Behind closed doors

I walked through the halls of Parkland Hospital this afternoon, near the same halls where they wheeled John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, quite a while before I was born. Some of the walls are probably the same color--lime green and faded yellow, with wooden-handled stair rails worn smooth like a bone-handle knife that you keep in your pocket for years and years. For a long time, this was the event that put Dallas on the map, and caused many parts of the country to hate Dallas. Still, when people come in from out of town, I usually drive them by the shooting site, pointing out the famous landmarks such as the Schoolbook depository, the "grassy knoll", and the triple underpass. People over a certain age are usually in awe and introspective. Under that age, they politely, maybe quizzically shrug and thank me for driving them around.

Going around a corner and continuing toward my destination, I went down a putrid-smelling hall reeking from plastic bags filled with rotting human tissue--red Biohazard bags piled eight feet high in a large bin, resting and simmering in the still-hot Texas heat just outside the door and a gentle wind just strong enough to waft it in an assault through the adjacent halls so you can smell when you are walking up on this area. Glancing at the bags on the way to my appointment, I remembered the line from Doctor Zhivago about "laying life on the table and cutting out the tumors of injustice", and then mentally flipped the figurative language to realism and wondered whose tumors lay inside the waste in front of me--whose skin, blood, pieces of organ, etc. were being tossed in the trash. I was thoroughly grossed out and I can still conjure up that awful odor. They say that the sense of smell is one of the most primal.

I flashed back to another scene that shocked me last week. I was in a research facility and I agreed to help fix a piece of equipment. It's a type of "top-secret" place where I have to give 24-hours notice to get in, have a constant escort while on the premises, sign in and out, wear a badge, and even put on a cleanroom suit. One of the researchers was leading me around and I turned a corner and stopped walking for a second. I was at the end of one of the longest hallways I've ever seen which was lined with cage after cage after cage, primed to be filled with experimental animals. There must have been thousands of cages. I can't find the right adjective--it was staggering.

Deep down inside, I know that experimental animals are helpful to all of us, and I typically feel pretty cavalier about that--my instinct is to instantly defend the use of animals in research. I've personally used and killed animals for research and for study. I reject and even mock PETA's agenda because I feel it is so ridiculous and radical that it can not be taken seriously--they really do themselves a disservice through their extremes. But this one time, looking at these thousands of cages, I was struck for the first time that perhaps something is wrong somewhere that makes this whole scene necessary. Do we really need 10,000 animals to die, or could we get our data from a more reasonable number?

Now, here's the real thing that struck me now that I think about it--I saw a 36 cubic foot upright cage with brightly colored plastic toys inside. The cage was cold, grey metal and the wire door in the front of the cage was left swinging open. I thought of the dog or cat or rabbit or even a monkey playing with those toys right before being quickly and coldly snatched up...

The toys are a distraction, aren't they?--a pitiful distraction to keep the animal from going crazy while it is readied for death. Made me think about life...

My mind flashes to the girl in the red dress in Schindler's List. I'm sure that somebody, somewhere has done a well-thought-out academic paper on this girl's role in the movie, but here's my interpretation: Throughout this movie, we see people murdered in mass numbers. It's there in front of us literally happening in black and white (interpretation: it's a cold fact). This girl in the red dress makes you realize that each of the victims is an individual--otherwise your mind goes numb in light of the huge numbers of dead. Later, when the girl ends up hurled into a mass grave, she isn't just a number--we are reminded that she was an individual: living, breathing, precious--she isn't merely a statistic. It's a loss of an individual and the loss becomes more real to us through this device. I jumped, but didn't cry, when the soldier abruptly executes a man with a bullet between the eyes.

That's what those plastic toys did to me--I involuntarily saw the blood-spattered corpse of the girl in red and it gave me pause.

Also yesterday I found myself walking behind a doctor and a herd of medical students. It reminded me of ER, one of my favorite shows--the doctor was quizzing the medical students and they were asking questions back and forth. Apparently, they were discussing transplanting tissue into a patient. The doctor, casting a suspicious sideways glance at me, a "foreigner", walking in step with the group quite by accident, starting speaking in special "doctor code"

"We will insert a porcine heart valve...blah blah blah" (that'll fool this leechy moron).

(besides being a silver medalist in the National Latin Exam, I a) knew what they were talking about anyway and b) didn't really care. But found their evasiveness amusing.)

One of the students hesitatingly asked, "Do they use a special...(quietly, almost whispering) pig?"

The doctor (smiling), "They do raise them specifically to be used for transplants, then they harvest the valve."

(then, chuckling) "They send the rest to the pepperoni factory...I guess I don't want to think if it that way, though..."

I didn't set out to make a political statement today. I was thinking about the ugly things that happen behind closed doors that we know are there but are glad that we don't have to deal with them. I've heard an odd saying "Two things you don't want to know how they are made: Laws and sausage." But more serious things occur behind closed doors--nursing homes crammed with aging people, harvesting animals by the thousands for research every day, cutting out both literal and figurative tumors to save the body--In a way, maybe these things make our lives easier and we're glad we don't have to dwell on them.

Someday I should write about this...really

No one would believe the stories about my days with the small trucking company.

We hired this driver from Russia who was over 6 ft. 6 inches and weighed more than 300 lbs., complete with grizzled beard and thick accent. His name was Victor. One day, he brought his truck back and was very indignant. When one of the girls asked him what happened, he told her "Tis man drive behind me and keep honking. When he stop at red light, I open his door and punch him in face!" Needless to say, he didn't last long.

One woman had a badly chipped tooth that she would superglue back in place when it fell apart.

One time, a thousand pound forklift rolled off the 6-foot-high dock and burst into flames. Oh, sorry, make that two times.

Another time, we hired an accountant and found out he did work on the side for a group of revolutionaries (he was proud to show me his business card).

One guy, Earl, who we all knew was mentally unstable, picked (another) fight with another employee. We had to run him off. When we tried to follow up with him to bring him back, we were told he had been killed. Earl was always pulling stunts, so we didn't exactly break out the black clothing--sure enough, we confirmed with his dad that he wasn't truly dead, but just wanted attention since he was unemployed at the moment. We ended up bringing him back--two years later he was indeed killed in a bar fight.

I got called in the middle of the night to drive to the scene of an accident--one of our drivers had fallen asleep and flipped his 18-wheeler over in the road. Another driver (later, we found out he was letting his son-in-law drive his rig) plowed right through the middle of the trailer (he couldn't see it because the highway was dark). They came out covered in...prune juice. But they really thought it was blood and were completely freaked out.

We were always pretty desperate for drivers. One day, a guy came in who had exactly the same first, middle, and last name as my brother, Don. I figured we couldn't go wrong. We got him trained, and 3 days later, on his first delivery, he turned around, went 20 miles in the wrong direction, sped up to 50 miles per hour, and plowed into a huge brick mailbox, sending bricks flying for 100 yards and totalling our truck. It was a scam he had worked out with a lawyer to collect worker's compensation insurance (in a twist of fate, our company had an alternative coverage that was immune to their scam). The mailbox's owner? The president of a competitor trucking company.

The Air Conditioning was wired very funny--the detector for the thermostat was actually located in a different part of the building that was conditioned by another unit and heater--it belonged to a different company, and was always off--sometimes the heater would kick on in the summer. The office was either literally over 90 degrees in the summer, or in the '40's and '50's in the winter. It was the only place where I saw people quit their office jobs because of the temperature of the office, but it was pretty unbearable.

One manager stole 20,000 gallons of fuel, selling it to another company and pocketing the cash.

One customer asked me for a kickback, which completely offended me. Then I talked to the president and found out that we actually did it all the time, including arranging for "female companionship" for one apparently lonely customer (before I worked there). There was a group of people called "freight whores" that were always shamelessly available to provide work to small companies in exchange for bribes.

I solved a mystery! One of our drivers, after getting his paycheck one Friday, took off in our truck and never came back. A week went by...nobody had seen him. We called his mom and she told us that he liked to hang out at one of the interstate truck stops on the outskirts of Dallas. Apparently, it's a technicality that he did not actually steal the truck since we handed the keys over to him (foolishly trusting he would work all day and bring it back that evening). For a few days, I checked his hangout and saw nothing. Then one afternoon, I thought I would check again and I found the truck! Then I thought--what am I going to do if this PCP's out truck driver comes back (I was waiting for someone to bring me a set of keys)? I jumped up in the driver's seat and locked the door--figuring that he wouldn't come back. Did the driver come back? No. Did prostitutes roam through the parking lot? Yes--it was kind of scary. But that was my one Columbo moment in life.

For a few of the years I worked there, I got to work with my best buddy and former college roommate Gar and my wife's best friend since middle school, Nancy. I got them into it--partly just to keep myself from going crazy and partly just to have witnesses to the mayhem (Gar and Nancy ended up married to each other).

Seriously, I could tell dozens more stories about this place--if I wrote a sitcom about the misadventures of this crazy company, people would call it totally unbelievable. It was almost 10 years ago that I started there, and over 5 years since I left, and today I was thinking about some of those funny times and missing it--just a little. Although it drove me crazy and maybe even lowered my IQ a little, the unpredictability and sheer lawlessness of the place was fresh and made me feel alive--made me live in the moment. But when I seriously consider reality, I'm glad it's over.

Scenes from Yet Another Weekend Hike

After last week's hike in Oklahoma, I wanted to take Ryan (my 6-year-old boy) on a day hike to see how he might hold up on a longer walk/backpacking trip in the woods--We went to "Fossilmania"--kinda freaky-looking fossil hunters hanging out in a convention center selling each other fossils for 100 bucks apiece (Overheard: "That's an incredibly intact Megaladont, Phil!") . I paid my $1 for a grab bag of 10 common fossils for Ryan, who was thrilled. Then we went back to Dinosaur Valley State Park nearby in Glen Rose, TX and looked at dino tracks frozen in the river and hiked on the trails in the Texas hills.

You may remember a similar "Ryan being chased by a T-Rex" picture to this from a previous post, but we couldn't resist...he's a ham, isn't he?

Tucked away at the trailhead by the Paluxy River is this oak tree--I practically expected it to speak to us--it has great character, doesn't it?

This is Ryan crossing the river along the "main" (large rock) route--later, he kept taking gradually smaller and smaller "side" routes on the tiny rocks until he finally fell in (I knew this would happen and brought an extra change of pants and shoes).

Below: our photos on a bench at the top of the hill we were climbing later that day...

Leaving the trail, we ran across this armadillo, who stood still long enough for me to fish my camera out of my backpack. Total wildlife spotted today: 1 deer, 1 snake (!), 1 armadillo. Ryan crashed out--I think maybe next year he'll be ready for a longer hike...

I promise I'm turning my blog into Field & Stream -- It's just the topic at hand for the last week...

Don't believe I was the only one who spotted this...

"And now, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court...or is it Supreme Chancellor of the US Court?"

I think we really have dodged a bullet...

Re-Living the Oklahoma Hike

There's a scene that comes to mind from the Tennessee Williams play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Brick Pollitt is lying on a couch holding a crutch, and his "no-neck monster" niece asks him why he was jumping the high hurdles in the middle of the night.

He answers, "Because I used to jump them, and people like to do what they used to do after they've stopped being able to do it." I've caught myself thinking that this is exactly what I'm up to--at a rock concert, trying to stay up all night, playing basketball, even looking at pictures. I recently had another moment where those words came back to me...

This weekend, my brothers and I took my dad on a backpacking trip that we all did individually as younger kids. Ironically, although we all were very active in camping through Boy Scouts, we had never all been camping together. Since several of us are married and we don't all live in the same town, my brother Don thought it might be a treat to take my dad on the same trail that he hiked with all of us individually over the years. For Father's Day, we announced our intentions to put together the trip that we would arrange the logisitics and do our best to shoulder the burden of the weight. Dad seemed to like the idea.

Anyone that knows my dad also knows that, even if you carry his tent, food, and water, he can still locate at least 30 pounds of crap to stuff into his aging, green backpack--so much that the old seams finally burst at the end of the first day--he grinned and said, "Well, maybe this is the last trip." I knew when he said it that he meant for himself, not just for the pack.

We had driven down on Friday night and, after the four-hour ride through traffic getting out of Dallas, through the empty streets of tiny towns in Southern Oklahoma, where my Dad and brother, Patrick kept violently erupting in excited pointing exhibitions every time we passed a gas station with a new, lower price per gallon (the first time one of the passengers urgently pointed out the window, I winced when I glanced over, half-expecting to be confronted with an RPG-wielding terrorist).

The final hour of the trip was a gut-wrenching, brake-smoldering climb-and-coast through winding mountain roads, during which my headlights silhouetted at least eight deer on the side of the otherwise unlit road, and an unfortunate possum met a grisly end.

Patrick and I set up our tent in the pines of the Ouachita Mountains in the Kiamichi Wilderness, and in the morning we were awakened by the crisp air, the crickets chirping and...

honk, honk, honk....(echoing and continuing)

Dad had slept in the car, which had automatically set the alarm and now we were sounding a burglar-alarm revilee across the Kiamichi...I reached up, grabbed my set of keys hanging in the top of the tent, and pressed the button to turn off the alarm...about 10 times before it actually worked. To Dad's credit, he said he suspected it would go off and waited as long as he could in the car before getting out.

Patrick scrambled eggs and made breakfast burritos with tortillas and coffee--I could tell already that the food on this hike was going to be better than anything we ever experienced as young kids--we would normally have oatmeal, trail mix, and Cup-o-Soup--pretty much gross, dehydrated food. I think all of us were interested in seeing how we held up to our previous physical standards. I would have to say that I've changed the most since I last hiked, 17 years ago. I've grown over four inches taller and weigh considerably more. Don has recently been exercising every day and has gotten lean and mean, so he was probably most prepared. Patrick was just married this year, and hasn't been camping in a while. My youngest brother, Noel, plays hockey in a league so he is physically active. And Dad is still Dad--a trooper who would go camping with us as kids even though it wasn't even clost to his favorite thing to do (which might be watching the Cowboy game on TV Sunday afternoons).

We sat and had our luxurious hot breakfast and I snapped pictures while a frosty dew fell all around us in the crisp morning air. I packed up my tent and snapped this daddy longlegs spider (harmless). The air smelled like crushed pine needles--a smell that brought back memories that I hadn't thought of in a long time...

My job for the trip was to confirm the logistics of the maps. It was a little awkward to call someone that I haven't seen in almost twenty years and ask them for a favor, but that was what my task for the hike was--I looked up our old Scoutmaster on Google (love Google) and it even had his cell phone number listed. He told me a book to get (Ouachita Trail Guide, by Tim Ernst), and even invited me to come to a Boy Scout meeting to make sure I had picked out the directions properly (I went to the meeting and that was a story itself). I felt very prepared.

I'm including a copy of the map, because somebody need to Email Tim Ernst and tell him that it's wrong. That was my one thing to do, and I got it wrong (not my fault!!!!)

We were supposed to put in a car at Forest Road 6031, off Highway 63. We left Patrick and Noel and our packs at the Pashubbe Trailhead and drove up and down highway 63 for well over an hour, stopping at any break in the trees that may look like Forest Road 6031--Finally, in a leap of faith and after realizing that we were dramatically behind schedule, we tucked the car in a grove of trees where we thought we would emerge at the Kiamichi River Trailhead (marked 6032--there were several unmarked Forest Roads along 63, spaced out along the highway). If it wasn't the right place, Don and I agreed that we would hitchhike along 63 until we got to the car and go back and pick everyone up. This kind of bugged me off and on during the trip--Were we going to see our car when we got off the trail?

When we got back to our backpacks, we took a quick group picture and started off--and I promptly got us off the trail immediately--the trail was blazed with blue paint, and I missed a faded blue mark at a switchback and took us in a circle around some trees before Don found the next blue mark. Again, my usually impeccable navigation duties seemed to be faltering a little.

Once on the trail, we were doing pretty well. Don took the lead and set a pretty quick pace up the switchbacks along the hill. The trail was rocky; much rockier than any of us seemed to remember. This continued until the last 2 miles of the hike at the end of the day. After a couple of hours, our legs felt hammered--balancing from tiny, softball-to-shoebox sized rocks put a strain on the tiny support muscles on the sides of your legs instead of the normal, large muscles you use for walking. The nice part about the rocky terrain was that there were several beautiful rock formations cascading down the mountain as we climbed--huge glacier boulders that we sometimes had to climb over.

Then the trail headed uphill--steep! By the time we reached the top of Wilton Mountain, we were gassed and broke for lunch.

We sat down and Patrick broke out the first meal for Dad. Don, Noel, and I brought our own trail meals, but Patrick took care of my dad--and boy, did he! He started to make a sandwich with cheese, mayo, the works (which is really unheard of, for good reason, in backpacking). As Patrick offered Dad a choice of flavored water, chips, and condiments, I started wondering exactly what kind of smorgasboard he had going on inside his backpack. I teased him, asking "Hey, Pat--do you think you could whip us up a chocolate bundt cake?" Little did I know that, not only did he pack steaks in a light cooler for us as well as a lightweight metal grill to cook them over the campfire that night, but he had also baked a chocolate cake and put it in an uncrushable container for dessert that night!--Patrick and his magic food-pantry backpack became an amazing phenomenon that we all uneasily watched all weekend...and benefitted from.

Again--all these things: sandwiches, steaks, cakes, grills--backpacker sacriledge! I felt naughty just participating in it...

As we sat in awe catching our first glimpse of Patrick's chefery, we were startled to hear voices approaching. It's hunting season out in the Kiamichi, so I was a little worried that we might encounter people with guns in the woods, but these were two merry hikers with hiking sticks who stopped to chat for a moment. They had also bought the book by Tim Ernst, and were also gassed by the climb to the top of Wilton Mountain.

Suspiciously eyeing the remains of a sandwhich tossed into the firepit, the larger of the two men reminded us to make sure we left the trail clean when we left. This could have been interpreted as out-of-line, but I thought he was right and we picked up the fire pit and tried to leave no trace of stopping there. We ran across the two guys several times on the trail, and I nicknamed them "Siegfried and Roy", which made us laugh every once in a while when we would wonder what they were up to.

The rest of the day went much smoother--Don led most of the way and each of us had a nice time hiking with different groups of people. Going downhill, even though it was rocky and composed of 33 switchback trails, was much easier going and the trail leveled out at for the last several miles--we passed Siegfried and Roy who were setting up their tents a campsite that we would have probably comandeered since it was getting dark and we got such a late start. We decided to push on to our destination, which we calculated as about a 10-mile hike for the day, with a five-mile backtrack the following day to the "car" (we were hoping and praying).

Noel and I got to the campsite and started the fire immediately, so we would have coals to cook on when Patrick and Dad got to the site--we knew they were at least half an hour behind. Don came shortly afterward and we both set up our tents while it was light.

I had sent out an Email to all the guys warning them about Giardia, which is a parasitic cyst that is common in water due to rodent feces. I told them that if we didn't bring in enough water, we would have to drink out of the "possum potty" (Kiamichi River which is known to have Giardia in it). Our projected campsite was on the banks of the Kiamichi, so one plan to keep from having to tote in liters and liters of water for overnight on the trail was to bring just enough for one day, then purify the water from the river for drinking and cooking. We've done it before and it's no big deal, but I'm glad that wasn't our strategy this time: the river was completely dry due to drought! In fact, there were pockets of unnaturally blue, milky, stagnant water that I'm glad we didn't have to consider drinking an of it.

We sat around the campfire, feasting like kings on steak, potatoes with butter and cheese, and chocolate cake and telling stories about camping in years past. Dad was quiet, but I think I caught him smiling a little...I hope that, even though he was exhausted, he had a nice time. I brought my nice camera, my luxury item of the trip, to see if I could capture some nice shots--one of my favorites was of my brothers, Patrick and Noel, and my dad sitting close to the fire--Don took this one of me.

A dog howled in the distance--enough to later give me a bad dream about a dog eating my entire backpack, which I had left outside the tent. Other than that, I was warm and toasty and slept soundly there on the banks of the river--I kidded my dad and Patrick: "If you guys have to get out of the tent in the middle of the night, I wouldn't go more than five steps--that sixth one is a long way down..."(the bank of the river).

At about Four AM a front moved through and the wind shaking the trees sounded like a freight train coming through the forest--Noel said he thought someone had opened the floodgates of the river--I woke up from my dream about the dog and started wondering what weather the front would bring--but beside the wind, it wasn't bad at all, and we got up, had a hot breakfast (there's a funny story about one of my brothers who was decidedly not pleased that his oatmeal was ruined because it wasn't warm enough, but I won't name names...) We passed Siegfried and Roy yet again on the trail, and I even sneaked off the trail a ways to catch my version of an "Abbey Road" photo of my brothers hiking by in a row in the thick cover of the forest.

When we got to the end of the trail--voila! We had guessed right and the car was there. Thank God. We were all in good spirits as we bundled into the car and the rain that followed the front moved in and soaked our packs as we drove to the beginning of the trail to pick up the other car.

The ride back always seems like it takes a lot longer than the ride to get there. We had a little miscue where Patrick, who was seemingly asleep in the back of my car, slinked off when we stopped to get gas and was highly offended that we drove off without him there. In fact, when he called my Dad's cell phone, my dad leaned back toward the empty back seat and said, "Patrick, what are you doing calling me?" To me, it was one of those Hitchcock moments of hearing my dad, glancing at the empty seat, and the sinking realization that I had abandoned my brother in an Oklahoma gas station...followed by hysterical laughter. I'm not sure if we were able to convince Patrick that it was humorous.

But we succeeded in revisiting the trail from our younger days, and this time, we did it in style.

Photos from our Hike

My brothers, Dad, and I went on a backpacking trip this weekend on the Ouichita Trail in southeastern Oklahoma. If you would like a preview , enjoy! Otherwise, I'll follow up with a description of the great trip later this week.

Disappointed People

I get this report that, if I get very curious, can tell me how people came to find my blog. It shows the search that they typed into the search engine. Sometimes, when I see what they typed and what they ended up finding, it makes me giggle a little.

(My sister, Nicole, also did a blog about this and there were some really funny searches like "Lesbian Bath House" and "Crack cookies"--she wished the searchers good luck...)

Here were some funny ones that I can recall:

1) "Hippo" and "Teamwork"--Yeah! My blog posting came before Animal Planet's website!

2) "A Poem about Birches"--not so funny, I guess; okay, here's one "Big Game Hunter" and "Halloween Costume"--? Come on, man, what a lame Halloween costume that would be...

3) "Latte' investment plan"--They were probably very disappointed to hear me say "Take your paws off my Starbuck's Venti Mocha, you bean-counter weasel!"

4) "Black girl and white guy"--hmmmmm...a little disturbing that I was a winner in this search--I guess this entry will now put me at the TOP of that search list...

5) "Drumbeats"--Tons and tons of hits on that, and I can almost hear the collective disappointment when people realize this isn't a music-related blog (I did play drums in high school) Photo evidence provided here-->

A little Ringo-ish, right? (Ringoesque?)

There are lots of others. It's really funny that most of the time the search "hit" is very tangential to the point I'm trying to make. Maybe I should try being less obtuse.

First Posts

Sometimes when I'm bored or trying to escape awful, work-related tasks I'll click on "Next Blog". People's first blog postings are kind of funny to read. You know, somewhat predictable (don't read mine-I'm sure it's lame).

One I new blog that I read last week very idealistically laid out the author's promise to never bore people with the mundane inner-workings of his life, and then a very specific promise to never include haiku.

Wow, I thought. My face grew flush. Is this some famous euphamism that I didn't realize exists? Am I, by definition, lame since I do throw in an occasional haiku? (This is rhetorical, by the way...)

So, here's why I do that--it's kind of tongue in cheek. I don't consider myself to be an overly creative person, and it helps me to have a framework and a limited number of syllables to express a complete thought. So sue me, you self-righteous jackass!

A Night at the Movies

Driving home last night, somehow the conversation turned to my blog.

"If one of my friends wants to read your blog, is that cool?"

"Uhhhh, which friend?"

"Oh, I don't know, (names a friend)"

"Isn't her husband some kind of Grand Wizard of their church or something? I don't want to feel censored."

"You never write anything that bad, do you?"

"Gee, thanks for reading!" (both laugh). "You know, maybe that's best left alone right now."

"You ought to write a blog about the human leg I saw under the car last year."

"Maybe you ought to write a blog about that--you can post it on mine, if you want. Besides, if I write about it, I'm going to write how it was fake!"

Background: Fran SWEARS that she saw a human leg dragging under a car last year on Halloween (hello!). She even called the police and everything, which is probably why my property taxes are going up this year. Later that day, our brother-in-law, who was a fireman, told us that a person jumped from a bridge over a highway downtown, and got run over so many times that body parts got dragged all over the city. I tried to tell her that there are so many practical jokesters, including incredibly resourceful ones, that you can pretty much never believe what you see anymore.

This week is our 14-year anniversary. On someone's anniversary, my mom likes to dramatically and sarcastically say, "(x) years of wedded bliss!", the same way one might say "(x) years of living hell!". But I must say that, in my case at least, it's been a great 14 years (OMG), and there's not much I would change (our topic at dinner last night).

So, we got a babysitter and went out to the movies for the first time in a long time, just Fran and me. Fran chose Elizabethtown, which definitely had a chick-flick feel to it, but it had a nice theme about finding meaning in life after a guy has a disastrous business failure, which kind of hit home for me in light of my recent thinking. When we walked in at the front of the theater, there was a couple whom I believed were escaped mental patients, because they had their infant and 2-year-old with them--Obviously I love kids but I was ticked that we had waited for months and months to go to a movie for a nice quiet time and certainly didn't want to hear kids screaming...

It may just be that I was overjoyed to be spending a night out with Fran, but I just loved the movie--I even got a lump in my throat when watching the main character's flashbacks of spending time with his dad when he was a boy, and hoped that Ryan has nice memories of growing up. When the movie was over, I leaned over to Fran and said, "Great, huh?"

She paused, then said, "Well, it was okay." She pointed out that the movie was a disjointed collection of ill-fitted parts. Damn it, she's right! Then I felt like I should have been a little more discerning instead of happily clapping at the pretty colors like a lobotomized monkey.

----

I've been fighting (and losing the battle with) this lousy cold for about a week. Friday, I laid on the couch and drank hot tea and watched movies (okay, I checked my work Email 4 times, too), but it was the first sick day that I took in 10 years! I've now restarted the clock on the "Iron Man" streak (2 days so far).

Two weird things: One of the conditions of my cold is the complete absence of taste or smell for about five days. The other is that I was watching The Matrix. There's a scene where Cypher is eating a steak and says, "I know that this steak isn't real, it's just that my brain is telling me that it's juicy and delicious. But I don't care."

I thought to myself, " I know this food really would taste good, but my brain isn't receiving any signals telling it what it tastes like. And I really do care quite a lot!"

I had this weird, out-of-body thought that maybe I'm lying in my Matrix pod somewhere and one of my little hose-connections, the one for taste and smell input, has somehow come unplugged.

Help! Somebody plug me back in!

Dialog of a Backpack Purchase

"I'm still high bidder--but there's still a couple of hours to go..."

"I think this is a bad idea."

"Look right here: it says 'Used once. Like New!' ...and look at the picture--it looks brand new!"

"There's no way they'll get it to you in time--you're leaving next weekend!"

"I'll just tell them that I need it by then."

"What do they care? They already have your money! Besides, how do you even know it's going to fit?"

"I went to REI and loaded it up with weight and tried it on. It fit great! Plus it's the color I want. My old backpack is an ugly orange color--looks like I've got one of those street pylons strapped to my back or something."

(not laughing) "Ha ha. I still think it's a bad idea"

"What, Ebay in general?"

"No. Cutting things this close to your trip, Mr. Sarcasm. So, hey, how many bids have there been?"

"I don't know--something like 10 or so."

"Someone will come in at the last minute and outbid you--it always happens to me that way."

---an hour later----

(Fran, calling upstairs) "Are you still winning?"

"Don't know--let me check real quick. It ends in an hour or so....No, some dude just outbid me."

"Well don't bid on it anymore--just go to REI and get a new one! That way, you know you'll have it."

My son, Ryan, walking in, tears welling in his eyes: "Dad, I really wanted you to get that one!"

"It's okay, Ryan--I'll get this one, but I'll get it from the store."

"But I wanted you to win..."

"Hey buddy, even if you win, you still have to pay for it."

I put him to bed.

---Forty minutes later-Twenty minutes to go on the bid---

I can't believe that guy waited until the very end and outbid me. I'll bet a bunch of people have driven the price up by now...

No way! His bid is standing at $1 over mine!

(Fran, calling up from downstairs): "Mike, Do Not bid on that backpack--they'll never get it to you in time!"

How did she know I was looking at it? (I hit the "refresh" button....20 times)

That guy is going to have to pay the "Mike Tax" for outbidding me! I'll raise him up a couple of bucks, the bastard!

---Ten minutes to go---

Enter a bid for $2 higher

What?! I'm the highest bidder? He only overbid me by $1? What an idiot!

---Time ticking, ever so slowly...---

One minute to go and I'm still the high bidder--here's where everyone comes in and goes bananas outbidding me up to a number that is ludicris.

5
-refresh-
4
-refresh-
3
-refresh-
2
-refreh-
1

delay

I won! What a great deal!

Now let's see if I get it on time! UPDATE: Got it with a week to spare! Yeah!!!