I am a sucker for well crafted pop-songs with genuine grooves. Often, in my role as a befuddled goober, I shamble around in my slippers and nod my head to a particular track for a few weeks. Such was the case with Locked Out of Heaven by Bruno Mars. During the drearier moments of December, I found myself cuing up the song several times a day. One of the duties within my role as befuddled, pop-humming goober should be to actually pay attention to  lyrics. I caught on eventually to what (or where) Bruno found himself locked out of (“Oh! He means that Heaven”).  It would serve humanity nicely if I could invent a sort of translator for pop music that is wired directly to a person’s cerebral cortex and tells crusty shufflers like me exactly what singers are trying to convey. I imagine that this invention would translate the some current Billboard singles as follows:

• Bruno Mars-Locked Out Of Heaven. R&B to Confused Goober Translation: “Your ‘Whoa Nelly’ takes me on vacation. Your ‘Thank You, Maam, May I Have Another?’ Takes me to someplace tropical. Your ‘Stupid Euphemism’ takes me to paradise.  Now I feel like you’ve installed ADT in your clothes and the police will show up if I cause a fire or flood in your pants.”
• Ne-Yo-Let Me Love You (Until You Learn To Love Yourself). R&B to Pajama Clad Suburbanite Translation: “Let me ‘Whoa Nelly’ you until you discover that I’m not a therapist (and am just in it until you lock me out of heaven).”
• Ke$ha-Die Young. Jack-o-Lantern looking wanna be R&B Star to the World Translation: “An exorcist, a sales clerk from Ann Taylor Loft and Don Knotts all walked into a bar one night. Guess which two are Ke$ha’s parents.”
• Fun-Some Nights. Glee to Sweden translation: “What the…? Who sampled Abba?”
• Rihanna-Diamonds. I’m not even going to make fun of this song. Even a fuddy knows when to shut up and just sing along with a weird, catchy chorus. Shine bright like a diamond, yourself Rihanna.

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#2013 Best Year Ever #Bruno Mars #Diamonds #Ke$ha #Ke$ha Die Young #Locked Out of Heaven #Ne-Yo #Postaday #Rihanna #Top 40

I took two weeks off from writing this blog. In fact, I didn’t go near the WordPress world for a while. Sometimes, you have to do that to gain a little perspective. Did I learn anything new, or gain some insight that can only be found outside of writing Mostly Teachable? Not really. I prayed, read and wrote for other projects. Most days I ran, only pausing long enough to stare boggle-eyed at the new issue of Runner’s World, and then…ran some more. When the sun (finally) comes out in Michigan, we don’t take its presence for granted, after all.

Yesterday afternoon, I was having the traditional Sunday dinner with my wife’s family. Well, traditional as far as her deep roots are concerned. Sunday dinner in my house growing had a lot to do with how willing one of us was to open a can of tuna. As we were finishing dinner, my 10-year-old daughter Anna began to expound on her career and life plans. This, apparently is what young girls do to prepare for the future. They lay out, in detail, the hopes and aspirations of their lives for everyone to hear. Not once did she mention growing up to start a family and open cans of tuna. Sitting next to Anna, and with unusual patience, was her 3-year-old cousin. As Anna dreamed out loud of becoming a movie star, the pre-schooler very matter of fact-ly announced that he was going to be Captain America. There was no excitement, no carrying-on about the idea. I affirmed the plan with “You go, man! Captain America sounds like a good job.” My nephew just nodded with his serious expression. “Yeah.” He later went on to tell us something about Captain America being one of the “Vengers” as he ran off. I like the black and white, no-nonsense world of pre-school thinking. The captain is good, the monsters in the closet are bad. Therefore, a good career would be that of a comic book super hero. By the time kids reach my daughter’s age, doubt has crept in. Even if someone older sets his or her sites on being one of the Avengers, there are myriad worries that keep them from making it happen. How does one break into the super-hero business? What’s the competition like? Is the post-college job market flooded with Marvel super heroes? In a post-recession economy, how soft is the job market for comic book characters. Do bad guys have better retirement plans? As a good-at-heart hero, how hard is it to roll over your DC Comics 401K into a Marvel Universe IRA? Did Captain America fare better in the job market as an armed forces combat veteran? What kind of disability rating did the defense department give him since they nuclear radiated his khakis off in order to bulk him up? Oh, the considerations. My nephew just knows the basics. Captain America is good. That, and when the dog eats his action figures we can go to the dollar store and get more.

I had an interview of sorts this past week for an additional on-call job to be added to my current work. The interview was the best one I’d ever experienced for something that I didn’t have any shot at getting. The interviewer and I had a long talk about crossing the line into vocational ministry and the seriousness of taking steps to do so. The advice was sound. So, rather than worry and fuss over what might have been, or what might never be, I simply leave the process in God’s hands. He may not make me Captain America, but if I check worry at the door and carry the shield of faith, the result will be unique and surprising. Sometimes you just have to put the shield to your chest and step into life.

#Captain America #Career #Faith #Kids #Runner's World #Running

Earlier tonight I was rooting through the refrigerator for the components that might possibly make up a complete dinner. In our house there isn’t any such thing. I found some oranges, a few jars of mustard and black oil from The X-Files. I guess that my standards need to drop down a little. There happened to be an unopened Lunchable.  I was not going to let the black ooze get a Lunchable. This, I thought, might be a nice change of pace. The last time I ate one of these happy little trays of lunchmeat goodness was…a long time ago. Some years back, I snuck onto a senior citizens bus trip to some war memorial (because when you reach a certain age, you take the bus to visit various cemeteries and restaurants with free, albeit burnt, coffee). The old timers had Lunchables. Stacks of soggy Ritz Crackers, bologna wheels, pasteurized processed cheese food product (the food product you feed to cheese, apparently). Good, All-American, toothless people’s food. As a kid my dad brought this combination of food home when we were getting ready to move, so I get nervous every time I pass the Lunchable aisle in the store. The package in my refrigerator tonight looked a little more sophisticated. It supposedly contained the makings of one sandwich and also a fruit smoothie. Upon opening the package, I figured out that the product was a fancy MRE, the Meals Ready To Eat given to service people in the field. A child size sandwich roll/doorstop, a smidge of turkey, some low-fat/low-interest mayonnaise, the smoothie and two Oreos. The product, to be fair, is designed for school-age children.

Despite my stellar I.Q.., there is no government standard that classifies me as a school kid (except for maybe the No Adult with Social Anxiety Left Behind {we swear} Program).

For a short time I enjoyed my tot-sized sandwich and smoothie shot. Not for long of course. In the end, there was some quality pizza growing in the back of the fridge. That not only killed my appetite, but several viruses growing in my stomach. Yummy, sprouted food for the modern man on the go.

Lunchable Smoothies Lunchables Meals Ready To Eat MRE's Oscar Mayer Retirement Bus Trips Smaller Portions

The tiny, non-starter irritations in life are always the ones I get stuck on. The other morning, I awoke and turned on the TV in time to see some unctuous spokes-models wandering through a wheat field touting the virtues of a brand of breakfast cereal. The beautiful people rattled and prattled for thirty seconds about this wonderful, natural sort of cereal. The food is supposedly natural because it’s shaped like something once found in nature and healthy because of some purported relationship with the earth. Blah, Blah, Blah. Never mind that the product is doused in malt syrup and makes its own gravy when covered in milk. The commercials used to employ a preachy testimonial from some world-famous chef, but models meandering through wheat fields dreamily expounding on the blessings of cereal must have seemed more relatable to advertising executives. Poor, hunky, famous chef. He’s probably gone back to slinging oatmeal in a hotel dungeon somewhere.

There isn’t much natural about breakfast cereal. If there was, we’d all be eating bowls of fertilizer (“All the best to you each morning!”). Rice grains impregnated with superheated air, rolled oats covered in sugar and stuck together with dyed and dried cranberries. I actually enjoy the completely unnatural. Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch. At least when I eat PBCC, I know that it’s not even an imitation of real food, the same as I know that it hasn’t travelled with actual pirates.

Arrr…we’ll forgo the booty and take the peanut butter crap food with us. Sure beats cow manure…

I’d love to make a new kind of cereal that embodies the all-American breakfast. Coffee, cigarettes and resentment. The new breakfast treat might be called Smoldering Java Anger Flakes. The advertising would feature combat boot wearing lunchroom cooks wandering through Walmart shouting the virtues of eating compost. Every box would feature a hairnet at the bottom as a sort of prize. You know, I might change course and start eating some of that unctuous, whole grain cereal. It might regenerate the brain cells killed off by years of Cap’n Crunch.

#Postaday Breakfast Foods Curtis Stone Great Grains Preachy Advertisements Models Selling Cereal Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch postaday Sugared Cereals

There are certain things that woman can’t stand about men, behaviors that anger them even more than mere philandering or ignorance of the heart. It’s my theory that men careening around stores during the act of male pattern shopping is what really causes the rift between the sexes. I noticed this when I was out this morning procuring the goods for a batch of cheese bisque. My cooking life began at 11 years old and I have no problem finding what I need in supermarkets after years of shopping. Still, sometimes it’s better to go on a sleepy, early Sunday morning. The chance that I’ll get into a cart battle with another shopper is less likely at that hour.

This following isn’t a sexist statement, but merely an observation on the different ways shopping is affected by chromosomal differences. I observe that many woman in supermarkets shop with care and in an orderly way, cruising their carts close to the shelves. I shop in a kamikaze fashion, which I suspect many of my kind do as well. The items I want are someplace in the store and I position the cart in death dive when those items come into view. All or nothing! Other shoppers get out-of-the-way when the scream of basket wheels rushes toward them. It’s not selfishness, but a way of getting the heck out of the store faster. Modern stores, I fear, were designed by the same rocket surgeons responsible for clover leaf freeway interchanges and Banquet pot pies. What you want is always in the middle, but once you get there you realize that the middle isn’t that great either.

A grocery clerk once walked up to my mom with a handwritten list he found on the floor and asked my mom if she’d dropped it. “No, I’m too screwed up for lists.” she replied and wandered off. I’m not that bad off, but I see her point. Sometimes you just aim the cart and go. Thanks mom (maybe it’s not a male thing 🙂 ).

#Banquet Pot Pies #Supermarket Behavior

I have more dreams about proper hygiene than I used to. Maybe it’s approaching middle age, or just the fact that I no longer flip burgers for a living, but I’ve started to have night terrors about social ills such as bad breath and perspiration. The days of being a teenager and only worrying about grooming as it related to meeting girls have long since passed. Those were the days when I owned an economy sized can of Right Guard. Wonderful stuff, Right Guard was. I received a can upon graduating the fifth grade and it lasted through my Junior year in college. There was no issue of not using the Right Guard. The can was just enormous. Some of the worst days of my teens were when I mistook my mom’s can of Aquanet for the Right Guard and shellacked myself with hairspray. No wonder my grades were so bad. Some days I couldn’t raise my hand because my arm was hairsprayed to my side. We knew nothing of climate change in the 80’s. There’s still a hole in the ozone layer over my childhood home that scientists have linked to my giant can of aerosol deodorant. The ozone was so depleted that we choose not to have a lemonade stand as kids. We just walked outside with bacon and let it cook for all of our neighbors.

Now I have dreams about being a stinky sort of person. I wear Wilhelmina mints around my neck at night so that I can ward off bad breath. What a weird thing to start dreaming about. I used to dream about cars, and women. Sometimes women and cars.  Dreams these days are of hygiene-ville, where I’m looking around for my lost can of Old Spice. It isn’t easy being an adult, but it sure smells better.

#Aquanet Hairspray #Old Spice #Right Guard Spray #Wilhelmina Peppermints

  When I was a strapping, long-haired hippy boy of 25, I was pretty smug about the aging process. At that time, I worked with a muscle-bound gentleman who attributed his physique to dietary supplements. One night, he turned to me and mentioned that he was, in fact 51 years old. Prior to that I had no idea.
“You know what keeps me fit?” he asked, in a way that indicated he was also hawking supplements as a sideline. Before I could answer, he held up a canister of bee pollen and told me how much he put on his shredded wheat every day. I read the canister and managed a “Wow! Well you’re really well-preserved. Keep that up!” The guy rolled his eyes and muttered “Well preserved, my a**.” Life went on and I finally now get the inappropriateness of my response.

I started to go gray late last year and my Pauly Walnut hair wings are starting to sport a kind of nice, even pewter tint. The term I’ve always heard to describe the gray-haired man is “distinguished.” This might be true if one was Roger Sterling, rich and able to do…the things that fictional character Roger Sterling does. There are great perks to the arrival of the gray age and the change in my appearance. For instance, Cialis ads are starting to make sense. I’ve asked my wife if we can get a couple of claw foot bathtubs for the backyard. Those commercials are shot through the cracked lens of societal expectations, though. Cialis is built on the 55/35 myth. The ads feature a man of middle age with a much younger woman. Not that I care, because I just really wants some indoor style antique plumbing for sitting around outside in. The Viagra man is an even less realistic expectation for the aging male. Those ads don’t even feature women. What are we now, the Marlboro Man? We ride, we rope, we start fires with rocks. There is the idea of companionship at the end of each commercial, but the time before that is spent alone with animals and cars. This is what it means to be the distinguished man. We can start fires and then go home and…I don’t know. The commercials haven’t explained that part. I may be older, and supposedly distinguished, but the virility supplement and pharmaceutical industries need to really paint by numbers for me. Distinguished my a**.

#Cialis Ads #Distinguished Middle Aged Men #Gray Hair #Roger Sterling #Viagra ads

 The other night I was with a group of friends when somebody pulled their sentimentality card and cued up the theme from Cheers. Sigh. For those of us who wasted every Thursday during the 80’s in front of the television, this is akin to striking up a sort of cultural anthem. Most of us within hearing distance of the speakers stopped and smiled. We shared a laugh over the full lyrics, which never played during the Cheers opening. I’m not advising anyone to go and dig up Gary Portnoy’s less than well-preserved relic of a bygone TV era ( yep. I listened to the cheesy synths so you wouldn’t have to). The song still resonates in a strange way with me, because I often wish I had a place like Cheers. Writing here is sort of the place where “everybody knows my name.” Making your way in the world does take all that you’ve got and each of us has our own Cheers theme.

My ultimate theme song  would mention that stuff randomly just falls out of my dog. I love Grace, the Sleepy Beagle, but I have trouble with the fact that household items just fall out of her. Not necessarily from the end I’d want to retrieve them, either (“Oh, look! There’s my keys. Hmmm… she can just have the car, I guess”). In one’s ultimate theme song, you can’t really deal with the major traumas of the world, just the inconveniences that make you look like a self-involved dope if you say them aloud in anything other than sitcom-song style. My theme would have to list my issues in a sing-song like, Friends-y way, even though most of these issues suck when shown in the light of day. Hopefully, upon crafting an amusing enough theme, friend’s will say “Yeah, everybody here knows his name. Get Andy a beer before the self involved dope starts singing.”

 

#80's sitcoms #Cheers #Cheers Theme Song #Friends Theme #Gary Portnoy #Keeper #Where Everybody Knows Your Name

  I went back to work today after nasty bout with food poisoning. The details are too detailed, but I can say that I will try to eat healthier, more nutritious meals. The illness stemmed from “dining” at a sandwich shop whose owners pride themselves on the speed with which they produce subs, but not so much on what really goes into the product. All my life, I’ve reveled in owning a cast iron stomach, but the Porkinator did me in (and judging by it’s name…duh). Vegetables, are no better. Unwashed havens of death, veggies are. You’d be better off eating from the men’s room floors at the Cleveland Greyhound depot than you would trying to live the healthy, balanced dietary life. In fact, I have, but there isn’t any reason to kiss and tell. Where is the Jolly Green Giant when you need him? We need more imaginary Madison Avenue advertising creations to benevolently watch over humanity and protect us from food borne danger.

Yesterday was Earth Day, and I didn’t have much time to think about careers in the nutritional super hero field (what, with all the puking and crying “Lord, kill me now”). Today, however is a blessed new day for the world, and I feel no shame in filling out an application to be the Jolly Green Giant. I have some of the qualifications down. Sewing a ginormous leafy loin covering skirt should be no problem. I got straight B’s in Home Economics. My complexion is seriously green, which is possibly a lingering effect of the Porkinator. The 85-foot tall height requirement is a kind of tough to break through. How does one become 85 feet tall? I’ll have to ask the folks at the Green Giant vegetable company. How many bags of frozen peas does a person have to eat to get that tall? Never mind the kind of genetic mutation loaded into the peas to induce such spectacular growth. Where in the blazes does an 85-foot behemoth of advertising genius sleep? Standing up? Oh, and what about all of that natural, jolly green fertilizer? God forbid old boy ever gets food poisoning. Every time the folks hear “Ho, Ho, Ho” they’d better run. On second thought, maybe I’ll just be careful about the food I put into my body and leave the work of Jolly Green Giant-ing to the advertising mutants. Ho Ho Ho.

#Earth Day 2013 #Fast Food Intestinal Distress #Food Poisoning #Jolly Green Giant

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#Dead Sea Salt Scrubs #Drunken Santas #Jesus #Jesus Birth #Mall Kiosks #Mostly Teachable #Santa Claus Mall Santas

0 Hiawatha

Last Wednesday I posted about being a solitary person and having a need at times to step back from life and just think. Over the days that followed, I drove deep into the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, far past Mackinaw and the pasties, fudge and smoked fish that are meant to lure in us southern dwellers. Even though I am a Michigander by birth, my trips over the bridge to the U.P. have been few. The world of the Yoopers is different. Towns are few and far between and most consist of small grocery stores, or gas and bait shops that cater to hunters and fisherman on their way to lodges. Over a seventy mile stretch of two lane highway, a driver might only encounter five passing lanes. For the most part, if you get stuck driving behind tourists, there will  be a grinding wait before being able to pass the slow vehicle in front of your bumper.

Each morning on my visit to the U.P., I made a habit of waking up at six a.m. and then watching through the window for the first “barely there” strains of dawn. At half past, I’d lace up my running shoes and head out into the woods. After a half mile, I’d reach a paved road that wound its way through the Hiawatha National Forest. There are few times in life when I’ve felt so absolutely alone. The further I’d traipse away from the cabin, the more isolated I began to feel. The trees seemed to grow around and over me, only allowing the sunrise to break just a bit over their tops. I smelled nothing but the cool scent of piney woods wafting on the breeze mingled with the fish smell rolling off of the lakes. Alone in the woods, I wondered what would happen if I ran across a bear. After twenty minutes went by on the road without seeing a car or any dwellings, there arose a flutter of panic in me. Then it vanished. For the first time since living in Grand Teton as a young man, or the year spent roaming the Delaware Water Gap, did I feel truly at home. In emptiness, as well as in quiet, did I find peace and the realization that I am infinitely small in the vastness of God’s world. The world is and will continue to be and my small footprint is just…small.

On its margin the great forest
Stood reflected in the water,
Every tree-top had its shadow,
Motionless beneath the water.
From the brow of Hiawatha
Gone was every trace of sorrow,
As the fog from off the water,
And the mist from off the meadow.
With a smile of joy and triumph,
With a look of exultation,
As of one who in a vision
Sees what is to be, but is not,
Stood and waited Hiawatha. H.W. Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha.