Have You Seen Me?

I woke up to Meredith Viera telling me of a 36 year-old woman who went missing from a cruise ship over the Christmas holiday.  There is a part of me that sinks a rolls my eyes a little.  It’s not I don’t want Jessica Sietz to be found.  I don’t know her and I quite sure she didn’t do anything to warrant falling four stories into the middle of the Caribbean.  It’s just when they show her picture I realize I am in for several weeks of this.

I live in a country with three hundred million people.  Three hundred million.  Excluding public personalities, is there anyone that goes missing and warrants national news attention?  Is Jessica Sietz the only person in the United States that went missing last week.  There are 2,300 people reported missing in the US every day.  That’s more people than San Francisco.  Let’s assume 95% of these are kids who got drunk and didn’t call home, women who left their husbands, men skipping town to avoid their bookies and good-old fashioned competent suicides where we’ll never find the body.  That still leaves 115 people or an average of 2.3 people per state per day or 69 people a month that have legitimately met foul play… in your state.

I had to hear about Caylee Anthony for six months.  In that time, 414 more people went missing (I know this because their pictures are in the breezeway of the Walmart) and they didn’t have a mom that neglected to alert anyone for thirty days while they were drinking and updating their MySpace page.  If most of the parents I know lose track of their kids, after the initial calls to babysitters, schools, ex-spouses and grandparents, someone is smacking the panic button.  Hard.  My old boss Jeff’s son got on a different bus to go to a friends house and didn’t tell him.  Jeff didn’t know where is son was for forty minutes and I swear it looked like he’d been awake for a week.  My friend Jessica once lost her son Jordan in a mall and said when she found him she wanted to kill him.  After that, they used to run kidnapping exercises in her front yard to see how long it would take someone to forcibly take an eight year old.  He was told he could do anything except punch her.  Jessica is a healthy 5′ 10″.  It took her over four minutes to push him into a minivan by herself.

And while I am here let my digress for a moment.  All those protesters who have been in front of the Anthony house are complete assholes.  This doesn’t involve you.  Somehow these idiots have forgotten that right or wrong, somebody’s daughter/granddaughter is dead.  Regardless of who did it, somebody else is going to be in mourning and holding onto hope the obvious isn’t true.  And the only thing that makes these people even larger jackasses is bringing toys and leaving them there for a kid who will never see them and when the family asks they be taken to needy children for the holidays so some good can come out of it, these ass-snacks argue with them.

Fuck those homeless kids who are getting Spam for Christmas.  I want these teddy bears and dolls to stay out in the rain so people know we mourn for a dead toddler we have never met.

Sorry about that but I live an hour from where that happened and have to watch news reports that actually show images of Caylee Anthony with the utterly ridiculous “2005 – 2008″ subtitle.

I wish I lived in a country where Caylee Anthony et al deserved the media coverage because they were the only people that went missing this week.  Hell, run that shit twenty four seven and have Nancy Grace give us updates during commercials.  There is a hierarchy to death.  There are lots of car accidents but only the truly massive ones get newsplay.  A plane skids off the runway it’s reported because that doesn’t happen every day.  My point is people go missing and heinous shit goes down all the time but what makes Jessica Sietz so special that a national morning news show has to tell me about it?

Jessica Sietz is pretty.

Case in point:  Natalee Holloway.  Chandra Levy.  Laci Peterson.  Granted, these are just three but from the news, you’d think only hot girls go missing in America.

   

Remember Jessica Lynch who was captured by Iraqis in 2003.  Her story was everywhere.  Ten months later they made a TV movie about her ordeal (which she couldn’t even finish because it was so inaccurate).

Well, this is Lori Piestewa.

Lori Piestewa served in the same company as Jessica Lynch and was also captured during the same battle.  Unfortunately she became the first women to die in combat in Iraq.  Jessica Lynch has repeatedly declared her the true hero, not herself.  So why does Jessica Lynch’s name return 669 hits on Amazon.com and Lori Piestewa’s returns 49?  Lori Piestewa’s a minority (Native American) and no offense, isn’t as attractive as Lynch.  Shoshana Johnson was also in the same battle and received zero press.  Johnson is a larger black woman and single mother.  The sad part here is when the United States decided what it was going to sell the the American people as the sacrifice of it’s soldiers, it wasn’t a black woman or a native American, they chose Jessica Lynch.

They call this Missing White Woman Syndrome and to be honest being white doesn’t mean people will come for you.  I read an article where a detective was interviewed and said he had a missing persons file three inches thick on his desk but nobody wants to put rewards out for runaways, drug addicts and prostitutes even if they are white.  And statistically speaking there are more men than women that go missing every year but the general assumption is men can take care of themselves.  Women need to be rescued.

Let’s be clear: I am in no way criticizing any of these women.  They aren’t the media and God knows if a loved one of mine was missing and Greta Van Susteren was willing to put me on TV to find them, mark me a parking spot next to Wolf Blitzer because you’re never getting rid of me.  I throw this one down at the feet of the media and shame on them for all following the same story… there are plenty of messed-up things to go around.

It’s a little discomforting to know if I go missing I won’t get the attention these women get.  If Natalie, an accomplished (and if I may say, attractive) attorney goes missing, being an African-American, even she won’t get the attention these women get.

Years ago I lived next door to my brother.  I came home in the evening and went next door to find the front door unlocked, lights and television on.  I called out and no one answered.  I checked all the rooms… empty.  On the kitchen counter was a warm bag of Chinese take-out.  My brother’s truck was in the drive-way with his son’s car seat.  It would be unlike him to go anywhere without the car seat.  I went outside and walked the perimeter of the chain-link fence that bordered the empty lots that surround his property.

I was looking for bodies.  Sorry, that’s how my mind works.  You home invade someone and it would be really easy to toss the bodies into the empty high grass in the surrounding lots.

I called my father and asked if he spoke to him and he said, “No,” and when I told him my concern he dismissed me.  “He’ll turn up,” he assured me when everything in that house pointed to something that had gone wrong.

An hour later my brother, his son and his future wife (Danielle) returned, Alex’s head wrapped in bandages.  They had picked up dinner and Alex was running around the living room and ran into a wall and split his head open.  My brother scooped him up, Danielle grabbed her car keys and they went to the emergency room.  Alex still doesn’t grow hair where that scar was.

If anyone I know goes missing, rest assured, I will come looking for you.

Fashionably Late

Natalie has me working out.  Okay, it’s something I should be doing regardless because I have a tuxedo to squeeze into in fourteen weeks and I need to lose about, I don’t know, seventy pounds.  In my defense, I am thirty-six.  Honestly, I didn’t ever think Natalie was going to get here and I started treating my body like rental car you know you won’t be getting the deposit back on.  I put cigarettes out on the dashboard.  I stop by throwing it in reverse.  I drive to Hazard County to just experience the scenic countryside and ridiculous amount of incomplete bridges.  I essentially did the same thing with my body except with cheeseburgers and random stuff wrapped in bacon.

So Natalie wants me to live longer, blah blah blah, so we joined this gym.  It’s a cheap gym frequented by lots of old people (I do live in a retirement community).  While doing my forty minute treadmill walk, Zune playing my favorite podcasts, I noticed something weird about old people.

They don’t have workout clothes.

Of course this isn’t all of them.  It isn’t even most of them.  Maybe just one out of five I will notice on a treadmill wearing jeans, a golf shirt and leather belt.  They do have sneakers on, a towel and bottle of water so it wasn’t like they didn’t know they were coming here.  But a leather belt… who wears a leather belt to the gym?  I was walking the other morning and there was a guy with Charles Darwin beard and camouflage pants.  Not shorts… pants.  Another day I saw a woman with sweatpants and a button blouse.

This leads me to the conclusion that maybe the first sign of senility is the inability of old people to dress themselves.  My friend Jessica once called me years ago to tell me her mother, who I never thought of as old, was wearing two different shades of pastel green (and she argued she shouldn’t even be wearing one shade of pastel green, let alone two).  She was convinced at that moment her mother was losing her mind because this is something she never would have done years prior.

I have pictures of my father wearing a plaid shirt and pants, wait for it, two different colors, two different plaid patterns.  Granted, it was the seventies but understand my father was fifty-five coming out of the seventies.  My father never owned a pair of jeans (or dungarees which is what he called them… and I apologize if I spelled that incorrectly since nobody has used that word since 1940).  He wore dress slacks and suspenders and a T-shirt most days.  On special days he wore that old dude shirt Cuban men wear with the ruffles and four pockets.  He owned sneakers but most often wore sandals… with dress socks.

I once caught him mowing the lawn wearing an umbrella hat much like this one being worn by billionaire Apple Computer inventor and Segway enthusiast, Steve Wozniak.

But probably more often worn by people like this douche here:

Not wanting my father to be a dork, I immediately went out and bought him a proper baseball cap.  Something nice by the good people at Nike.  His only request is the back be ventilated so his head could breathe.  Nike caps with cheap plastic venting are a lot harder to find than you would think.

Luckily my father never owned any pastels which is a testament to my mother knowing where to draw the line.  I never understood the deal with old people and pastels.  I understand jeans were work pants in their day and they are still wearing what was fashionable when they were in their prime but was there some point ever where everybody wore pastels?  Someone told me this was common in the seventies but I don’t see old people in bellbottoms and jackets with ludicrously wide lapels and stitching that looks like it was done with twine.  And even if they did, my father never walked around with a fedora from 1940.  Nobody really smokes pipes anymore.

I wonder in thirty years and I going to be wearing wildly inappropriate clothing.  Is my daughter going to buy me new clothes because no seventy year old man should be wearing knee-length cargo shorts with an inordinate amount of pockets.  Am I going to have to look at seniors buying Metamucil with one hand while holding their baggy pants which expose their adult diapers with the other?  Eighty year old grandmas with butterfly tattoos on the wrinkled small of their back wearing hot pink shorts with the word “juicy” accenting their varicose veins and translucent skin?

Pictures With Santa And Other Socially Acceptable Forms Of Child Abuse

I don’t believe in Santa Claus.  I really never have.  We didn’t have a chimney in Pennsylvania (ironically, in Florida we did).  What we had was a piece or horrible furniture that looked like a chimney and where the mantle would be opened into a combination wet bar/phonograph where my father would store his apricot brandy and my mom’s Seals & Croft records.  The lit logs were plaster with circulating red and orange lights.  Because of this atrocity, this conversation ensued:

JIM: Dad, if we don’t have a chimney, how does Santa get into the house?

DAD: He has a key.

JIM: For everybody?

DAD: Yeah.  Everybody.  Now go to sleep.

JIM: Okay. (Pause)  Wait.  There are twenty-two houses on this block.

DAD: And he has twenty-two keys.

JIM: But that would mean on this side of the highway to eighth street he would have over one hundred and sixty keys.

DAD: It’s a really big key chain.  Go to sleep.

JIM: In this city alone there would thousands of keys.

DAD: (Frustrated).  You got me.  There is no Santa Claus.  Your mom and me buy all the stuff.

JIM: Really?  So there is no way I am getting that Star Wars Millennium Falcon for my Han Solo you said you’d never buy me?

DAD: No.  And you’re not getting a ColecoVision either.  You already have an Atari.

Two words, Dad: Skeleton Key.  But my father, God bless him, wasn’t know for his creativity.  This is the same guy who used to give unwrapped cartons of Methol Kools to his friends for birthday gifts.  As you can tell, my father never really tried to sell the concept.    My brother wasn’t much different.  I can’t imagine I will be either.  I remember my father watching Walter Cronkite during the Great Cabbage Patch Scare of 1982 and commenting, “It’ll be a cold day in hell when I wake up at 4:00a and get my leg broken by a bunch of assholes* to get you boys some stupid toy.”  I learned very quickly there are things you do for yourself and things you do for your children.  My father had a very distinct line that separated these things.

I have one picture of me with Santa.  I was dressed in a red onesy (shut up, Spell Check, that isn’t even a real word) with a hood over my head and mittens.  I am not able to walk so I am completely trusting on my parents judgement of who I should have my picture taken with.  The point is I don’t know where I am nor do I care.  So why is this picture being taken?

For my mom.

I have come to the conclusion that parents will sometimes do things to their children that do not serve their best interest for the sake of a good photo op.  The difference is my mom is not a whack-a-nut.  If your kid, like me, sits on Santa’s lap with the same expression Humphrey Bogart has when someone points a gun at him, more power to you.  Enjoy your picture and fond memories.  If your kid reacts the way I would assume Richard Simmons would if someone pointed a gun at him, you ma’am, are a nut.

Exhibit A: The Moms.

  

I am going to assume this woman is from France or some European place where berets are still fashionable or I am going to hate this lady even more.  Look at her kid’s face.  Santa isn’t a jolly bringer of joy to that baby.  That is a fat man in fuzzy pajamas she doesn’t know.  And let me tell you something else.  Your kids hide behind your leg and refuse to talk to the people you work with.  What makes you think this guy is going to fare any better?  Now the kicker is look at the mother’s face.  This crazy chick is completely obvious the the entire process or just doesn’t give a shit.

I know my baby is upset, terrified and crying… tell you what, let me hold her just long enough to get a picture.

Again, I am assuming that baby is a “she” which is the only thing preventing me from calling Child Services on this woman.  The second mom here looks like she actually had to sit on Santa’s lap in a failed attempt to calm her kid down.

Exhibit B: Singled Out.

        

If you let some random stranger hold your kids while they screamed their heads off, begging for the secure embrace of their mother who is standing five feet away, anytime between January and November so you could take their picture, you’d be a psycho.  At Christmas, people line up and pay money to do this.

Exhibit C: Once, Twice, Three Times A Baby.

        

And out of curiosity, under what circumstances would you expect anyone to ever hold more than one baby at the same time?  I am sure there are moms out there who do it but not willingly.  If someone, probably anyone, offered to hold one of those kids most moms would jump at the chance.  Most of these Santa’s look like kindly old men who make a little extra coin six weeks a year pretending to be Santa.  He’s retired.  He doesn’t need this shit.  Why don’t you just ask that poor old man to spray himself with pheromones have a knife fight in an elevator with a crack-addicted monkey?  Seriously, that one in the center with the three babies?  What the hell was that parent thinking?

What, you can’t hold three babies at the same time?  What kind of dime store half-ass Santa are you?

      

Unless your Amish or a biker (or an Amish biker) how many people really have beards like that?  To a child, that’s just a masked stranger taking him from his mother who probably lured him to the Galleria with promises of toys and hot pretzels.  And at what point will anyone look at these pictures with fond memories of the event?  It isn’t like their crying is necessary like you’re getting your four-year-old daughter her Depo-Provera shot.  They are crying for your enjoyment.

Let’s make this clear, this is about you.

I worked with a very nice woman named Tara who had one son named Alec.  He was the Chosen Son.  The reason we haven’t all frozen and died is because the sun shines every morning out of his ass.  There were seven pictures on her desk, all of them of her son.  If you didn’t know you would assume she was a single mother since excluding Alec, there was no proof a husband existed (or maybe, just maybe, she conceived him herself… cue cherubic choir).  She once showed me a scrapbook she’d finished which was a four inch thick testament to Alec’s first three years… not a picture of his father to be found.  She once called me to show me she had finally put a picture of her husband on her desk and when I got there to bear witness, there was a picture of her husband… holding Alec.  I immediately disqualified the picture as invalid.  At three they decided it was time for Alec to go to Disney World and when her mother made the reservations… she cried on the telephone to the customer service rep.

Seriously… she cried.

Meanwhile Alec was somewhere minding his own business oblivious that his mother and grandmother were making memories for him that he wouldn’t recall a year from now and hoping that Mickey Mouse, a character reduced to corporate mascot that hasn’t appeared regularly in cartoons in sixty years, would fill him with glee and isn’t just a six-foot rat in a tuxedo.

There are people that will tell me, “Wait until you get kids,” to which I will kindly refer you to the first paragraph and my upcoming biography of my father, “I’ll Give You Something To Cry About: The Wit And Wisdom Of Edward Ford.”

I don’t cry in Santa pictures.  I knew better.

* My father seldom swore in my childhood and I am quite certain he didn’t at this occassion either.  That is my own colorful interpretation.  I don’t drink and smoke.  Please leave me and profanities alone.

Sam Walton Hates Me

This story is a footnote to Irate Of The Caribbean and further proof there is a conspiracy against me by the Walmart Corporation.

The first movie Natalie and I saw was Ratatouille.  We have decided to start a tradition on the anniversary of our first date to go to dinner and (preferably) a (Pixar) cartoon.  The past summer it was Wall-E.

So being the movie addict I am, I went to buy a copy like the good moviephile I am.  Now part of my personal ritual is to wake up Sunday morning and see what Best Buy, Circuit City and Target have on sale.  My favorites are the ever elusive two-disc special editions that are normally $24.99 on sale for a cool $10.  Sometimes I’ll replace a movie I already own because someone released a super-duper, steel-belted, now in lemon-scent version of Star Wars, a movie I have purchased five times and am still compelled to buy the new Star Wars: Sith Happens Edition.

So I am in the market for Wall-E.  There are three versions of this film.  A single-disc DVD edition for the normal people.  A Blu-Ray DVD version for the elitists were complaining about the quality of DVD and had to have something that would let them see every hole left by Dr 90210’s Botox injections with a clarity they won’t be happy with until their eyes bleed.  And the three-disc special edition DVD for people like me.  Now here’s the kick in the ass.  The single-disc DVD is $15.  The Blu-Ray is $25.  The regular DVD… $35.

What the hell?

I check a few more sites and $30 is the cheapest anyone has it for.  In fact, some people have it for more.  Madness, I tell you.  I check the Walmart website and they have for $22 and my blood pressure subsides.  On my lunch break I go to the Wally World and there is a giant display with a big cardboard Johnny Five Wall-E and I take one and go to the counter.

CASHIER: $37.25.

ME: I thought these were $22.  Are you sure?

CASHIER: Yes.

I have a policy about express lanes.  There should be a sign below them that reads, “Ten Items Or Less – No Checks, No Bitchin’.”  You shouldn’t be able to buy newspapers or cigarettes in these lines, either.  If the cashier can’t give you what you need by turning 180 degrees without moving her feet then you can’t have it.  To complain about pricing and have her call in a manager defeats the purpose of an express lane.  It she rings up your carton of Ben & Jerry’s Americone Dream for $29.99 you can either pay that for your novelty ice cream or tell her, “No thanks,” and go about your day.

I went about my day.

Well, actually I went back to work and looked it up on their website, printed it and went back later that night.  I went to the Customer Service counter and politely asked:

ME: Do you price match web sites?

CUSTOMER SERVICE: It depends.

ME: Do you price match your own site?

CUSTOMER SERVICE: No.

ME: Excuse me?

CUSTOMER SERVICE: We don’t price match our own site.

ME: But I can order stuff from your site and pick it up in the store?

CUSTOMER SERVICE: Yes.

ME: So I can’t just come in here and you give it to me for that price instead of registering for a Walmart Online account?

CUSTOMER SERVICE: No.  That stuff is sent from a different warehouse.  You’ll get an email when you can get it.

ME: So if I want this movie for $22 I have to register on your website, order it, wait for an email and then come back to the store and get it even though there are two hundred of them seventy-five feet to my left.

CUSTOMER SERVICE: Yes.

ME: How long does that take?

CUSTOMER SERVICE: Usually two weeks.

ME: You’re completely serious.

CUSTOMER SERVICE: Sir, I never joke about grown men buying kid’s cartoons from an international conglomerate.  I take my job very seriously.

Okay, that last line I made up.  So I went home and ordered the damn movie.  About a week later I get an email.  Now there is this thing they do besides the DVD double-dip (which is releasing the same movie with slightly different features usually to tie in with a newly released sequel or remake (which is about every six minutes)… a practice that works mostly on me).  This is weird packaging.  The first I remember is my copy of Total Recall which came in a red tin designed to look like Mars (and if you haven’t seen Total Recall let me tell you it has mutants, a three-titted whore and a scene of Arnold Schwarzenegger in drag from the director of Showgirls… run, don’t walk to Blockbuster).  My friend Heidi has a copy of Heathers in a tin lunch box.  I have a copy of Evil Dead in the Necronomicon, the book of evil written in blood and bound in human flesh… or in this case cheap rubber.  I am waiting for someone to release a copy of Boogie Nights where the DVD is is sticky for no good reason.  None of this is conducive to being stored on a shelf.

The Wall-E packaging comes in a cardboard case that looks like it should slide out like a slipcover but nooooooo, that would be too easy.  Both ends slide out and the fucking thing folds out again.  Inside these two folds are the grooves for the DVDs, oh but wait, there is a third disc that just sits there in a paper sleeve, sad because nobody gave it a home.

Now let me tell you about the third DVD.

This is the third time in the last two months I have bough a DVD with the ever elusive “third disc.”  Let me tell you what’s on this third disc.

Jim, is it a documentary on the making of the film I will never watch?

Is it trailers for other movies that if I liked Wall-E I should be sure to buy Pocahontas and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame because they are so similar and I’ll surely enjoy them, too?

Wait, is it deleted scenes… from a cartoon… because cartoons characters often flub their lines or they animate extra scenes just for the hell of it?

No.  The third disc is the digital copy of the same movie in a lame attempt for me to not pirate their movie and stick it on the Internet.  Now follow the logic of this.  They want me to pay $35 for a movie that includes a digital copy so I can watch it on my portable device such as Natalie’s iPod or my Zune (because I watch to watch movies on a screen half the size of my palm) when I could just pay $15 for the single-disc version and go to the Internet and steal a version I can watch portably.

So all this and crappy packaging.

Now someone is going to email me and say the whole point to Wall-E was environmental responsibility which is why they have the cardboard packaging to which I call Bullshit!  Sell that crap to the tourists because I ain’t buying.  This isn’t those flimsy bottles of water they sell as “environmentally friendly.”  If that was so important they would sell soda in those crappy-ass bottles or better yes, beer.  Do you know how many lives would be saved in barfights with drunk dudes trying to stab each other with plastic bottles?  Those bottles are made because people will buy them to feel good about themselves and they cost less to make and they charge you the same money for them.

I didn’t walk off the plantation yesterday.

But do they think I am going to throw my DVD in a landfill?  Why is this thing in a cardboard case?  I appreciate the theme unlike in 2000 when they made How The Grinch Stole Christmas (which I despise) and merchandised the shit out a movie that was about anti-merchandising or after Finding Nemo when all the pet stores couldn’t keep clown fish in stock because kids aren’t bright enough to comprehend that “All drains lead to the ocean” means you shouldn’t be keeping these fish.

And maybe it’s just odd foreshadowing that I am standing in a Walmart buying a movie about robot built to clean the environment after a large international conglomerate sells me a bunch of stuff that will make me happy.

Then again, I think beer should come in two-liter bottles so what do I know?

Shhh, My Parents Are In The Next Room

Natalie’s parents came to the house a few weeks ago.  This was the first time they have been to my place since I started dating their daughter in July 2007.  Her parents have taken the whole ”moving-in” thing well.  My mother took to the idea very well.  I am pretty sure it was the combination of: a) I finally found someone I could be happy with (read: tolerates my crap) and b) I wasn’t gay.  Not that it would have mattered to her but when you get to be thirty-five and single people start to talk, theories are formulated, you’re introduced to someone’s male cousin who’s also “picky.”  I am reminded of a Jerry Seinfeld joke that one of the benefits to being gay is immediately your wardrobe doubles.  Natalie will tell you when people asked, “why aren’t you married?” her standard answer was, “Nobody’d asked me yet.”  My standard answer was, “At this point, the shock would kill my mother.”

Anyone who knows me knows I am fairly neurotic and a self-diagnosed obsessive compulsive.  I made Natalie help me clean the house before her sister Brittany came to visit the first time.  “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” is policy, not just a dandruff commercial.  When I find people were at the house when I wasn’t, I always ask Nat did she put the dishes in the dishwasher or at least stack the dirty ones neatly in the sink?  Yes, my OCD leads me to think neatly stacked dirty dishes make a better impression than a messy pile of dirty dishes.  Did she pick up the inventory from the Payless Shoe store she seems to be opening by the front door?  There is a very thin line between messy and people thinking you’re one step from being homeless.

So her parents were coming and I was a little neurotic.  Make sure everything is clean.  Nothing is rotten in the refrigerator and they know I am feeding their daughter well and she isn’t eating cold mac & cheese over the sink with a large plastic spoon (like I was before I met her).  Move the recyclables by the trash can so they don’t think it’s overflow garbage and I am too lazy to take it out.  Natalie asked if we could let her parents sleep in our bed. I agreed.  So we’ll be sleeping in the office on an air mattress.  The first time I have slept in that room in the four years I have lived there.

Her parents were fifteen feet away in my room.

I was a little weirded out by this.  Not that anything would have happened.  I can’t count the times I’ve stayed at Natalie’s parents house.  Depending on the sleeping arrangements, I either sleep in the extra bedroom or the office.  I once slept on the couch so I could watch Inglorious Bastards after everyone went to sleep.  This was when Natalie’s parents went to St Louis because even when they’re not there, it’s still their house and she respects that.  The first time I stayed there, the next morning her father told me it was a privilege to be granted access to “the upper rooms.”

All week I joked that when her parents come I will show her mother the bedroom and hand her father a pillow and comforter and show him the couch.  My house and thems the rules.  Yeah, it’s funny but it didn’t happen because it’s funny on paper doesn’t mean it works in the execution.

I’ve talked to parents about this and often they’ll tell you “not in their house.”  My friend Jon, said at lunch, he didn’t “care if his daughter had been living with her boyfriend for three years… not in his house.”

ME: What if she’d already been married, divorced, and was dating someone new?

JON: Don’t care.  Not under my roof.

ME: What if she’s thirty and for ten years she’s been with a guy, they have some kids and he’s been knocking the bottom out of it?

JON: Okay.  First, Elizabeth (Jon’s daughter) is ten so can we please not conjure up images of anyone “knocking the bottom” out of anything?  Secondly, she tries that crap in my house someone’s going down.

KIRK: Probably Elizabeth.

JON: Shut up.

ME: Okay, what if she’s like fifty?

JON: No.  I’m just going to be completely dickish about it and I don’t care.

ME: I bet Amy (Jon’s wife) overrules you on this.

JON: Probably.  It happens a lot… but I don’t have to go quietly.

I remember living at home and being allowed to have girls in my room with the lights off as we watched movies, something I later completely realized was a double standard and never would have happened had I been a girl.  There was a girl from high school I was involved with for several years (she who shall not be named but if you do say her name three times into a mirror she’ll appear and suck the self-esteem out of you like only a high school girl can).  Sometimes she would sneak over to my house after she got off work at midnight or 1:00a (which was completely against the rules).  We fell asleep once and woke at 5:00a.  As quietly as possible, I attempted to sneak her out only to hear the toilet flush across the hall where my parents slept, three feet across the hall.  We made it to the kitchen when we heard the bedroom door open and in my effort to be a gentleman and walk her out, I neglected to shut my bedroom door.  In retrospect, my father probably would have gone back to bed but instead on noticing I wasn’t in bed at 5:00a, investigated and found us in the kitchen. 

Hello, Mister Ford.  How are you this morning?

Really, what are you supposed to say?  I probably could have shot a man in Reno just to watch him die and gotten a shorter lecture.  And I still did the same thing with another girl and got busted again.  Teenage boys are fairly stupid and breasts have immeasurable power.

My friend Jessica’s former Sister-In-Law tells a story how she never snuck out of her house for fear her father would catch her.  When asked how he slept the night before, he always told them how he didn’t sleep well and would often check on his daughters, sitting in their rooms and watching them sleep.  Years later her mother told her none of this was true.  Her father invented the story and started telling them this when they were young so they wouldn’t sneak out.

Simply brilliant.  I am so doing that.

I respect her parents and even though they are not naive people, I offered to Natalie that I would sleep on the couch if that makes them more comfortable.  Natalie vetoed it immediately.

Her house.  Thems the rules.

The Internet Is A Series Of Tubes

I am sorry.  I know you shouldn’t laugh at old people but this is just too funny and besides, I am really laughing at the narrator.  It sounds like those horrible 1950s high school videos.

I see you looking at Jane differently, Timmy.  And maybe you feel a little different.  Well let me tell you about your changing body.

Christmas Toys I Never Got

I was walking through the Walmart and I came across this:

For those of you not in the know, this is the Millennium Falcon, cargo ship of smuggler Han Solo and his faithful co-pilot Chewbacca.  It made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs.  It was the ship that distracted Darth Vader long enough for Luke Skywalker to destroy the Death Star in the Battle Of Yavin and was flown by Lando Calrissian and escorted the rebellion into the reactor of the new Death Star destroying in the Battle Of Endor so they could be greeted as liberators by Ewoks everywhere.

I was seven when I saw Star Wars and rightfully obsessed.  I had a handful of figures.  Never a vehicle.  When the Rebellion staged an attack in my bedroom, they walked.  Brown blankets became sand dunes.  Styrofoam packaging became an ice fortress.  Raymond Barnett lived one block over from me and had everything… even the ever elusive Death Star playset which had three floors and a trash compactor.  I think I have seen three of these in my life.

I don’t remember my friend Star Wars toy when I was a kid.  I remember my brother’s was Han Solo and my father specifically told him do not open it until he were home.  He didn’t listen and somewhere between the supermarket and home he lost Han Solo’s gun which pretty much made his only weapon his dry wit and harsh language.  Hardly adequate when fighting with Sith or nearsighted Storm Troopers.  But we were kids, what did we know?  I spent several years referring to the preferred weapon of the Jedi and Sith as a Lifesaver which made sense since I didn’t know what a saber was.

In truth, I was a GI Joe man.

I never went without in my youth.  I never have looked back and wished my parents had gotten me something that they didn’t.  Thought that my life was somehow a little more empty because of a toy or game I missed out on.  Standing there in Walmart, at age thirty six, there was a part of me that wanted to buy this.  I wanted to finally own that thing I wanted almost thirty years ago but my father refused to buy me.

Then I saw the price in enormous numbers that I somehow overlooked in the return of my childhood glee.

$149.99.  Are they out of their fucking minds?

Screw that noise.  That’s our electric bill.  Half of Natalie’s car payment.  Gasoline for a month.  Seven trips to the movies.  Five dinners out.

That’s thirty DVDs from the Walmart $5 bin which is right over there.

Are these toy companies trying to make parents look bad?  I buy a lot of stuff I don’t need because I am a lot like a seven year old with a paycheck.  I can imagine me trying to explain this to Natalie which is immediately followed by her dragging me back to the Walmart (which she detests) to get our money back and explain to Ruth at the Customer Service counter than I don’t make mature decisions.

Now had this been the GI Joe USS Flagg we probably would have some issues.

Intestinal Fortitude

Thanksgiving.  Some time mid-afternoon I go to the kitchen for another Coke.  The kitchen is noticeably quiet from the women who surrounded the table an hour earlier talking.  In fact, no one is maintaining the cooking food.  The bubbling pots simmering on the stove.

This is when it hits me: What is that smell?

I wish I was a better writer and could phrase this in a more subtle way but I am not and any other phrasing would only do disservice to what I experienced.

Something smelled like shit.

My first impulse was quickly check the trash cans since there was a small child on the premises and I have experienced my old roommate girlfriends who put dirty diapers in kitchen, and worse, bathroom trash cans.  Proper disposal of diapers is to take them to an outside trash receptacle or toss them into a three foot ditch in the backyard, burn them and cover the remains in lime and earth.  There was no diaper.  The smell of butt asserole grew stronger and I was pretty sure the longer I stayed in the kitchen, years of my life were being stripped away.

Forget the Coke.  I have to save myself.

I came back into the living room, my face obviously showing my puzzlement.  You can’t just say, “What smells like shit in your house,” when you’re someone else’s guest and more importantly, it’s the house of your future in-laws.”

“Chitlins,” Christina answered to a question I didn’t need to vocalize.  “That smell is the chitlins… or as they say… shitlins.”

A little background.  My father grew up poor and black in Charlottesville VA.  My mother came to the Unites States from Vietnam in 1972.  My brother and I were raised in suburban Pennsylvania an hour outside of Philadelphia.

I’ve never had chitlins.

For those not in the know…

Chitterlings (often pronounced /ˈtʃɪtlɪnz/ and sometimes spelled chitlins or chittlins in vernacular) are the intestines and rectum of a pig that have been prepared as food. They are a type of offal.  (From Wikipedia.org).

Yeah.  They said rectum.

My father will tell you I am a picky eater and my father would be a liar.  There are few things I won’t eat and there are steadfast rules to them.  I don’t like the smell of fish sauce which, if you’re Vietnamese, you know is used in 98% of their meals.  It’s like salt is to Americans.  This is where my picky eater status came from because having a Vietnamese mother makes about 40% of your meals made with fish sauce.  I don’t like wet vegetables.  I’ll eat all the Brussels sprouts and lima beans you have.  Cole Slaw I can deal with (although not my favorite).  Spinach in salad, stuffed into a chicken, made into a tasty dip in a neat bowl made from bread… the line forms here.  Cabbage and ham, spinach, and collard greens sopping on a plate… I’m out, more for you.  I also don’t like meat on bones.  This goes back to my not wanting to eat any animal that still looks like the animal.  You know those movies where they roast a pig and it still has it’s head and an apple in its mouth.  Nasty.  If I am on the other side of the luau and someone brings me carvings off the pig, I’m fine.  I just don’t want to watch someone carving hunks off an animal while it’s looking at me.  I eat white meat mostly because the meat/bone ratio is in my favor.  The same for ribs because there is one bone and I think of them more like meat popcicles.

I understand the history of black (and for that matter, poor) people in America.  That Soul Food is derived from taking the leftovers after their masters had taken the best parts of the animal and making them into something edible.  But also understand, this history isn’t derived by choice.  It’s derived from necessity.  Had they been offered chicken breasts and sirloin, I highly doubt they would have said, “No, that’s okay.  We’re good eating the asshole out of this pig.  It’s a little nutty but we’re cool.”  I like having modern conveniences and part of that is not worrying about, and I quote, the “possibility of disease being spread when they have not been cleaned or cooked properly. These diseases/bacteria include E. Coli and Yersinia enterocolitica, as well as Salmonella. Chitterlings must be soaked and rinsed thoroughly in several different cycles of cool water, and repeatedly picked clean by hand, removing extra fat and specks of fecal matter because the part of the pig the ‘chitlins’ come from includes intestinal polyps and the last few inches before the pig’s rectum.”

Yeah.  They said fecal matter.  They even hyperlinked to an entry on it so we’re all on the same page.

I have no love of animals.  I have no line for “these are the cute ones and are off limits.”  I’ll eat a koala panini sandwich or General Tso’s penguin if you stir-fry it right.  I draw the line at primates because I think eating a monkey is too close to eating people, Intelligent Design be damned.  I sincerely believe there are animals put on this planet for me to eat because God made them tasty and stupid.  There is a reason we don’t eat cheetahs.  They’re fast.  There is no bear at the Super Target because they’re cranky and dangerous.  Silverback gorillas may taste like cheesecake but I won’t be the guy who finds out.  God gave chickens wings and the inability to use them.  Turkeys are so dumb they’ll drown in rain looking up trying to figure out what it is.  Cows are so stupid you can push them over while they’re sleeping.  And God made them delicious and made me smarter than all of them and to stack the deck even more in my favor, gave me opposable thumbs, the intelligence to control fire and invent Heinz 57 sauce.

Billy Green is a family friend of Natalie’s parents.  He a large boisterous bear of a man who bleeds garnet and gold, evident by his family’s clothing (including their Florida State socks) and his quickness to wipe his feet repeatedly on the Gator doormat at Natalie’s parent’s home.  He found out about my chitlin experience and quickly called me out on it.

“Have you ever tried it,” he offered.

I couldn’t stand to be in the kitchen while they were cooking.  How can I put them in a plate eight inched from my face? 

“You eat sausage and hot dogs,” he asked.  His voice booming and intimidating.

“Yes.”

“Well that’s the same thing,” Billy said.

“No.  Hot dogs and sausage smell delicious,” I explained.  They don’t smell like ass.  Nobody’s ever tried to burn their clothes after being in a room with hot dogs.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Pennsylvania,” I answered.

“Well that’s your problem.”

He could be right.  Chitlins, like Silverback Gorillas, might taste like cheesecake… but I won’t be the one who finds out.