Location, Location, Location

Big weekend here. We completed the purchase of some fine Bergen County (NJ) real estate. Nothing built on the property yet, and we're not planning on developing it for a while. Still, it's in a beautiful part of the state, right next to a golf course, and the area is quiet and private.

 

Ok, ok. It's a cemetery plot.

 

You might be thinking it's a little creepy to hold in your hands the very pieces of dirt they're going to be shoveling onto you, and I admit it gives one pause. I've seen the subtle recoil in several friends when I've mentioned the purchase to them. Buying it just seemed like a good idea after we counted the graves, both occupied and reserved, in the plot my grandmother bought years ago, and found there was one left for about six of us. (You want creepy? Now that's creepy.) Besides, everyone - even if they're horizontal - has to be somewhere. My main focus now is not to die within the next ten days, before the check clears.

 

I got to visit it yesterday, meet the neighbors, that sort of thing. It's in a new area of the memorial park, so many of the nearby plots aren't sold yet or, at the very least, haven't had anybody (perhaps that should be any body) move in. The plot is only 20 or 25 feet off the roadway, so if my kids can develop a good hook shot they won't even have to get out of the car to leave flowers.

 

If all goes well we won't be sowing anything there, as it were, any time soon. In the meantime, it seems a bit of a shame to let prime real estate sit unused. One idea I had was to put a metal storage shed there while we're, well, waiting. Keep the kids' bicycles there, the snow shovels, things like that. When the time comes, we can just clear out the stored items, or maybe just push them to the side, spray paint my name on the front and have a very reasonably priced mausoleum.

 

Another question I have to find out about: is our ownership limited to the first six feet of depth? It may not seem important now, but if oil or gold is ever discovered there it's going to matter.

 

Have I considered avoiding all of this by being cremated? Yes, but I quickly dispelled the idea. I just don't see the point of burning twice.

Letters, We Get Letters...

The previous posting got a number of great comments, both posted here and sent to me privately. One of them in particular, from a marvelous lady you've gotten to know as Oldhousegal, triggered today's thoughts.

 

She wrote, in part, "I heard that Oprah once did a show asking audience members questions about various general knowledge topics, such as whether the earth revolved around the sun or vice versa.  One woman (who answered the question incorrectly) stated that 'she never felt anything moving.' "

 

My initial thought, of course, was probably the same as most people's: it's a trick question - everyone knows the world revolves around Oprah. Beyond that, though, it reminded me of one of the finest mini-soliloquies I've ever heard in a movie. If you saw Men In Black, there's a good chance you'll remember the scene in which Wil Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are sitting on a park bench. Tommy Lee has just shown Wil that there are aliens on earth everywhere. Wil asks, "Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it." And Tommy Lee, bless his manly-man heart, had this response:

 

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicy, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everbody knew the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago everybody knew the earth was flat. And fifteen minutes ago you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

 

I love that. It makes me think. And it got me thinking about other movie lines I keep as favorites because they make me think.

 

From Superman (the first one) comes the only quote that beats the Men In Black one as my all-time favorite. This is Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, after explaining his plot to do evil things:

 

"Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe."

 

For me that's just a great description of what an eloquent friend once called our "sacred search."

 

And this from Clint Eastwood's great western, The Unforgiven. Eastwood is Will Munny, a retired gunfighter whose career included killing men, women, children and animals and, as one of his lines says, "deserve" had nothing to do with it. The Schofield Kid, a young, inexperienced gunfighter wannabe, has just helped Munny kill a man, his first. Shaken and looking for reassurance, the Kid turns to Munny and nervously says, "Yeah, well, I guess he had it coming." To really get this, as you read, squint, snear a little, and imitate Eastwood's trademark disengaged cynicism. Ok, ready?

 

"We all got it coming, kid."

 

Now that's something to think about.

 

I could go on - I love quotes, including movie quotes - but I'll keep it at these for now. Besides, I have to start working on the true meaning of gum base, corn syrup, glycerin and extract of peppermint.

 

In another unrelated item (there seem to be a lot of those in this space lately) I just saw a news item reporting that Dick Cheney made an unannounced visit to Iraq. How unspeakably cool would it be if, as he was preparing to leave in a day or so, he got told his stay was being extended an additional three months? Just asking...

You Report, We Decide - To Lose Interest

Compiled from the Associated Press -- Former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey claims his wife knew he was gay before they married. "On the offhand chance she wasn't paying attention, I AM A GAY AMERICAN," McGreevey wrote, using capital letters and referencing the term he used to describe himself when he announced his resignation in August 2004. McGreevey says a snipe by his estranged wife about [his alleged lover's] appointment [to the position of state homeland security adviser] is "evidence of a bitter vengeful woman."

Dina Matos McGreevey, who is seeking custody of their young daughter, claimed that the ex-governor exposed the child to erotic artwork. McGreevey countered that his wife "HAS NEVER SEEN THE PHOTOGRAPH" of the nude male model, again using capital letters for emphasis, and that she "tries to remain on a pedestal while hawking her tell-all book." [His own tell-all book was published last summer.]

As vitriolic as their divorce proceedings have been (and no doubt will continue to be), anyone who's been involved with, or even a close observer to, a divorce involving child custody recognizes this behavior as typical. The only difference here is that this one involves a former NJ governor who resigned with the revelation that he is a "Gay American."

This labeling is unfortunate. As a society, we should be well past looking at McGreevey and saying, "I see a gay man." We should simply be saying, "I see a man. A corrupt man, forced to resign from public office in disgrace under the weight of more scandals than there are stars in the sky, but a man nonetheless."

I really don't need wall-to-wall news coverage of the McGreevey's child custody arguments, or the Baldwins', or anyone else's. Two people announce they're getting divorced, and suddenly we're a step away from CNN giving the story its own theme music. There aren't many rules governing my life, but one of them is this: there are more reliable sources of information about a person than their estranged or ex-spouse.

None of this, of course, is new. Years ago a television program I was watching was broken into. I don't know about you, but "We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this special news bulletin" shoots a chill through my back. It means the president's been shot, or we've started bombing somewhere, or that something else has just happened, something big, and you must know about before 6:00. So what was the emergency? Woody Allen was holding a press conference to respond to Mia Farrow's allegations of improper conduct regarding the children. It was surreal, like something you'd see in, well, a Woody Allen movie.

Let's all make an effort to focus on real news, shall we? The things that matter. Things like videos of David Hasselhoff rolling around on the floor. Now there's a story.

An unrelated item...

You've probably seen the news items about a limited edition gold coin issued by The Royal Canadian Mint. Equal to $1 million Canadian paper currency (familiar to non-Canadians as Monopoly money), it weighs 220 pounds and is the size of a pizza.

Combining money and pizza - be still my heart! Now if the coin just had a picture of naked woman drinking a cup of coffee, everything important to me would be contained in a single place.

Tenth Life

I write this partly out of great joy, and partly as a warning to readers who may come as close as I did to making a very serious mistake.

 

Like many of us, I am owned by a cat. Her name is Skids, derived from the way she takes fast turns on bare wood floors. Or the way she used to take fast turns, back before she gave up the nasty habit of doing things that involve getting up once in a while. She's a tiny little thing - about five and a half pounds - and gets more milage out of being cute than Anna Nicole Smith and Sanjaya combined ever could have.

 

Skids is about 15 years old and has enjoyed good health throughout her life. It is only recently that she began to experience problems. (The problems involved her bladder and digestive systems; I'll spare you the details.) A couple of courses of antibiotics and some intravenous rehydrations later, there was no improvement. The vet took a urine specimen for some super-detailed testing, and told us if this didn't do anything to help it might be time to put her (Skids, not the vet) to sleep. (I detest that expression, by the way.)

 

In the meantime, my wife - whom I gratefully admit is smarter than I am - decided on her own to try something. Skids had been on a prescription diet for her dry food and, more recently, her wet food. (I know what you're thinking; her food was not among the ones affected by the recent contamination.) She (my wife, not Skids) decided to stop the prescription wet food and replace it with tuna fish. Skids, for her part, agreed to the experiment. In a matter of days, the symptoms that had been present for weeks cleared up, and testing indicated her levels of various cat things were within normal ranges. It turns out that Dr. Mom is not only a pediatrician, but a vet as well. (Makes a great meatloaf too.)

 

Today, the member of our family we refer to as the little furry person wet the sofa again. She's done it dozens of times over the years. And do you know what? This time, unlike any time before, I smiled. 

 

 

 

Jack, Lee Harvey, and Me

Tonight I was having some trouble sleeping and went downstairs to watch television. My kids having misplaced the remote (or taken it up to their room after misplacing theirs, I'm not sure which), I actually had to suffer the indignity of getting up from the chair and changing channels by hand.

 

On the History Channel I found a program about the JFK assassination. There have been dozens of programs on the subject, of course, and most address various conspiracy theories. This program mentioned those things as a kind of side issue. Mostly it attempted to explore Oswald's motivations. Jack Ruby's too.

 

What appeared to put Oswald over the top was not his communism-obsessed belief system. Rather, it was his obsessive desire to be a big shot - pun not intended - within that belief system. To make his mark, and get respect in the process. He posed for iconic photos with his firearms, and offered himself to the Cuban and Soviet embassies. (Both turned him away.) Oswald's fatal flaw was not that he was a communist. It was that he felt a need to be a star, and became overwhelmed by frustration when the world - even the communist world - didn't raise him above the rest.

 

And then there was Jack Ruby, the Dallas strip club owner who associated with penny-ante hoods and liked to hang out at the police station. Loved JFK. Wanted to feel important. No, more than important: he wanted to be elevated to the status of hero.

 

Are we noticing a pattern here? I am, especially when I added the third data point: stresses and frustrations I've felt building lately - one friend accurately called it being very prickly - when I point out to the world that it's not conforming to my vision for it, and the world glares back and says, "Who the hell asked you?"

 

It was quite a revelation, this business of recognizing some part of me, some part of a lot of us I suppose, in vilified historical figures whom we've always felt safely separated from. That their cases are much more extreme is just a detail, and doesn't excuse the more basic form of the problem others of us have inside us.

 

There's a book I quite literally keep right next to my Bible. It's an AA book called, "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions," known to AA's as the "12 and 12." (Although I'm not a drinker, and some of what AA presents is specific to substance abuse, I've found the majority can be thought of as "take out drinking and fill in your favorite self-destructive behavior.") This has, for me, been a life-changing book and if someone out there is feeling a little lost you might find it so too. But I digress...

 

Part of the chapter on Step Four - "We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves" - reads as follows: "It is from our twisted relations with family, friends and society at large that many of us have suffered the most...The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being...Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend on them far too much...We have not once sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society. Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide underneath it. This self-centered behavior blocked a partnership relation with any one of those about us." 

 

A few hours from now, when on the train commuting to work, I think I know what I'm going to get back into reading.

The Long and Whining Road...

Ok. Enough nice guy. Time for a rant.

The nearby and normally quiet city of Bayonne, NJ - well, quiet by Hudson County standards anyway - has been shaken in recent months by growing social unrest no one seems to be able to resolve. State and federal lawsuits, civil protests and inflammatory speeches normally reserved for hot-button issues like gun control and abortion are now addressing something even bigger: school uniforms.

Last summer, the Bayonne Board of Education instituted a requirement for students in their public grammar schools to wear uniforms. In December, the State Education Commission upheld the requirement over the objections of a group of local parents, and gave the parents a 90-day deadline to file an appeal with the State Board of Education. Showing the same sense of responsibility that they're teaching their children, the parents filed an appeal after the 90-day deadline expired, and it was rejected on that basis.

Understand please, dear reader, that this rant is not about school uniforms per se. Though I'm the father of two teenage sons, both of whom wore school uniforms in a public grammar school and who now adhere to a strict dress code at a public high school, I'm not against uniforms or dress codes. I'm also not against people who are against uniforms or dress codes. I'm against - Bayonne parents, please listen carefully - WHINEY PARENTS and their AREN'T-WE-PRECIOUS CHILDREN!

So what are the parents saying?

One described the uniform requirement as "very non-democratic, highly punitive dictation from a political government group." First, requiring students to do homework is non-democratic. I don't know what school this mom went to, but I've never seen a classroom that's a democracy. Second, I'm not sure the jailed political dissidents in Russia, Cuba, and a whole bunch of other places would agree with their sister-in-arms in Bayonne, NJ about uniforms being highly punitive dictation. But what would they know of the oppressive regime of the Bayonne Board of Education, what with being in jail so long and all that?

This same woman has filed a federal lawsuit against the board for prohibiting her son from wearing an anti-uniform emblem depicting Hitler Youth. (Charming young man, don't you think?) I just hope, when all the fuss about school uniforms is over, that this woman and her spoiled son never really have to find out what the Hitler Youth movement was about. (Here's a hint, honey. It had nothing to do with school uniforms.)

Another parent, this one a father, was also concerned. "The school board doesn't have the right to tell me how to raise my kid..." No dude, but they do have the responsibility to hold him to a set of reasonably high standards at school. It's kind of what they're there for, like, you know? Otherwise, the child is liable to grow up into the kind of irresponsible adult who, oh, I don't know, let's say, waits till the deadline has passed before filing an appeal and then blames everyone but themselves when it's turned away.

I'd love to be there when junior's boss tell him the office has a dress code he's expected to follow. Who's mommy going to sue then?

Society has - as it should -certain expectations about following rules you may not always like. The question for me is not whether students should wear school uniforms. I really don't care if they do or they don't. The question in my mind is this: what are any of these people - the whiney adults and the spoiled kids they're serving as examples for - going to do if they're ever faced with a real problem?

So as not to end this on a negative note, let me tell you a joke. How many Bayonne public school students does it take to change a light bulb?

It takes one to hold the bulb still, and nine parents to stand around expecting the world to revolve around him.

Middle Age - Dat Be Whack, Yo*

* In some urban areas, "dat be whack" is an expression of deep concern, and possibly dissatisfaction, over something. "Yo" may be roughly translated as, "and I really mean it." For example, "The Dow Industrial Average decreased by nearly 100 points on reports of a downturn in petroleum futures and concerns over inflation? Dat be whack, yo."

The good thing about early Sunday morning hours is that they're quiet, and I get to sit and think. The bad thing about them is that they're quiet, and I get to sit and think. This morning, the thoughts are of having "life experience." You know...middle age.

 

Yes, I know. It's bad enough I've added one more blog to the world. Now I'm using that blog to give the world one more entry about middle age. But you see, this one is different from all those other people writing about reaching middle age. This one is about ME reaching middle age. I don't know about you, but for me, this is a key difference.

While not every effect nature's process has had will be discussed here <ahem>, there

are a few examples I'll share.

My hair is longer in back, down to about the base of my neck. The mid-life crisis period is, if nothing else, a call to action. When you can't afford a canary yellow corvette, when no 20 year-old co-ed will give you a second look, and when - crisis or not - you're still not crazy enough to sky-dive or bungee-jump, there aren't a lot of options left. Hence, the hair. My family appears to be ok with this, though my sons did advise me to grow it longer on the sides too, lest it start looking like a mullet. This, I've been led to believe, would be considered the ultimate step in the embarrassing-your-kids process.

 

I'm ok with the fact that I'm an older man to the women in my class of fourth year college students. What's harder to accept is realizing that a man half my age is an older man to them.

 

Even my cel phone has gotten involved. I wear it on my belt, and keep it on vibrate. I cannot tell you, dear reader, how many times I've reached down to answer a call, only to find out it was just some internal body part rumbling.

 

Still, we are here, and happy, and that is something. And you know, now that the sun is up I'm remembering  corvettes are ok, but the really cool guys cruise in a Saturn station wagon. As long as it's freshly washed. And driven by a guy with life experience.