The Face Is Familiar

I was coming out of steakhouse when I ran into Daryl Green.  I went to high school with Daryl who married his high school sweetheart, had a couple kids and has been a cop as long as I can remember.   I doubt either of us would categorize each other as friends as much as “this guy I know.”  The guy I bump into once a year coming out of a steakhouse.  Even still he’s friendly and genuine when I see him and I never mind the ten minutes in a parking lot I spend catching up once a year.

He asked me for my address and I asked why since I don’t think we’ve ever shared a phone call. He told me he needed to send my invite for the twenty year class reunion.

There are times you have a reaction to something and as soon as you do, you know it was wrong.  Before I could catch myself I laughed in his face and said, “I’m not going to that fucking thing!”

I felt bad because he was genuinely trying to do me favor but if you know me you also know I’m not going to that fucking thing.  I hated high school and wouldn’t go to a class reunion if they held it in my kitchen.  I don’t do reunions; at least not my own.  I went to Natalie’s reunion and had a great time.  There’s no pressure that I maybe don’t make as much money as I’d like or I weigh a hundred pounds more than I did in high school.  Hell, at someone else’s reunion I can make up any bullshit I want… I’m never seeing these people again.

What do I do?  I clean pools… well, more specifically grottos.  Have you ever heard of the Playboy Mansion?  You’d be shocked at what gets caught in a hot tub drain in at Hef’s place.  Then again, if you knew Lil Jon, you might not be.

My good friend Jessica Sexson-Zins missed our ten year reunion and completely intended to come to the twenty and went so far as issuing threats to drag me to hell with her.  This never would have happened.  She assures me if she flew all the way to Florida from One Red Light Indiana, my guilt would have made me go.

It’s so adorable how naïve she is sometimes.

I told her more than likely she’d show up and Natalie would probably jump at the chance.  Let the two of them get all dolled up and revisit the past (or for Natalie, a past that she never was a part of).

Remember Jim Ford?  I’m his wife.  He really wanted to come but he had other obligations.  The Real Housewives of Terre Haute finale was on.

Although it would be much funnier if Natalie showed up as transgendered post-op Jim Ford (now known as Jane Ford) and introduced Jessica as her “partner.”  No, wait, Lackawanna Blues.  I want my drag queen name to be Lackawanna Blues.  I’m not even talking about drag queens am I.  I’m probably using the word “transgendered” wrong, too.  Anyway.

A week or so after the reunion Jessica mentioned that although she didn’t get to go, one of her friends did and there were pictures on a website.  Apparently someone I went to high school with has a photography business and took his twenty year reunion as an opportunity to take photos and post them to his website where he’d be happy to send you copies for a fee.  Classy.

As I clicked through the two hundred and eighty three pictures, my initial reaction was, “Who the hell are these people and how did they get so old?”  It was like I had amnesia and was brought to a family reunion.  I spent years with these people and I have no idea who the hell they are.  There are girls that showed up in multiple pictures I couldn’t identify but when they all converged in one pic suddenly I remembered, “Oh, I remember them… I hated those bitches.”  I call this “The Dixie Chick Effect,” in that I never recognize them by themselves but if you put all three of them together a light goes on within fifteen seconds and I say, “Oh, it’s the Dixie Chicks.”  It only takes ten seconds if they’re holding violins and five seconds if they’re surrounded by rednecks in sleeveless Toby Keith shirts that don’t understand the First Amendment throwing copies of Wide Open Spaces at them.  Some look a little familiar but most of them are gray haired paunchy strangers.  I immediately call Jessica.

JIM:  Have you been to the reunion photos?

JESSICA:  Yes.  Who are those people?

JIM:  Fuck if I know.  Do I look that old?

JESSICA:  No.  Do I?

JIM:  Hell no.  Gretchen doesn’t.  I saw a picture of Carrie Guarcello on my Facebook and she looks the same.

JESSICA:  I’m so glad I didn’t go.  I would have been pissed if I flew to Florida and got to a reunion with a bunch of strangers.

Looking at the pictures we both had the same experience.  Maybe had we been there and recognized some people we would have started talking about old times and it would have come rushing back.  Then again, it could just turn into three hours of repeating my life story over and over again and talking about myself which I have no need for… I already have a blog.

Most of the people are strangers to me and honestly if any of us really cared, we probably would have made more of an effort to keep track of each other in the first place.  It’s not like I don’t have friends I’ve kept for twenty years.  I’m not criticizing people who go to these things.  If you had a great time in high school and you want to see those people again and relive a Bruce Springsteen song, more power to you.  It’s just not my thing.

When Natalie came home from work I told her about the photos and my evening on Memory Lane and in her pajamas under a blanket she perked up and asked, “Is there a picture of [She Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken] on the website?”, referring to a past relationship that went on ten years longer than it had any right to.

I told her, “Yes,” and she burst from the couch and ran for the computer.

“This is her?  Really?  Wow.”  There was a long pause.  “I am so much cuter than she is.”  Then Natalie climbed back under her throw blanket, smiled and ate a popsicle reminding me without words why I had every reason to look forward and no need to look back.

There are girls that showed up in multiple pictures I couldn’t identify but when they all converged in one pic suddenly I remembered, “Oh, I remember them… I hated those bitches.”  I call this “The Dixie Chick Effect,” in that I never recognize them by themselves but if you put all three of them together a light goes on within fifteen seconds and I say, “Oh, it’s the Dixie Chicks.”  It only takes ten seconds if they’re holding violins and five seconds if they’re surrounded by rednecks in sleeveless Toby Keith shirts that don’t understand the First Amendment throwing copies of Wide Open Spaces at them.

The Parent Trap

Our friends Stephanie and Danny are in the process of adopting a baby.  I’ve seen people go through this, as well as artificial methods and it’s long, tedious, often heartbreaking and only cements my belief of how serious parenting is.

The real rub is knowing how many people have kids and don’t want them or rather, shouldn’t have them in the first place.  I was in the Wal-Mart last night…

I know, me again with the Wal-Mart.

…talking to a former co-worker when I watched a woman smack the hell out of her kid with a DVD.  Granted, the kid was screaming about something and she was way too old to behave like that (for that matter, too old to be pushed in a cart).  Did her behavior warrant getting clocked with a copy Madea Goes To Jail?  Maybe.  I’m not above clocking an unruly kid but keep in mind, I got hit twice as a kid.  Ever.  My father’s theory that if you have to hit a kid often, then you aren’t doing it right.  This is the same man who when children would come to visit he clearly explained to the parents, “I treat any kid in my house like my kid… they step out of line and I will pop them.”  It never came to this because unlike a lot of parents these weren’t threats… these were rules and rules have consequences.

So I was in Sam’s Club getting a pizza…

Shut up, I give a lot of money to the Sam Walton company and contribute to the downfall of America… but it’s close to my house, the pizza is tasty and socks are twelve for three dollars.

…and watched a two-year old play on the floor and scamper around repeatedly as the mother watched.  On occasion she would stand him upright only to have him on the floor two minutes later.  I watched waiting for someone to hit him with a cart of Brontosaurus steaks and gallon cans of black olives.

The floor… in a Sam’s Club.  If you don’t see what’s wrong with that then you probably have that kid that plays under the table in restaurants and in the clothing racks at department stores and brush it off with, “They aren’t hurting anyone.”

Years ago at the theatre my sister-in-law was getting her seat kicked by a kid.  She turned around and gave him a look.  A few minutes later he started in again.  She turned and politely asked him to stop kicking her chair.  The woman sitting next to him took notice.  A few minutes later he started again at which point Danielle turned and politely asked the woman if these were her children, the woman said, “Yes,” and Danielle told her, “You should be ashamed your children don’t know how to behave in public.”

She then watched the rest of her movie and her chair was never kicked again.  Nothing like someone calling you out on your parenting skills to shame you into doing what you should have been doing the whole time.  And Danielle, being one hundred and five pounds of born and bred New Yorker, is just the person to make that happen.  She’s here to watch Brendan Fraser fight mummies… not make friends.

It wasn’t until last year while we were watching Meet The Robinsons (and for two people without children we watching a lot of cartoons), Natalie told me there were no more orphanages.  They’ve been replaced with people’s private residences.  It was a process, like slaughterhouses and diamond mines I never really thought about it.  Like when Matt Lauer tells me a bunch of Pennsylvania miners are trapped in a shaft or a billion dollars is being used to give people with antennas the ability to watch The Bachelorette my reaction is always, “There are still miners?  And who is still watching TV with antennae?  Are they watching from 1975?”  If I had thought about it, I probably would have liked to have thought somewhere in town was a place where all the orphaned kids go and sleep in some kind of barrack configuration and maybe Carol Burnett does a drunken song and dance number bordering on genius.

Instead you’re put into someone’s home who watches you for cash.

Funny story, Annie is one of Natalie’s favorite movies.  She knows all the lyrics and watched the movie constantly in her youth.  As a child she wanted to be an orphan not understanding for that to happen her parents have to be dead.

It also bothers me the double standard that allows homosexuals to be foster parents but not be legal adoptive parents.  It really is the booty call of child welfare.

We’ll call you at two-thirty AM and hit that if nothing comes home with us from the club but I wouldn’t start picking out China patterns if I were you.

The fact that these dudes can’t adopt a kid…

…but this single unemployed woman can have fourteen is unfathomable.  Because nothing fills a gaping hole in your psyche like a baby.  And if the first one still leaves an empty spot in your life, go ahead and jam thirteen more babies in there.

Then again, she’s straight.  Well at least that’s what she told us since all her kids came from a bottle.  I question her sanity just based on all of her last eight kids have the same middle name.  Then again, if I had to name fourteen kids somewhere around eight I would just start naming them after random things.

I’ll call you three Wendy, Krystal and Denny.  And you guys will be Hardee, Popeye and Quizno.  I’m tired.  daddy needs his rest.  Has anyone seen Chipotle?  That little scamp.

How many kids is fourteen?  They could play basketball against each other and still have two men each to ride the bench.  There are only nine dudes in the Wu Tang Clan.  If you have a 2000 square foot house and subtract non living areas (like porches, garages and kitchens) and fifteen people living in it means each person has about six square feet to call their own or something roughly this size.

And let me call out another bunch of idiots.  This would be people have a litter of babies through artificial methods and thank God for the miracle of children.

No.  That would be a miracle of the Pfizer Corporation (NYSE: PFE) and a little thing we like to call science.  If you were paying attention you’d know God didn’t want you to have any babies.  For that matter, she was pretty cool with us living with Small Pox, Polio and probably wouldn’t care if we got rid of the Food And Drug Administration and just said a prayer over our unchecked pork and hoped for the best.

I’m not chastising people who have babies artificially.  I’m just saying you give credit where credit is due.

This brings me back to Stephanie and Danny who really want to be parents.  I wish them the best and hope it’s everything they ever wanted with full confidence they’ll be excellent at it…

…or at least better than these people.

Celebrituaries

Driving home Thursday, June 25 I got a phone call from Heidi Pattie.

HEIDI: Michael Jackson is dead.

JIM: What the hell?  Are you sure?

HEIDI:  Apparently he had a heart attack or something.

JIM:  Okay.  Let me go.  I’ll call you later.

“I’ll call you later,” doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be talking and driving or I am in the middle something.  “I’ll call you later” really means, I have to call other people.

This is an odd thing my friends and I do.  Almost like some macabre pointless game that when a celebrity dies you want to be the first person to tell everybody.  I don’t know why.  We just do this.  Maybe in hopes that when people say, “Where were you when [enter event here] happened,” you’ll respond with, “In my car driving home from work… Jim told me.”  Hell, I did it five hours earlier when I clicked on my internet browser and saw Farrah Fawcett died sometime after The Today Show and before I left for lunch.

I immediately text messaged a half-dozen people.

Usually when it comes to this I am Johnny On The Spot.  Paul Newman.  Bea Arthur.  Every now and again someone beats me to it like when Ray called me to tell me Marlon Brando was dead.  When Gregory Peck died I got up from my desk, walked across the hall to Kelly Gaudet’s department, prefaced with, “I’m not fucking with you… Gregory Peck is dead.”  He was one of her idols and better she hear it from me than Mary Hart.

We don’t do it for everybody and never discussed who warrants the chain text message that goes out.  Somehow we just know.  Usually it’s icons or legends.  Talented people who die in weird, unusual ways.  You don’t exactly see a Tim Russert or a Bernie Mac coming (for that matter, neither did they).  David Carradine is just frickin’ weird.  The nerd-radar pings hard when someone like Majel Barrett (wife of Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry, and voice of the ship’s computer) dies.  She’s the kind of person who you can say that name right now and 97% of the people in a room will have no idea who you’re talking about and that last three will get severely bummed.

I remember going to work years ago and someone told me a Saturday Night Live cast member had died but couldn’t remember their name.  This is like saying Carmen Electra is here somewhere giving out lap dances but I can’t remember where.  Later my brother called and told me it was Chris Farley and I asked what did he die of and Bobby, without missing a beat, said, “Pick something.  The guy was an addict, an alcoholic and weighed four hundred pounds.”

My friends and I usually have the same reaction which is along the lines of that just sucks.  I have never seen any of them get bummed for more than five minutes which is usually disbelief when the death isn’t expected or in some strange bizarre fashion.  Every time a celebrity, or for that matter, anyone dies, I am always puzzled/surprised/and a little disgusted at the emotional outburst that follows for someone they’ve never met.  Some people warrant this display but not nearly as many that actually get it.

Ed McMahon?  Seriously?  The guy was a punch line.  These are the same people that send him money when he thought his house might get foreclosed on.  If you spend thirty years on a couch with Johnny Carson and at eighty-six you’re still making payments on shit… you’re an asshole.

It makes me wonder does anyone in California have jobs or does someone pay them to patrol the Walk Of Fame outside of Mann’s Chinese Theatre in some crazed version of musical chairs waiting for the ambulance chasers at TMZ.com to announce a death so they can throw the flowers and pictures they’ve been toting with them into an impromptu shrine for someone we haven’t thought about in twenty years.  Maybe I’m just a cold-hearted bastard but I can’t imagine what it would take to make me call in sick, leave my home and stand along the side of the road with a bunch of strangers holding candles in vigil.

Heath Ledger dies and as bizarre as it may be, does it really warrant the outpouring it gets?  Yeah, he’s got a kid and that’s sad for her but you know, there are probably a half-dozen people that have died in the last week within five miles of where you’re sitting right now and they have parents, children and siblings.  Not to shit in anyone’s cereal but Heath Ledger isn’t Marlon Brando, a guy who had a forty year career and reinvented acting.  In his twenty-two credits, only five are really worth mentioning (The Patriot, Brokeback Mountain, Monster’s Ball, The Dark Knight and I’m a sucker for Julia Stiles in Ten Things I Hate About You… don’t you judge me).  In fact, ten years ago, none of us even knew who he was and ten years from now will only remember The Joker.

In the Michael Jackson retrospective I actually watched a woman in the mass of people during the 1993 verdict, on hearing he’s been declared Not Guilty, reach into a box, retrieve a dove and set it free.

Really?  Who the fuck are you people?

If Matt Damon died and Natalie told me, incoherent over her hysterical sobbing, that she couldn’t go to work and immediately needed to know where she could find doves to release at his funeral there is a good chance when she got home there would be an empty indention on the couch and a cold Xbox controller where I should be sitting.

There used to be a thing people would do called a Dead Pool.  Clint Eastwood even made a shitty Dirty Harry movie about it.  You basically pick people you think are going to die and you bet on it.  It’s pretty sick and I don’t think I have ever played the game as much as consulted for people I was in the vicinity of.

You always pick the talented rock stars and eccentric actors.  John Lennon got shot walking home while Yoko Ono was standing right next to him.  Right the fuck next to him!  Meanwhile, Tommy Lee couldn’t get himself killed if he snorted all of Linday Lohan’s cocaine while getting banged by Magic Johnson choking him with an asphyxiation leash made by Michael Hutchence in the middle of a Klan meeting.

I would think being a celebrity is emotionally fairly empty.  People want to mementos to prove they met you.  They watch TV to see who you’re dating.  They buy magazines to see pictures of your babies.  You die and they grieve for you.  And you don’t know their names and have probably never spent more than two minutes with any of them.

Briton Jade Goody died a few months ago of cancer.  Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, “She was a courageous woman both in life and death and the whole country has admired her determination to provide a bright future for her children.”  Her funeral was attended by thousands, broadcast on television and attended by celebrities.

Oh, and I forgot, Jade Goody was reality television star and veteran of the British versions of Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother and numerous appearances where she was essentially paid to be herself.  And often that person was drunk and racist.  She spent the last seven years in the public eye and people kept watching her go from one show to another to her own series.  In the end she got cancer, filmed and aired it under the guise it was for her two small children to know her.  I’ve seen My Life (1993) with Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman and you can leave your loved ones mementos that aren’t part of the Nielsen Ratings System.

And how morbid and self-important is that?

HUSBAND: What do you want to do tonight?

WIFE: We can watch Britain’s Got Talent on BBC2 or we can watch that reality show woman slowly die in front of our eyes.  Yeah, let’s watch the dying woman.

When she died she was celebrated like someone who accomplished something special.  Instead of dying the game show contestant she was.

I don’t mourn for people I don’t know.  I shake my head and say it’s a shame and move on.  I have to get to work.  I like Michael Jackson probably more than the next guy but I left 1990 almost twenty years ago and quite frankly, Michael Jackson has been dead to me for years.

The Sign Remains The Same

I spend a lot of my day waiting for my computer to do stuff.  One of my tasks at work is issuing cell phones, more specifically, Blackberrys, to employees.  I notice while I am waiting for it to do something it shows a little hourglass that flips every few seconds.  This would be useful if the simulated sand actually corresponded to the length of time I would be waiting for the task to complete but it doesn’t.  It’s just there for my viewing pleasure.

So I start thinking somewhere when someone was programming Windows, probably in the early nineties, someone had to make a decision as to what the “thinking” icon would look like.  I’m sure there was short list of various clocks and someone decided, “Hourglass… we should have an hourglass.  Everybody knows what that is.”

Now here is the funny part: when was the last time has anyone regularly used an hourglass to measure time?  I own two decorative ones my brother brought back from Turkey and couldn’t tell you how much time they measure since after thirty seconds I’ve grown bored and started thinking about things I could put cheese on.  Don’t blame me… I’m the generation that has microwavable Minute Rice.  Natalie tells me her grandmother had one and she used to watch sand trickle out of when she spent her summers in St Louis.  I am not sure where you can even buy an hourglass at or what one costs.

So I look online and the good people at Wikipedia.org tell me portable watches have been popular since the 1500s.  That’s five centuries ago.  It would be like someone at Microsoft deciding we don’t need a digital clock in the lower right corner of Windows 95… let’s put a sundial there.

I was in the airport and there was the list of things you can’t bring on a plane and my favorite was the universal symbol for bomb which looks something like this:

Understandably we’re all clear on what that is but has anyone made a bomb like that in the last two centuries?  Would the silhouette of several sticks of dynamite and clock confused anyone?

Granted, nobody makes bombs that look like that either (since I am assuming most bombs are just a brick of C4 and a radio receiver that can detonate it from a cell phone) by someone who doesn’t look like this guy:

And for those of you who don’t know, that is Academy Award nominee, four time Screen Actor Award and MTV Movie Award Best Villain nominee Alfred Molina as Snidley Whiplash in Dudley Do-Right (1999).

Alfred’s gotta eat, too.

Granted, now Windows Vista has a little circle animation that chases its own tail never catching it kind of reminding me I probably spend in an ordinate amount of time of my life trying to get to something that will never happen.  Watching that little circle is like watching my brothers pug violently try and break free of her leash to chase cars or pre-1999 Susan Lucci at the Daytime Emmys.  Even if you could get what you wanted, what would you do with it?

eFelony.com

I generally don’t take pleasures in the downfall of people. Things the celebrate the worst aspects of Americans, and worse, humans in general, usually is reason for me to run in the other direction (or at least change the channel… I’m looking at you Bravo! TV). Jon Plant has introduced me to one of my guilty pleasures.

This would be Look Who’s Been Busted. This is a monthly newspaper (and I apologize to anyone who writes for an actual newspaper) that publishes photos of people who’ve been arrested in Marion County and the surrounding areas.

Mugshots are fun.

Okay, so these are people obviously not in the prime moments of their lives but for the most of them, looking at what they’ve been arrested for, they had it coming. If you see anyone’s picture and the words “BATTERY/STRANGULATION/FALSE IMPRISONMENT” below it, fuck that guy, he’s a scumbag and I don’t mind paying one dollar to laugh at his ass.

More than likely I probably dated the person he strangled because that’s the kind of guys women have left me for. Completely serious.

And is there anything sadder than a crying, remorseful thug?

I think not.

My favorite is a guy who’s in for “SHOOT/OR THROW DEADLY MISSILE.” I have no idea what that means but I envision two neighbors having a feud and finally when one refuses to stop his loud Memorial Day barbeque that goes too far into the night the other takes all the South Of The Border fireworks he’s purchased for Independence Day and fashions a hellacious rocket with several empty Sierra Mist bottles filled with gasoline strapped to the sides and spray paints “Memorialize This, Asshole!” on the makeshift m-eighties that fill the warhead. This all goes very Wile E Coyote pretty quickly and this jerk ends up in the pokey.

There is the slight anticipation of flipping the pages waiting to see someone you know. Twice this has happened to me elsewhere and both times of the Marion County Child Molester website when I recognized one of our vendors at the bank and a few years later some guy who worked in the office next to mine. In both situations I asked around was told it was weird circumstances which made them seem stupid but not deviants but then again… what did I expect them to say?

She told me she was into creepy old guys in sweatpants who drive windowless vans with a DVD of the Hannah Montana movie on constant loop… and who am I to argue?

My brother will buy the same newspaper and I find if you show this to men inevitably one of us will come across a woman and make the comment, “She’s kinda cute,” which quickly evolves into a game I like to call Inmate Tap That where you find women who, if you saw them in the wild at let’s say, the mall or the Applebees, and you were unattached, you’d probably take her home… or at least to your car. Keep in mind you don’t know what she’s been arrested for and she probably has cleaned herself up a little wiping the crack-induced saliva crust from her dry lip and maybe a little makeup to hide the black eye given to her when she didn’t give Pretty Tony Playa all his money because she skimmed a little for bay formula and other incidentals (like penicillin… Pretty Tony Playa has a horrible health plan).

I find Citrus County has much more attractive criminals than Marion County.

I wish they would put these people’s ages on there. I’d like to know how many of these people are my age or twenty years older still doing dumb shit. It’s hard to tell since almost no one takes a good mugshot. While few and far between, I find it odd the amount of people who smile in mugshots.

Generally they look like stereotypical criminals or seventies porn stars instead of Disney sitcom and movie stars.

For some reason the smilers tend to be the ones arrested for sexual assault so I am just going to chalk that up to batshit crazy.*

They should also distribute this in high schools. Maybe put their mugshots next to their yearbook photos so the kids will know what a very small series of bad decisions can lead to.

And if I can diverge for a moment. I know no one anticipates their child becoming a criminal but everything is possible and you probably shouldn’t give your kids overly pompous names just to avoid the irony. Nothing funnier than a cocaine possessing prostitute on violation of parole arrested for battery against the elderly named Princess.

I also have a hard time forgetting people have families, the same way I can’t think of girls in strip clubs and not think, “Hey, that’s someone daughter or mom!” This is probably more benefit of empathy than a problem (although some people in politics would argue empathy is a problem). The same way when I watch Cops I wonder how the hell did this happen to this guy? At some point he was a kid going to elementary school and thirty years later he’s habitually arrested for violation of parole and domestic battery. It only makes me the pressure of being a good parent all the more important or twenty years from now someone will be paying a dollar to laugh at my kid.

And just so you know they’re no better than you…

*Just so we’re clear… I don’t know if this guy is a child molester but I don’t know that he isn’t.  I do know that Circus Ringmaster mustache and that asshole grin aren’t helping.