing about peace on Earth and a little drummer boy (and they weren’t talking about Ringo).

There were also the great animated kids programs. We were very careful to know when they were going to be broadcast. It was a real bummer (that word was appropriate then) if Charlie Brown was going to be on when you had to be gone doing the school program. We all remember those elementary school extravaganzas complete with a ten-year-old Santa Claus who wasn’t allowed to wear the beard because it might muffle the voice which was yet to be affected by puberty so he really just looked and sounded like an overgrown elf. (This is true. I was that overgrown elf at Roosevelt Elementary School, December 1972.) There was no VCR, DVR, or TiVo so if you missed it you missed it until next year.

That was another thing which made them special. They were only available one night, once a year. Now my children have on demand entertainment. They can watch the Grinch any month of the year, any time, day or night. The sheer availability of it makes it less special.

As a disclaimer I have to say I watched Chuck Jones’ “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” recently on one of them new fangled DVD contraptions and it is still really good. When the Grinch is bothered by his dog Max’s behavior and he looks straight out of the television at us it is funnier than anything Jim Carrey has done or ever will do. In addition, not only does Thurl Ravenscroft have one of the all-time great names, he also has one of the all-time great performances when he sings “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”. (“Your heart is full of unwashed socks. Your soul is full of gunk.” Now those are lyrics.)

Some of the classics don’t hold up as well. Every Christmas season my family, which has three girls in it, watches the Rankin/Bass “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”. While we do enjoy Burl Ives and I personally love Yukon Cornelius’s way of checking for silver and gold there is one point which has started a new holiday tradition in our household. When the big blizzard hits towards the end there is a line about how it was important to “get the women folk back to Christmastown.” This always gets a boisterous Bronx cheer from the Pyle women folk. Not only does the show give a message that anyone who is different from the group should be shunned and ridiculed, at least until the powers that be find a way to exploit that abnormality for personal gain, it’s sexist to boot.

For those us who grew up in this part of Kansas Christmas also meant “Santa’s Workshop” with Santa and KAKEman (or Toy Boy when they jumped networks). This was free form, stream of consciousness conversation done by a guy and a puppet with a budget of about seven dollars and fifty cents, but I loved it. Actually, my sister gave me a DVD featuring snippets from the show a while back and I still get a huge kick out of it. I can’t wait to go zooming around the big wide world, zooming and zooming…

Speed of Light vs. Speed of Lint

Black Friday! The day people look to celebrate peace on Earth and good will towards men by elbowing their way past grandmothers and nuns in order to get their mitts on a big screen television. Actually, the last few years I was one of those people rousting myself out of bed at a time roosters scorn to witness in order to get my hands on something one of my children didn’t really need at a price I believed I couldn’t pass up. I was a lemming running towards the consumer cliff with credit card abandon.

This year I am going to sleep until the sale junkies have already cleared the aisles and maxed out their Mastercards. The foremost reason for this is last year wasn’t any fun. The previous years there was a sense of camaraderie. People laughed. People poked fun at themselves for standing in a discount store at five in the morning. People gave each other directions on where the various cool things were stashed in the store. Last year there was blood in the water and the sharks thought Robert Shaw was somewhere nearby singing about ladies of Spain. (That is a reach as an analogy but if Richard Dreyfuss happens across my blog he’ll enjoy it.)

Another reason for my non-participation in the feeding frenzy of electronics and Cabbage Patch Kids (okay, I am that old) is I no longer feel the need to hurry up. I’ll be more leisurely in my approach to shopping. As I get more mature (mature = gray hair, expanding waistline and attention to things having to do with IRAs and prostates) I find I value calmness more and more. Multi-tasking and speed seem much less necessary. I am perfectly willing to be the tortoise except even though slow and steady wins the race I don’t even care about winning. I just want to finish well and avoid the need for ace bandages and Ben Gay.

Recently I was reading a book called “In Praise of Slowness.” In this book there is discussion of the term time-sickness, the obsessive belief that time is getting away and we must go faster and faster to use it all. The author mentions in other cultures they see time as always coming as well as going. Time goes away, but it also keeps showing up. Time waits for no man is the modern day way of thinking about it, but it might be healthier if we all realized that just like the manufacturers of Doritos chips, they’ll make more.

This demand for fully utilizing every minute causes people to the believe time is so precious it is deemed horribly imprudent to waste it. This leads to road rage (the bozo in front of me allowed a full three seconds to elapse after the light turned green before he hit the gas), shopping rage (the bozo in front of me has 12 items in the 10 items or less express lane), airport rage (the bozo in front of me is taking forever to remove his shoes and now he has walked through the metal detector with his stupid car keys still in his pocket), drive-thru rage (the bozo in front of me has ordered enough food to sate the appetite of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir after a week long fast), and newspaper columnist rage (this bozo has written 117 words already and he still hasn’t finished this stupid sentence). There may be a dearth of time in our lives but there is an abundance of bozos.

There was a reference in this book about a novel written in the 19th century (when the industrial revolution was first starting to make time the master and man the servant) in which a civilization develops where time is the currency of the realm. Think about that. We pay each other for things with time. You fix my car and I owe you a couple hours. The problem for the guy who fixed my car is my list of skill sets doesn’t lend itself to a fair exchange. I could write 800 words about why machines are turning into people and people are turning into machines or I could answer any question he had about “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. On the other hand this could be the only way he ever gets anyone to watch his home movies of the family trip to Niagara Falls.

A Stranger in a Strange Land

It has often been described that people of my generation are immigrants to the world of technology and members of my children’s generation are the natives. This makes sense because their world has always had technologies which we, as children, only saw in science fiction movies shown on one of the three fuzzy television channels the black and white Magnavox could tune in after the sun went down.

Like many people my age it was not the Statue of Liberty welcoming me to the new land but rather the VCR. Instead of a blazing torch held high in the sky lighting my way to freedom and prosperity the video player had a digital clock bravely blinking “12:00” into the darkness of technological ignorance. The problem was getting the darn clock to stop that.

I soon mastered the VCR. I was able to command it do irrational, possibly even unnatural, acts. Such as taping one show while I watched another. I could also be a timeshifter. This meant I could watch “Miami Vice” at eleven in the morning on a Sunday instead of all those poor folks in my technologically backward homeland who had no choice but to watch it at nine on Friday nights. I was no longer a slave to the whims of network programmers. I could watch “Cosby” AND “Magnum P.I.” even though they were opposite each other. Talk about your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to watch “Misfits of Science” any time we darn well pleased, this was the promised land.

Next I became a guide for the newcomers. I worked at a video store (known at the time as Popingo, later as Popinwent). There were many, many times I fielded a phone call from a techno immigrant who was struggling to program his VCR to do its magic for him as well. If I was unable to talk him through the process the last resort was to ask a single question. “Is there a twelve year old kid in the house? Put him on the phone.”

In the ensuing years I learned about DVD players, universal remotes, cordless phones, video games (beyond Atari), and the ultimate benchmark of a true techno devotee, the home computer. I mastered e-mail, surfing the internet and googling – a verb that sounds at once childish yet vaguely dirty. I have graduated to a point that I write blogs, watch YouTube, listen to podcasts and have even been known to occasionally wiki.

Having achieved something akin to resident alien status there are two basic phrases I use when dealing with my new homeland. The first one is used when I come across something really amazing to me, like when I got my first iPod. Even though it resembled a piece of Juicy Fruit and had no moving parts it was able to store and play, with crystal clear sound, dozens and dozens of songs. This prompted me to say, “This shouldn’t work.”

The other phrase is used when struggling to get the infernal computer to function correctly. Often I have been called to fix a problem and as the tension and blood pressure mounts the phrase my family hears shouted from the deepest recesses of the basement as I stare determinedly at the completely unsympathetic, nay, tauntingly brazen cathode ray tube is “Do what you are designed to do!” This is sometimes followed by terms best not published in a respectable newspaper.

My latest evolution as a citizen of Technovania was the purchase of an iPod Touch. This is something about the size of cassette tape (for the technology natives you’ll have to ask one of your elders what that was) which does a myriad of impossible things. I can connect to the internet via WiFi. I can download apps. It may even have Bluetooth capabilities.

Okay, I have to admit I am still an immigrant because I just used a bunch of words from a foreign tongue. I have an idea what I was saying but I could be totally wrong. Kind of like that guy who goes to France and using his high school French class from fifteen years ago as his template attempts to order roast chicken with rice and actually boasts to the waiter that his aunt’s pen in on his uncle’s chest of drawers.

I am learning how to use it even if I do not understand how it could possibly work. Of course the chief thing I use it for at the moment is playing solitaire which I could do with technology from the 9th century, playing cards.

A Child's Garden of Worses

I usually don’t write about things connected to my real job because I do not want to run the risk of it becoming my former real job. However, if I approach it in a purely Jane Goodall scientific mode maybe I won’t annoy my superiors. Since the topic of my column is an animal unlike any other this objective point of view makes sense. I am talking about that unique aspect of humanity known to the layman as “Kindergartener” or to the pure scientist as Absoluteeous Impulseeous.

When I first ventured into the natural habitat of the Kindergartener I became acutely aware of one thing. I am a creature of language and logic and kindergarteners are not. This became patently obvious as I tried to explain to a five-year-old why it is a good idea to use both hands while carrying a breakfast tray containing pancakes and syrup. Obviously the person who decided syrup was a good thing to give to 64 individuals who have only been adept at walking upright for the most recent third of their lives is now giggling uncontrollably miles away from the school cafeteria which now resembles the La Brea Tar Pits but instead of an exhausted wooly mammoth sinking into the muck and mire it is an exasperated principal prying shoe leather from the linoleum. If I try to explain why it is a good idea to use two hands the child’s eyes glaze over after the third word if none of those three words include candy, recess or candy.

It has taken me a long time and it goes against my natural default settings which require me to tell people why something is important, but I am getting better at just telling kindergarteners things. Kindergarteners have neither the patience nor the attention span for all the explaining. If I explain to a six year old that kicking a fellow student on the playground because you were mad at him is not an appropriate expression of anger, even though anger is a natural emotion and it is okay to be angry but not okay to follow through with that anger by inflicting pain on another human being, I’ve lost him. If I tell the kicker that he wouldn’t like it if somebody kicked him so he shouldn’t kick other people, he has started looking over my shoulder at the cool clock on the wall. If I just lean down close to the Jackie Chan of the jungle gym and say, “don’t kick or you’re in trouble” I have a chance of saving other children’s shins from minor bruising.

It became obvious after only a short time amongst them that a kindergarten student will not respond if the adult does not use the magic word. I am not talking about the magic words of manners: please and thank you. I am referring to the specific name of the child you wish to address. Let’s say a kindergartener is running down the hall, an unsafe act for most humans made even more dangerous by the fact these particular runners are as aware of their surroundings as a deaf bat, a deaf bat which has been dead for a week, a deaf bat which has been dead for a week and buried in the Mariana Trench.

If a grown up does not know the particular child’s name he will be ignored. I’ve tried. It usually goes something like this: “Uh, excuse me, hey, uh, kid, umm, little boy, uh, dude, kid in the red shirt, hey…” By now the Usain Bolt of the hallway has already startled two custodians, frightened three fourth graders and blown several crayon renditions of Wilbur and Charlotte right off the wall. However, if I know the kid’s name and call it out he’ll hit the brakes like Claudette Colbert just exposed her ankle and calf to a passing motorist. (Give yourself 65 bonus points if you followed that allusion.)

Just like Ms. Goodall I have also discovered many fabulous things. Most kindergarteners still have wonder and awe. They are excited by so many things that the rest of us take for granted. They also wish to share with you their excitement. This is why they are always trying to show you things and tell you about their lives. The only downside to this is: if a kindergartener beckons for you to lean down so they can talk to you and the first words out of his mouth are “there was this one time” you need to clear your calendar for approximately the next four hours.

A Fully Functioning Family - The Downside

My upbringing scarred me for life. I won’t write a lurid biography which will land me on Oprah, or even worse, Jerry Springer. Nonetheless my youth has made many parts of my adult life unmanageable.

What horrors have I lived through? None. That’s the problem. My formative years were spent almost completely in a state of contentment and well-being. Ergo my thresholds for putting up with mean spirited people, dealing with anger and aggression, and my ability to fly off the handle and fully engage all my organs of suspicion are severely diminished. Yet, more and more, it seems those are the skill sets which would best serve me in the world we inhabit today.
I remember my father commenting when a person accuses you of having a certain trait it is often a trait that person himself has in spades. If someone thinks you are a liar it often means they are good at lying themselves. They assume others are doing it just as often as they do, thus they accuse people, truthful or otherwise, of also possessing that tendency.

The opposite is also the case. It doesn’t occur to me to lie. I am not saying that in some sort of “aren’t I pure as the driven snow” egotistical manner. It just doesn’t occur to me to lie. There are times I did lie because I screwed up so monumentally lying seemed the only recourse available to me, but it is not the default setting for my software. Because of all that, it is also not my default setting for interpreting what others are telling me. It does not occur to me that people are lying to me even when most other people, including the majority of toddlers and people who actually look up when told the word gullible is written on the ceiling, can tell Pinocchio’s nose just grew longer than Durante and de Bergerac combined. I am easier to fleece than a flock of sheep in May. (I probably shouldn’t have said that in such a public venue. My voicemail will be chock full of wonderful opportunities for aluminum siding and credit cards with the low, low interest rate of a pound of flesh compounded annually.)

My family liked each other. We chose to spend time together, on purpose. Don’t get the wrong idea. We weren’t the Waltons. Oh, we were that supportive and we had the strong highly principled father and the stalwart caring mother it is just we didn’t have wacky strangers show up on our doorstep every week in order to teach us meaningful lessons about life. (Although having a traveling band of circus performers live in our garage for a while would have totally rocked.)

Come to think of it maybe we were the Walton’s. My oldest brother was named after my father so we could have called him George Boy, and that was well before there was such a thing as a Boy George. Just like John Boy, George Boy wanted to be a writer when he grew up. He didn’t sit at a tiny window in an attic bedroom scribbling stories into a big chief notebook, but he did sit at a desk in his room with a circa 1950s typewriter creating the Great American Novel, yet to be published.

Like so many damaged adults living out the residual after effects of a youth gone horribly, horribly right, I fear I may be passing on the traumas to my own children. Just the other day I witnessed my eldest daughter walk right up to her younger sister and give her a hug. Right there in broad daylight, like it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of both girls showed sisterly affection for each other without being blackmailed into it with promises of iPods and cell phone upgrades if they would just get along with each other for ten minutes.

My fear is it may be too late. My three children may grow up thinking the best of others. They may believe marriage is a supportive partnership between two people based on respect and love as opposed to a sentence of punishment to be endured until the kids are out of the house and then the lawyers divide up the assets and the mental health of the two exhausted combatants of the matrimonial skirmishes. They may have an over-developed sense of fairness and become addicted to the rush one gets from injecting a hit of unadulterated altruism.

All I have to do to save them from a doomed life of contentment with an appreciable lack of angst is expose them to the most effective antidote: talk radio.

The Truth Fairy May Be Dead

I have been studying the media for a while and decided that if I am going to make the leap from newspaper columnist to nationally known commentator I will need to change my ways. Instead of simply talking about the world in which I live and relaying the facts in my life I will need to hone different skills so I can convince people to believe things which are patently false and even detrimental to their own well-being. I will do all this in the name of making a buck and fighting with people for the mere sake of being contrary. If you will allow me to use this column for practice I will be forever in your debt.

Can you believe the impudence!?! (I’ll need to use lots of exclamation points) Not only does the government tax us to the point that we can’t afford a supersize Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino with extra Chocolate Whipped Cream a day so they can pay for aspects of something as trivial as public education! Not only does the government expect me to get a license, which is like asking for permission, to drive a car – a car I paid for out of my own pocket with the help of a 15 year loan from a bank who didn’t care I couldn’t afford the payments! Now the government has gone too far! The jack-booted fascists are pumping directly into my house…water! They built an elaborate system of pipes throughout the entire city, proving there was a conspiracy of gigantic proportions, for the sole purpose of injecting into my home the very essence of life itself. How dare they?! Then they have the temerity to send me a bill each and every month to defray the cost of this communistic fluid. Sure I need it to cook and drink and bathe and wash my clothes and flush away waste, but the despotic government still has no right to force it on me like some bush league Kim Jong-il imposing its will and its colorless odorless liquid on me as if I was some sort of faceless proletariat to be exploited.

I say it is time to stand up to this socialist Big Brother (the Big Brother from the Orwell novel, not the Big Brother from that crummy reality show hosted by erstwhile journalist Julie Chen)! Refuse to turn on your taps! Dig your own well! Collect rain water! Drink only the grain alcohol you can create in your garage with no help from government hand-outs! So what if you lose your job because co-workers refuse to let you into the building due to the stench which follows you around like paparazzi following George Clooney! So what if you’re down to three healthy teeth in your head and you don’t need to cut your hair because you can snap it off at the length you want due to its stiffness. At least we will be free!

Oh, boy…that was exhausting. Thirteen exclamation points can really take it out of a guy. On the other hand it was kind of fun. It is freeing to make an argument which does not have to rely on logic or even facts. It sounds like a genuine argument but all it is really is a great big “You mother wears army boots.”

Maybe I don’t need to be so bombastic. That would be less exhausting. Maybe I can become a more subtle spinmaster.

The other day it came to my attention that many people are unemployed. The people discussing it on the television seemed to think it was a bad thing. What’s the big deal? Having lots of people looking for a job has many benefits.

One of the only laws of economics most people have even the slightest grasp of is supply and demand. If the supply is low and the demand is high the price goes up. That must mean if there are fewer jobs and a high demand for them then wages the workers earn must go up raising the standard of living for us all.

Also, if there are more people looking for work then the pool of possible employees must have a greater variety. This could mean fast food workers who have master’s degrees in Romantic Poetry. So, instead of hearing “Do you want fries with that?” the guy behind the counter might say “water, water, everywhere you wanna supersize that drink.”

Christopher Pyle wishes to apologize to Samuel Taylor Coleridge for messing with his poem. Also, he realizes he implied many wild things in this column. The craziest thing may be that people who majored in Romantic poetry aren’t already working at McDonald’s. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Two Score and Seven Years Ago Sounds Way Old

When I turned the page on my calendar it showed we had entered September. That means my birthday is coming up. I will turn forty-seven years old. The number forty-seven holds no magical properties and that particular age does not signal any great change is my status as person. I have long since passed the magical ages: 16 years old (I can drive without benefit of having a grown up in the car), 18 years old (I can vote, often a disheartening proposition at best), 21 years old (I can buy booze, something I stopped caring about not too long after turning 21), and 30 years old (I can no longer be trusted by the younger generation). The only thing turning 47 years old really means is I am now in shouting distance of 50.

When I say shouting distance I truly mean shouting distance because I am making very loud remonstrations “Whoa there, Sea Biscuit! What’s your hurry? We don’t need to make that turn to the final furlongs with such intensity.”

Even approaching a half a century I don’t really feel all the way grown up. However, there are many times I feel old. When I have been sitting for a prolonged period of time standing up requires making a noise. When I look at my children and realize they are smarter than me. When I tell people I do not have television in my house and they look at me like I just told them I cook over an open hearth and believe the world is flat. When I listen to top forty radio stations the words are unintelligible and the singing sounds like the noise I make when I stand up after sitting for a prolonged period of time.

Inside I still think of myself pretty much the same way I did when I turned 21. Just this past weekend I was in Wichita and I was taking a stroll across a college campus. Very little in the world makes me feel like I feel when I am on a college campus. I truly value learning. I truly value teaching. I adore the bohemian attitude of being a college student. Stepping into the student union there was a very large young man fast asleep on an even larger sofa with his backpack between his knees. Two other guys were playing ping-pong. A boy and a girl were sitting at a table deep in discussion. I prefer to think they were discussing the merits of empiricism versus rationalism because that completes the circuit of a college experience and if they were discussing who would be next to leave the Big Brother house it cheapens the whole thing. All this enhanced my inner concept that I am still a young person exploring the world with wide eyes.

Then I left the union and walked towards some of the other buildings. As I crossed one street a girl-next-door-beauty walked by me, smiled and said hello. That is when I realized I might feel young on the inside but it wasn’t the case on the outside. When I was a young man walking on a college campus, as a fully matriculated student, girl-next-door-beauties did not look at me, smile and say hello. As an overweight, gray-haired middle-aged man the comely co-ed said hello, not because I was even remotely attractive but rather because I was…cute. Not cute in the Jonas Brother way, but cute in the “isn’t it cute how this old guy is walking around campus remembering his salad days” way. Deep sigh.

I simply have to reconcile my inner image of myself (eager explorer of the intellectual world) with the real-world me (middle-aged curmudgeon in training) in order to truly follow the advice of ancient Greece and “know thyself”.

Eager explorer = reader of blogs and internet news services for the latest information

Middle-aged curmudgeon = reading blogs and internet news services and having my blood pressure rise because there are so many idiots out there

Eager explorer = believer that spending time alone allows one to understand oneself on a much deeper level

Middle-aged curmudgeon = believer that spending time alone allows one to get away from all the idiots out there

Eager explorer = gets excited by new ideas and when the creative process is allowed to flourish

Middle-aged curmudgeon = thinks new ideas are just old ideas wearing a bad mustache and sees how the creative process is thwarted at every turn…and something about all the idiots out there

Christopher Pyle clings to the eager explorer but feels the curmudgeon is more cunning and will eventually win out. He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Lower Expectations for Higher Education

My oldest daughter is starting her junior year of high school. This means she has homework which may as well be a nuclear physics textbook translated into ancient Greek for all the help I can be. It means any would-be suitors are now able to beat me up removing any threat capacity I might have had. It means she has a calendar of events which would make Gloria Vanderbilt’s schedule look like Ted Kaczynski’s. It also means she gets anywhere between five to twenty-five pieces of mail a week from various colleges and universities trying to entice her to attend their esteemed institutions. This makes me feel old and gives me a sense of impending poverty, but it also makes me more than a little bit wistful.

It was twenty-eight years ago this month that I first packed up the ol’ Chevette hatchback with my most important possessions (record player, black-and-white portable television, twenty pairs of white socks, and my single setting of flatware) and drove off to begin my scholarly career as I matriculated at the University of Kansas. I was only slightly excited and more than just a little bit scared. This was because I was unusual compared to most recent high school graduates. I really liked my family. I had no problem envisioning myself living with them for the rest of my life without it seeming Norman Bates pathetic/psychotic.

Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to go to college. I just wasn’t gung ho about the whole thing. My older brother filled out the majority of my application paperwork and took me to orientation helping me do all the registration stuff and even found the apartment I was going to occupy. So, if it wasn’t for him it truly is possible I would still be sleeping in my single bunk bed while my mother does my laundry fixes my supper and pays all my bills. Hmmm…curses.

I was not a social college student. There was no desire to join a fraternity. I didn’t even live in a dorm. My freshman year I lived in an apartment slightly smaller than the backseat of your average SUV. It was in the thick of what we called the student slums, an older house chopped up into single sleeping rooms with a shared bathroom and miniscule kitchen. It was close enough I could roll out of bed, put on a semi-less dirty shirt and pair of jeans, jam a hat on my head and be in class after a ten minute walk. Here’s the kicker, it cost ninety bucks a month. Nowadays ninety bucks a month wouldn’t buy a college student a place to park his car, much less a place to park his carcass.

As hermit-like as the description of that apartment sounds it was not the most socially removed place I lived during my college career. There was the basement apartment at the bottom of a hill on a dead end street. Really, by that time I should have had a better eye for the stark symbolism of my living arrangement. I was a film studies major at a university in one of the least Hollywood-esque states in the country. Such a degree just screamed career prospects akin to a basement apartment at the bottom of a hill on a dead end street or at least a life spent trying to convince the customer at the video store (at which I am the assistant manager working for an hourly wage only slightly more impressive than the chief French fry salter at McDonald’s) out of renting the Sylvester Stallone movie in his hand and convince him he really ought to rent Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion because of its brilliant humanistic portrayal of men held prisoner in a World War I prison camp used as a lens through which to examine the rising tide of fascism in Germany in 1937. It never worked, but I tried.

Looking at my daughter’s mail many colleges today advertise themselves as offering a personal touch, a place where you are a full-fledged person and not just a faceless number at an institution of thousands of faceless numbers. This would not have been an inducement for me to rush to enroll. I wanted to be a faceless number amongst thousands of faceless numbers. Life is easier if you are camouflaged. Just ask the nudibranch (a sea slug very adept at hiding itself within sea plants and a very fun thing to say).