Crapples to Crapples

Sundays are usually my favorite day. I get to sleep in until 7 or later. And when you get up at 5:30 five days of the week, 7:00 really is sleeping in. I fix myself a nice big glass of the iced tea that only I find potable, and I sit down on the couch, pull the lever that raises my legs on my side of the couch and read the paper.

I used to read the comics first, but we recently switched to a different paper that has better local news and crappier comics, so I tend to read section A and B first now. The comics are next to the last, and then come all the slick magazine-sized ads that generally offer coupons.

The first one I came to yesterday made me laugh out loud. It was trying to sell me  on the idea that a corn dog was more nutritious than four chicken nuggets. “A CLASSIC THAT STANDS ABOVE THE REST” it announced, showing, a proudly battered and deep fried hot dog on a stick standing next to something resembling Chicken McNuggets. And below each picture was the alleged calorie count and fat grams of each serving. The corn dog was 190 calories and 8 grams of fat. The four nuggets were 228 calories and 14 grams of fat. Allegedly.

Are you fucking kidding me? These are my choices? I don’t eat either of these products. My Uncle Earl, God rest his soul, managed to turn me off to hot dogs at a very young age when he told me they contained ground pig lips. Hot dogs were offered every single day in my junior high cafeteria, and whenever I saw someone eating one, I’d say, “You know you’re eating pig lips, right?” And then I’d get milk thrown in my face or my entire cafeteria tray dumped in my lap.  These people now, I fantasize, are either dead, obscenely overweight, and on huge doses of cholesterol meds and insulin. Or they should be.

And I don’t eat Chicken McNuggets, or McAnything for that matter. I learned that the McNuggets were once made from that pink slime that has been so recently in the news. Ground bones and marrow mixed with carcinogenic chemicals give them a meat-like flavor. They should have been called Chicken flavored McLabarotory nuggets if there was any truth in advertising.  McDonald’s has since claimed their lab nuggets are no longer made of that (God knows what they are made of now, though). To be brave and fair, I took a bite of a McNugget once, but I found that they didn’t taste anything like fried chicken to me. They tasted like fried… I don’t know… fried texture.

So now the food industry is trying to tell me that a sound nutritional choice is a State Fair brand corn dog. As an incentive at the bottom of the ad, there was a coupon for 75 cents off and a statement that read: “NEW! State Fair Hot Dogs available exclusively at Walmart.”

What a surprise, and thank God. That means they aren’t sold at the grocery store where I shop, but I’m sure there are other brands of frozen corn dogs available somewhere in the vicinity of the McLunchables.

When I was a kid, a corn dog was a delicacy. At the Florida State Fair, Pronto Pup stands were the favorite corn dog vendor, and they made them fresh. There was a big tub of batter, and they’d push a hotdog down over a pencil-like pointed stick, dip it in the batter and drop it in boiling vegetable oil until it was golden brown and serve it to you with your choice of condiments. They were a once-a-year treat, and as a kid before I knew I was eating pig lips, I loved them and looked forward to them every year. They even sold the batter mix in a little box that moms could take home and mix with milk and make their own corn dogs. I think the batter box also came with the sticks.

So I look forward to more nutrition-awareness print ads like these. For instance, I wonder how a baloney sandwich on mayo-drenched Wonder Bread stacks up against, say, a snack pack of fried pork rinds? Which is more nutritious and tasty: a pile of dog shit from my back yard or one of dozens of varieties of Lunchables?

Please, convenience food industry, keep up with this kind of comparative advertising. Think of it as a public service to your consumers.

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Gidget Goes to a Funeral

I just found out that fifty years ago, while my father was being buried, I was in the Britton Plaza theater in Tampa watching Gidget Goes to Rome. This wasn’t even a Sally Field or Sandra Dee Gidget or a Deborah Walley Gidget. It was a Cindy Carol Gidget, probably the least known Gidget of the Gidget franchise. A movie so bad that Netflix doesn’t even offer it.  They never even bothered putting it on VHS or Betamax, much less a DVD. I was watching the lousiest Gidget movie ever made while the rest of my family was sobbing over my father’s casket at a cemetery across the bridge in St. Petersburg.

The 50^th anniversary of my father’s death was last week , and it started a seemingly endless stream of e-mails back and forth between my sister and me, and, as it turns out, almost everything I remember about that day for the last fifty years has been wrong.  Two things I got right: our mother told us in the den of our house, and after we all finished crying until we had no tears left, and after my fears of having to move to the Poor House were put on hold, my mother’s best friend was waiting for us in the kitchen with big glasses of Coca-Cola with ice she crushed with a rolling pin.

As my sister and I swapped e-mails last week, I learned that everything else was wrong. I thought we stayed with our next door neighbors during the funeral. I have to believe my sister, because she was 9 and I was 6, so her brain was (and still is) more developed than mine. All I got right is that I learned my dad was dead and I was sadder than I had ever been in those short six years.

I found this realization quite unnerving. I got through the anniversary day fine, but when I learned the rest of this yesterday, I had to leave my desk at work, go out in my tinted-window car and just lose it, sobbing into a rag made out of a returned polo shirt from a police officer.

When a six year old boy loses his daddy, it is something he does not get over. Ever.

Of course with the passing of time, life gets easier. You learn to adjust with just one parent, something I like to refer to as “making do.” As decades pass, you lose all memory of what his voice sounded like, and from time to time, you sit at your desk at a job you’re not all that thrilled with and stare out the window if you’re lucky enough to have one and fantasize about what might have been different had your dad lived. Would he have influenced me and helped me decide on a career that I never ended up having? Would he have pulled strings and gotten me jobs I loved like so many other of the boys I went to school with? Would I have been a happier person? Or maybe I would have grown to dislike him and rebel against him as I did my mother. I know I still would have been gay, because I knew that before he died. How would he have dealt with that? Would I still be taking antidepressants to curb my obsessive compulsive disorder? Probably not, because I wouldn’t be sitting at my office window obsessing over questions I’ll never be able to get answers to, like I am now.

The subject of death in 1963 was something that wasn’t talked about. It was like some dirty little secret that got swept under the rug and ignored. This was before Elisabeth Kubler-Ross formulated the processes and emotions involved in death and dying decades later when people started to treat death as a part of life. It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I found out the effect his death had on my Dad’s mother and sisters, and I only found out about that through some letters that my grandmother wrote to my Aunt Kay that I got only after she died. And just a few days ago my cousin told me where she was and how she reacted when she was told about his death. She was working in a bakery and fell apart all over the manager.

So now I’m curious, and I’m going to query the remaining members of my family, of whom there are damned few, to find out where they were and how they reacted. Because back then, we were alone in our grief. We grieved silently and in solitary.  Maybe people were given instructions not to say anything so as not to upset those poor 6 and 9 year old Wiley children. Instead, all I felt was isolation and that nobody really cared or was as upset as I was. And that is something that affects you for the rest of your life, or at least it has for me. I don’t have any close friends, because I spent my life pretending that people who call yourself your friends don’t really give a shit about you, even though they truly, earnestly do.

When a boy loses his Daddy at age 6, it’s not uncommon for him to be seated in a restaurant and watch a father and son sitting across from each other in booths, blowing straw wrappers at each other or playing “football” with a piece of notebook paper folded up into a thick, taught triangle.  And you get a little weepy eyed and blot your tears in a napkin that you pull from a chrome napkin dispenser. And when your partner asks what’s wrong, you just say you’re having a moment, because if you tell him the real reason you might lose it completely, looking silly as a weeping 40 year old inside a Denny’s restaurant, and a waitress might come over and say, “What’s the matter, hon, are your waffles cold?”

I’ve spent plenty of time in therapy with different therapists. I am pushing 60 years old, so this is the way I am. This is the way I feel, and I’m not going to change. This old dog doesn’t have the energy to learn new tricks. And I’m not wallowing in self-pity. For the most part, my adult life has been terrific. And I am one of the fortunate few people I know who even at this point of his life, knows what it’s like to be genuinely, unconditionally loved.

And that is almost as good as having your father alive.

After all, who else is going to recognize the absurdity of life and maybe write to Turner Classic Movies to see if they’ll broadcast Gidget Goes to Rome?

I’m not optimistic. I’m kind of hoping all the celluloid copies of that film have rotted in their cans.

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Why I Love AOL

Before there were Internet service providers, there were modems hooked from your computer to your telephone line. You would dial up a number and send text to people or a group of people. Sometimes these services were free; sometimes there was a membership fee. This was in the 80’s when computers had no mice. There was no music, graphics, or video, because there was no Microsoft Windows. Most of these chat lines served local areas only.

Then along came America Online, which was the same concept, only it had a network of phone banks strewn across the country so that you could enter a chat “room” and talk to someone clear across the country. They charged a per-minute connect fee, and where I lived in rural Virginia, it often took a half hour to an hour to connect to a number that didn’t give you a busy signal. I used it sparingly, as sometimes my AOL bill would be as much as $80 a month. Just to send words to strangers.

AOL, in its heyday, was a zillion dollar corporation, and if you weren’t a member, you were a nobody. It was like not owning an iSomething now. I knew a guy who worked for AOL then, and they had benefits stuffed up their butts: stock options and free everything. If you were lucky enough to land a job with AOL back then, you were guaranteed to live the life of a Bill Gates Mini Me.

Provided, of course, you sold your stock before AOL disappeared from the radar screen. The guy I knew who worked for AOL got canned in one of their numerous downsizings or takeovers or corporate messes that turned their bright looking futures into a flaming bag of dog poo on their front porches.

I still have an AOL account; it’s a joint account used by Other Bill and me, but it is mostly used as Other Bill’s primary home e-mail account. If you want to get word to both of us without having to send it to two addresses (I know that extra mouse click can be taxing), you send it to the AOL account.

For me, the Internet has surpassed television as my primary time waster, but it also is one of my primary providers of blog material, so for that I am grateful. I know a lot of people spend a whole lot of time on Facebook. I limit my time there, and also limit my postings to things that happen to me that are funny or exciting and not just where I am at the moment or if I like red potatoes more than brown potatoes.

But AOL, despite its low ranking in the World of Serious Internet Business, is my secret little hub of blog material, always. They run a new slide show every day of the scandalous, the bizarre, the 100+ pound weight losses and how they did it, cars that sell for a million dollars and the people who buy them. Most of it is crap that is easy to ignore. People lose 100 pounds all the time. But often there is something that leads to something that leads to something, and that’s where you find the nougat, the tasty cream filling, the Kruggerand in the coffee can of metal washers.

Today there was a note about the 500^th person executed in Texas since the death penalty was reinstated in 1982. It also said that Texas law (and I love Texas law. I love everything Texas. As Other Bill likes to say, Europeans see Americans as Americans see Texans) requires that everyone executed must have their last statement on file. So I dug deeper and found a link to a database of the 500 records of the names, ages, races, etc. of the people executed in Texas and their last statements.

Having an obsessive personality that is somewhat under control through medication, I started going through it record by record. I would say I got through 100 records before I thought I wouldn’t find anything noteworthy. The majority had no last statements.  Many had found Jesus and were glad to be going to meet Him. Some still proclaimed innocence and urged people to fight against the death penalty. Most told their families they loved them. A few apologized to the families of the victims and hoped that their deaths would bring closure and that they could move on with their lives. Some were still angry and would die angry. It was a lot of the same.

So then I decided that rather than waste more time going through each of the records of 500 dead people, I would just go through the records of the youngest ones, because they were probably the ones who were too young to have learned anything from what they had done, or were most likely to say something really stupid.

But I was wrong on that count, too. I found someone that I think should have been spared the lethal injection, marched out of prison and put directly on the stage at the Improv. The award for best Last Statement by a Death Row Inmate in Texas goes to a man who kept both his cool and his sense of humor in the face of his demise goes to one Vincent Gutierrez, age 28, a mere child with only an 8^th grade education who was executed on March 28, 2007, who in his final statement said the following:

“Where’s my stunt double when you need one?”

Photo courtesy of Texas Department of Criminal Justice

http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/death_row/dr_info/gutierrezvincent.html

The First of the First

I have always taken pride in being first in everything I do. In junior high school, I played first chair, first clarinet in the band. When I was twenty, I was the first person I knew who went out and bought a VCR for the ridiculous sum of $995 plus tax, and two blank videotapes for $25 each just so I could watch my Saturday morning cartoons on Saturday evenings. I haughtily lived in the jealous envy of rage of all my friends and neighbors.

As time passed, I was the first person in my crowd to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which brought forth unknown amounts of sympathy from those who were now buying VCR’s for a $18.95.  In my thirties, I was also the youngest of my peers who came down with gout that was so painful that it had to be surgically corrected. People at work were stupendously jealous of the sick days this allowed me to take all in the name of the inability to walk comfortably (I think it was two days.)  They also resented my ability to hoard Percocet in doses that made me more than just comfortable.

 Then one day when I was about 40 I discovered I couldn’t make it up a flight of stairs without gasping for air. I was soon the first on my block to be diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, or an enlarged heart. Now everyone knows I have a big heart, and they have ever since I bought the thousand dollar VCR and never invited them over at night to watch The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Hour. What they didn’t know was I was also the first of my peers to have congestive heart failure. When I was 45 I had two cardiac ablations where they ran wires up my groin and burned out parts of my heart. Both procedures failed.  I also had three attempts at electrocardioversion where they zap you with the paddles after yelling “clear.”  All that was a big waste of time and money, and did not make me the first of my friends to be cured of a-fib/cardiomyopathy/ congestive heart failure. I could have bought a warehouse full of thousand dollar VCR’s with the co-pays from that nonsense.

I have always taken ownership of being well ahead of my time and exhibited a certain pride in it. That way when other people come down with the same problem, I can offer more than just empathy but sympathy, and also add this reassuring line: “Oh, hell, that’s nothing. I had that when I was half your age, and I got through it just fine.”

I was only 44 when I was first given the senior discount generally reserved for those two decades older after bringing my items up to a register at a thrift store. Some people may find that outrageous and offensive, but I spent years blistering  on the beaches of Florida’s Gulf  Coast to get this shar-pei look in order for this to happen, and I was successful, and I’m not about to argue with 50% off retail.

Two weeks ago I was diagnosed with what’s called in layman’s terms as a “frozen shoulder” which, like the migraine headaches I’ve had for the past 26 years, affects women more than men. Frozen shoulder is treated with Prednisone and physical therapy, which is working nicely, and as soon as it thaws I expect it will taste very nice grilled with a nice mango-lime marinade.

So today, right after my physical therapy session, I went to my optometrist, as I do every year, and I could tell right away that my left eye had dramatically gotten worse than my right eye. With my right eye I could read the last (sixth) line down. With my left eye, even with optimal correction, I could only read the third line down.

“I didn’t tell you last time,” the doctor told me, “but you have a small cataract in your left eye.” Not a Lexus. Not a Lincoln Continental, but a genuine  Cataract. A Sedan deville, I believe. A cataract. You know, like your grandmother gets.

Once again, the first on my block, the first in my graduating class. Mr.-gotta-have-it-before- anyone-else.

Something else better show up quickly, because too soon I’ll be too old not to get something that old people get.  Maybe I’ll burn through all the old-people problems and start on the young people problems.

Maybe I should go out and buy a pre-emptive tube of Clearasil just in case.

How to Not Take a Free Cruise

The other day we were at a home show, and because Other Bill has never been, but always wanted to go on a cruise, he signed us up to sit through a two-hour (which turned into a three-hour) timeshare presentation which would reward us with a 3 evening cruise. A 3 evening cruise.  (Lightning bolt, thunder crash, ship tossing up and down). We were promised that if we gave them 120 minutes of our time, whether we bought into the timeshare or not, we would get a 100% absolutely free 4 day, three night Carnival cruise. Because I am a relatively agreeable partner, I was willing to contract a retrovirus just so he could experience the wonder of the lowest of the low cruises that would hopefully put an end to his desire to ever go on a cruise again. I have been on one cruise of the Greek islands, and it was one of the worst travel experiences of my life. You could get no rest at all, because every fifteen minutes in four languages, through loudspeakers bolted to the ship every five feet, came blasting broadcasts as to where we were and interesting sites to see that we would soon be approaching. I was the only one on the ship not to get food poisoning, and the whole ship was covered in and smelled like vomit. I swore I would never again go on another cruise. That was 31 years ago, I and have so far stuck to my guns.

Let me explain the difference between Other Bill’s idea of a free cruise and my idea of a free cruise. Other Bill’s idea of a free cruise is an enormous, well-lit double-balconied state room with accommodations for pets and rugs made from animal hides, and a home theater with room for a dozen guests. The room smells like citrus, fresh cut grass and the sidewalk just after it starts to rain. You ring a bell and a tan, shirtless Abercrombie and Fitch model comes and gives you a full body massage with release and refuses a tip. He tells you what time he gets off and asks if he can come by later just to cuddle.

My idea of a free cruise is a windowless box the size of a piano crate. It is big enough for a full size cot and a prison-designed stainless steel toilet/sink/shower combination. There is no shower curtain; just a drain in the middle of the room to trap all the spilled non-potable water. The room smells like a urine and mildew smoothie. It is lit with a flickering nightlight plugged into the ceiling. Given the choice of a cell or in interior ship cabin, inmates will choose their cells 100% of the time.

So, by sitting through this timeshare presentation, not only did we receive our interpretations of a free cruise, but also included before the presentation was one of the most repugnant, inedible breakfasts I have ever touched teeth to.  The only thing I could get down were cold, rubbery English muffins spread with margarine from the Paleozoic era and some kind of brown water claiming to be instant iced tea.

The presentation started, and the dynamic speaker and her wonderful touch board and whiteboard showed how much the average person spends on a week’s vacation without the flight and other transportation costs. She said the average hotel is about $150 a night. Food is about $100, shows, entertainment., also a c-note a day, so $350 times 7, is $2450. Actually, it turned out to be a thousand dollars a week more than that, but I was nodding off and didn’t take good notes so it was $3450 a week, and you spent that week in a crummy box of a motel with two beds, a nightstand, a bathroom and a closet.

So why not, she said, for the same price or less, enjoy the same thing, and stay in a 2 to 4 bedroom luxury condominium and enjoy all the benefits of ownership as well? 

“What do you feel about owning your home over renting?” she asked the group.

Without batting an eye, I said, “Trapped.” And I think that got the biggest laugh of the morning.

Throughout the disgusting breakfast and the annoying presentation, each couple was required to sit at a table with a sales person. Ours was a pushy wiseguy from the Bronx.  The sales price that day for the pride of ownership was $7300, reduced from $10,000. Our sole mission in attending this gig, besides the free cruise, was to find out if enjoying the pride of ownership of a timeshare in San Francisco on Union Square, which turned out to be walking distance to Union Square, which turned out to be in the Tenderloin, which is the ghetto we always stay in when we stay in San Francisco for $71 a night, would be cheaper than $71 a night.

This particular timeshare company, every year, for a few hundred dollars a year gives you 84,000 points to use for accommodations. Some units cost more points than others. Places near Disney cost you relatively few points a night. We finally nailed them down to find out how many points their one timeshare unit in the same ZIP code as Union Square was. Monday through Thursday: 32,000 points. Friday through Sunday: 80,000 points. That’s per day. Game over.

You also pay a $50 a month maintenance fee for the rest of your life, and that fee gets passed on to your beneficiary after you die. That $600 is the roundtrip airfare for two to San Francisco right there.

After we initialed the “Decline” box, we had to take the survey and then go stand in line to get our coupon for the free cruise, and 3 hours after setting foot into this resort, where we were supposed to be shown a luxury suite, but weren’t, because it was Memorial Day weekend, and all rooms were occupied, we got back into the car, and I began to read the fine print of the free cruise.

Port fees, taxes, and all sorts of government fees came to $158 per person. The cruise left from Miami, which meant traveling to the port of Miami and parking there for 4 days, which probably would have been another $100. Neither of us has a valid passport, so that’s another $320.  To get off the boat and actually go into Cozumel would have been another $100. We probably would stay on the boat instead of going into Key West, because Key West these days is nothing more than Duvall Mall, so why bother? We can always shop at the Gap at home. Plus the cruise does not include drinks, soft or otherwise. So without having anything to drink, this free cruise would have cost us $836.

And then there would be the physician and medication co-pays once we got off the boat when we got back. So to Other Bill, it may be a free cruise. To me it’s more of a lesson. I’m more than willing to go along with it if it means I don’t have to go on a cruise for another 31 years.

For other Bill, I happen to be pretty convinced that the big attraction of a cruise is the 24 hour all you can eat buffet. If such a place existed on Hollywood beach, I can pretty much guarantee you he would prefer that to a four day, three night adventure at sea.  We’d wake up, drive to the beach, sit by the window of the restaurant and have a nice ocean view, eat a big breakfast, go home, take a nap, maybe take a dip in the pool, go back for a nice brunch, return home and watch a movie until it was time for a midafternoon snack, go back and have some chips and guacamole, and maybe just stay for dinner and baked Alaska and do the same thing the following 2 days. No port taxes, no sea sickness, no security checkpoints, no passports, no little windowless shoebox sized rooms; just eating at will.

Now that is my idea of a free cruise. Without all the inconveniences of a boat.

 

 

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Well, Don't Lose your Head Over It.

I read a report recently from Reuters, oddly enough in the “AOL Jobs” section that “Saudi Arabia has authorized regional governors to approve executions by firing squad as an alternative to public beheading, the customary method of capital punishment in the Gulf Arab kingdom, the Arab News reported on Monday.”

The reason given was a lack of swordsmen who sometimes have to travel hours and arrive late to their assignments.

I wondered why there was a lack of swordsmen. Did the Marie Antoinette School of Beheadings go belly up? It’s hard to imagine enough classes required for a 4-year degree for lopping off a head. Maybe you could just earn your certificate after completion of just these 6 classes: Sword Selection and Sharpening; Choosing the Right Hood; Tricks for Removal in Just One Slice; Protecting Yourself Blood-Borne Pathogens; Introduction to Pressure Washing, and Advanced Pressure Washing Techniques.

I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for a year and personally knew several people who had witnessed beheadings and behandings. Not many of them took place in Jeddah, where I was stationed, but more were in Riyadh, the capital. If you were in the town center on the right day, the police would corral you in and force you to watch these gruesome events.

According to what I was told by non-natives, so take it with a grain of salt, if you were a big, strong executioner with the build of a sumo wrestler and had a good track record of whacking off a head with just one chop, then you were well paid and a valued member of society. On the other hand, if you were not an honor student at the Marie Antoinette School of Beheadings, maybe just coasted through with a low C average, and you were thin and weak, and you had to hack at a criminal’s neck like some butcher’s apprentice, you were not well received in society nor were you sent out by the temp agency very often unless there was a rush on crime-deterring executions. Because you know those aren’t full time jobs. Those people aren’t killing people 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, because there is very little crime in the Kingdom. 

And if you can’t figure out why crime is low there, maybe you should just stop and think about it a half second longer. Think death by anorexic supermodel with a butter knife to the neck. How’s that sound?

Oddly enough, when I was living in the Kingdom in the early 1980’s I had a secret and somewhat sick wish that someday I would be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get dragged into witnessing a beheading. I was in my early 20’s then, so I couldn’t help but be curious about it. My dad, as a writer in his 20’s, witnessed an electrocution by the notoriously faulty electric chair nicknamed “Sparky” at Starke prison and wrote about it for the St. Petersburg Independent and even won a state journalism award for it. I wondered which execution method would be worse.

I wonder why Saudi Arabia decided to personalize beheadings and not adopt the guillotine.  The guillotine is pretty much fool proof and quite accurate, and for the most part, quick and, I would guess, painful only for a second or two. As beheadings go, it would certainly be my choice. Everything in the Kingdom is religion-driven, so there must be something in their scripture that requires the killing must be done by a MASOB graduate, preferably a cum laude. Since shootings are personalized as well, I imagine this doesn’t violate any religious tenant.

It makes you wonder (well, it makes me wonder, anyway), how you choose a career in Head Removal. “Mom, when I grow up, I wanna be an executioner!”  And to support this, your parents give you toy swords and little pop-bead headed mannequins.  But this is really a sideline job, or a hobby. Maybe they have an Executioners Reserve Corps. Perhaps companies offer executioners’ leave. “All right, Mohammed, you can have Thursday off, but just make sure you bring back the proper documentation, including photographs. And this time be sure the victim signs the permission slip before you cut off his head. Last time that signature was a little suspect.”

So it’s guns over swords in Saudi Arabia. According to Wikipedia, in America, death by firing squad is still legal only in Oklahoma, and even then as a secondary method (what, the lethal injection didn’t take?) Also as recently as October of 2011 a state representative sponsored a bill to make death by firing squad a choice, And from which state did this representative reside?

Why, Florida, of course.

Just another reason why I love living here. Nothing insane or insipid gets by us. And we’re damned proud of that. Can death by sword to the neck be far behind? We can only dream.

 

 

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Honor Hole

In my neighborhood, there are a lot of proud parents who stick to the back windows of their SUV  these pennants that read, “My child made the honor roll at Brand X High,” or whatever school. Most of these people put these tapered stickers in a circle to show the world that their kid is really racking up the frequent honor roll points, meaning that, when s/he graduates, it could possibly lead to an internship at Checkers.

I’ll admit I was a frequent  honor roll student. Back then however, the honor roll limbo stick was set so high, it didn’t take any effort to pass under it. Pretty much if you showed up to class sober, unlike so many of the teachers didn’t, and completed the better part of your homework, you made the honor roll. There was no celebration, and there were no sticky pennants. The last thing we wanted was our parents to do was to let the neighborhood know they had a dork for a child.

Today they even have also-ran stickers that you can buy (there is no room for second place in our educational system) that read something pitifully sad like “I’m the proud parent of a terrific kid.” Let’s get this straight. Unless you are a child abusing parent, it goes without saying that you think your kid is terrific, and you are proud of them even if they do spend four hours a day with a rock, trying to pound a square peg though a round hole.  “He’s a non-conformist. He thinks outside the box,” you say. “That’s the stock where great business executives come from.”

Well, you’re probably right about that. It would explain a lot about the places I’ve worked.

I’d like to see some more creative and true bumper stickers. “My daughter dropped out of high school, has a $3M stock portfolio and a full tuition to MIT for a popular 99-cent iPhone app she wrote in three days.”

“My son is 27, drives a Maserati and is retired because of the revenue he earned selling your honor roll student ecstasy and meth for just 3 years.

Oh, all right, if the truth be known, there was one semester I did fall off the honor roll wagon. We got two grades for every class: an academic grade and a conduct grade. There was one semester I got all A’s in all classes academically and in conduct with the exception of one conduct grade, in which I received a “D”.

Really? A “D”? In my whole academic career I had never, nor would ever again receive a “D”, conduct or otherwise. The teacher had never taken me aside and warned me that if I didn’t behave myself I was headed for a bad conduct grade, and I didn’t act any differently in that class than I did in any other.  I went up to this so-called teacher the day after the report cards came out and asked him if there hadn’t been some kind of computer error. He looked down at the sea of A’s for that semester and arrogantly said, “Oh no, there’s no error. Talking. Too much talking.”

I was outraged! Anyone in that school who knew me knew I was not a talker. I would write until my hand turned black. But I was the quiet, shy, keep-to-myself kind of guy I was the eat-lunch-by-himself-friend-of-few boy. So thank God they didn’t give out bumper sticker pennants back then. My mother would have been driving around with one that said, “My child got a D in conduct at Wilson Junior High School.” How humiliating.

Other Bill reports that in Maryland schools they did not have conduct grades. “God,” he told me once. “Grades for behavior? That is so Southern.”

These days some people in their big SUV’s form giant crop circles on their back windows with these look-at-me-my-child-is-smart annoying displays of pride.  Personally, if you have multiple smartypants children, these circles can block your rear view and be a driving hazard. So I want to do a few ride-alongs with some cops at work and have them pull these safety hazard stickers off their cars and give them to me.

I will re-adhere them to a large cardboard cutout of the letter “D”, and when it is covered, front and back with these stickers, I will anonymously mail it to a Mr. William Bush, my American History teacher from Wilson Junior High, the only teacher who ever

arbitrarily gave me a D.

He won’t have a clue what it means. But I’ll feel vindicated.

 

 

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