Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, my High Holy Day. Lisa's family will come over and we'll once again blend our traditions, each person carrying a ghost from their own childhood in the form of a platter of food. It may be the stuffing their grandma made or the pie their favorite aunt used to make. Some new traditions may start tomorrow, and some old ones may vanish forever. This is only the most recent incarnation of my favorite holiday. 

My Parents

I'm not someone who likes to spend a lot of time dwelling on the past. I am very good at compartmentalising my life, and that includes keeping the past in the past, where it belongs. But at this time of year, it seems like the veil separating the past from the present is so thin I may fall through. I feel like I could be driving home from work, sitting alone in my car, and suddenly find myself sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner at my Mema's house thirty years ago. It may be seventy degrees out, but I can feel the chill of the last Thanksgiving before my mom passed away. It was 1993, and it snowed and iced on Thanksgiving. I almost skipped it because I was scared to drive on the ice. Only a handful of people were able to make it that year. I'm glad I was one of them.

I've shared the Thanksgiving feast with representatives of every generation of my family who lived in my life span, from my great grandparents, who were born in the 1890's, to my son, who was born over a century later. Some day I'll eat the feast with my grandchildren, and maybe someday with my great grandchildren. Those future feasts will be as different from tomorrow's as tomorrow's will be from the ones in my memory. But each will carry with it the joyful memories of all that came before.

Tomorrow, the memory of my parents, grandparents and great grandparents will share a table with us, as though they were still here. And hopefully, years after I have moved through the veil, the memory of me will live on to share Thanksgiving with the generations I will never meet.

World Series Blog 4: How Minor League Baseball Ruined Major League Baseball

Field of Dreams

Is this Heaven.? No... It's Dr. Pepper Ballpark.

I always thought there was no better place to be than the ballpark. Any Major League Ballpark would suffice, but I have a special affinity for the Ballpark in Arlington. I never loved the name, but I love the design. I love the smell and the sound. Cold beer. Hot dogs. Then a few years ago we went to the Dr. Pepper Ballpark in Frisco, TX to watch the Frisco Rough Riders. I immediately fell in love with the smaller venue of the Minor League park.

Teddy

Minor League ball, when done right, is everything you should love about baseball on a smaller scale. Fewer seats let you be closer to the action. Lower concession prices let you enjoy the full ballpark experience without breaking the bank. Great deals on ticket packages will help you build a relationship with the team in a personal way.

If you've never been, and you can get to Frisco in the Spring, you should go. If you're local to North Dallas, you should really look at getting a ticket package. They've got an all you can eat section, the Teddy Express Section, where your ticket price includes unlimited burgers, dogs, brats, chips and sodas. Getting eight or thirteen games with burgers, dogs and sodas really makes it special.

Now that we've made a habit of going to the Rough Riders throughout the Spring and Summer, we don't go to Arlington anymore. I don't love the Ballpark in Arlington any less, but I love the Dr. Pepper Ballpark so much more.

World Series Blog 3: How Technology Ruined Baseball



It's been almost thirty years since MTV started shrinking my attention span with three minute bursts of entertainment. The progression of technology since has made entertainment more readily available and more personal. If we're measuring from the end of World War II, then it starts as a slow progression, but thanks to Moore's Law (look it up), technology has advanced at an increasing rate which enables me to get to my point before I lose interest.

Here's how it went:



C3P0's loyal sidekick



1945 - Radio - baseball was edge-of-your-seat exciting.

1955 - TV - 3 Channels. You'd watch a monkey washing a cat. You'd damn sure watch baseball.

1965 - Still just 3 Channels. Your choices were watch Vietnam or watch baseball. In two years you could add Star Trek to the list.

WTF

1975- 5 TV channels  -  baseball was still slow and no one noticed. We even sometimes listened to games on the radio for the nostalgia, and so we wouldn't have to see Rollie Fingers' mustache. 

1985 - Cable TV - more channels. Should we watch baseball or 540 music videos. Tough choice, steroid abuse made baseball a little more appealing, which made the choice easier.

1995 - Internet - Baseball or porn? Why not both. You may not know this, but the history of the Internet dates back to the 1960's. Formal Internet Protocols were established in 1982. Chances are, you first experienced it in the mid to late 1990's. Then checking your email or chatting via AOL were such novelties that they interrupted most of your life.

2003 - MySpace. Birth of social networking. More distraction.

2006 - Facebook. Ever growing need to know what your third cousin ate for lunch. Baseball seems kind of boring in contrast

2007 - iPhone. OMG! Social networking in my pocket. The whole Internet to look at while Jeter fouls twenty consecutive pitches.

2010 - iPad / Android phones / Android tablets. I'm streaming the exciting parts of the game real time thanks to my nifty MLB app. There's no need to spend three hours (or four if it's on FOX, thanks to the three minute commercial breaks) if I can watch it in three minutes. Besides I'm playing Words with Friends, checking email, updating Twitter, and watching a monkey wash a cat on YouTube. Who cares what's happening on the TV.

World Series Blog 2: How Steroids Saved Then Ruined Baseball

This a short one. It's the story of how for one shining moment steroids made baseball burn brighter than ever. Then with the help of a Red Sox shareholder and the U.S. Congress, the fire burned out.



Claims this was natural

In my early adulthood, baseball suddenly became awesome. Thanks to performance enhancing drugs, records were falling almost weekly. Players stopped looking like Babe Ruth and started looking like Mark McGwire. They had biceps the size of a normal man's thighs.These guys were titans, willing to abuse their bodies for the sake of competition. Their testicles shrank, their tempers flared, and they were hitting home runs out of the park nightly.

This is when I discovered baseball, and it was incredible. Then George Mitchell, Senator from Maine and shareholder in the Boston Red Sox, set out to prove that there was a doping problem. Shockingly, no Red Sox got outed, but the bastard did out Yankees greats Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte. Then the U.S. Congress got involved. Never mind MLB isn't a department of the Federal Government. It's not even a Federally regulated industry. Congressmen just wanted to meet the stars of baseball.

After that, steroids went away. Players went back to being normal sized athletes, and the game got boring again. Doping, no doubt, still goes on. I'm sure A-Rod is using HGH or some such thing. Whatever they're using, it makes them muscular, but worthless. So here I sit watching the Rangers and the Cardinals in the World Series, dreaming of the cornfield in Iowa that will one day be home to the freaks of the '90's.

World Series Blog 1: How Al Qaeda Ruined Baseball

Most years I spend October watching my beloved New York Yankees in the World Series. When they're not in the Series, I spend the month hating baseball. From the depth of my disappointment, I will now begin a best-in-seven-short-blog-series on the things that have ruined baseball. If it takes seven blog posts to get this out of my system, so be it. If I can kill it four, then all the better for my four loyal readers. 

This is the story of how Al Qeada ruined baseball.



Other hand genius.

After the attacks of September 11, the Commissioner suspended games until Sept.16. The Yankees had their first post 9/11 home game on Sept 25. At the seventh inning stretch, instead of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame", an Irish Tenor sang "God Bless America".



Okay, that was patriotic and sentimental. I'm glad we got that out of our systems. But it wasn't a one-time happening. This became a new tradition for the Yankees. Then the tradition spread to almost all of Major League Baseball. Yankee Stadium even put in place a "no moving" rule during the singing of "God Bless America". A guy sued them in 2009 because he was forced by security to leave the game because he left his seat. It's the stretch!!! This is when you're supposed to get up!



Wait. It get's worse. Fans and players alike remove their caps and face the flag, hands on hearts. This is not the national anthem! It's an Irving Berlin show tune. Sometimes it's not even a person singing. It's a scratchy old Kate Smith record. No one should have to stand solemnly in place, and face the flag and salute for a scratchy recording of a show tune. We don't genuflect for "Ya Got Trouble" from The Music Man. We don't lower our heads in prayer for "Maria" from West Side Story.

WTF MLB?

Low T

On the way to work I pass a clinic with a huge sign that says "Low T". This new-age disorder has replaced "Restless Leg Syndrome" as the new made up thing that people think the suffer from. They call it Andropause (this is "male menopause") or Low T. The "T" is for testosterone. Here's a complete list of symptoms:

"Your T is low, Fool."

• Fatigue
• Memory Loss
• Muscle Loss
• Weight Gain
• Low Sex Drive
• Erectile Dysfunction
• Depression
• Irritable Male Syndrome
• Hot Flashes
• Night Sweats
• Hair Loss
• Sleep Apnea
• Prostate Problems
• Osteoporosis

Oh God! Where do I start? One of the symptoms is "Irritable Male Syndrome". I cut this definition right off a website called renewman.com, "Getting irritated by things that never used to bother you? Have you lost your temper suddenly or for no apparent reason? Never quite know when you’re going to fly off the handle again?" I've been an irritable male since puberty. I thought flying off the handle was a sign of testosterone rage. Are they saying if I take their drugs, I will have more testosterone, but I'll be mellow? OH THAT MAKES ME SO MAD!

Fatigue, memory loss, muscle loss, weight gain, hair loss. Find me one man over forty who doesn't suffer from four of those five things and I'll buy him a wig. Hair loss? Really? They are claiming that hereditary male pattern baldness is actually a symptom of this disease. Whah?
 
Low sex drive, erectile dysfunction, and depression. If you spend enough years being emasculated by women, subjugated by the boss, treated like an idiot by your children, and beat down by life you will exhibit all of these symptoms. Hormones have nothing to do with it. 
 
Sleep apnea, prostate problems and osteoporosis. These are all serious problems, the cause of which is not low testosterone. They are each actual health problems. Diseases in their own right. If you suffer from one of these, go to an actual doctor and get help.
 
Wait a minute. Is this all some B.S. reason to legally get steroid injections? Why didn't you they so? Every man wants to be a pumped up action hero. They're going about this all wrong. The ad shouldn't say "Remember when you had the energy to [do a bunch of wussy stuff like be romantic and go to concerts]" It should feature Mr. T saying, "Wanna get ripped? Wanna bust some heads? Tired of takin' shit off everybody all the time? Then get your T back, Sucka!"

Hell yeah! Sign me up.

Thirty Nine

On the occassion of the 18th anniversary of my 21st birthday, I'd like to take a 3.25 minutes to review the stats for my life so far:

• I've been with Lisa and Jacob for 9.12054794505479452054795 years.
• I can honestly say that 9.081532158016554 years of it has been pretty awesome.
• We've been married for 6.795205479452054794520547945205 years
• I've had the same cat for 17 years.
• I've been legally elligible to drink for 6,570 nights. I don't remember how many of those nights I actually drank, but I can say I puked probably less than 20 times.
• This is only since I turned 21. Underage drinking gets expunged from your record.
• It can be assumed that I've consumed 462.6 gallons of booze. (This stat is based on normal American per capita consumption, That's 2.14 gallons per month. Jesus, America, slow down. It's not a race. Is this why Rick Perry is so popular? You bunch of drunks!)
• I've owned 11 cars
• 3 were bought new
• 10 were American
• 1 was German
• I've eaten 14,235 breakfasts, but I've only had 1,768 bisuits
• I've lived 9 places (4 apartments and 5 houses) in 4 different cities, all within 60 miles of my place of birth.
• I've voted in 5 Presidential elections. 3 times, my candidate won.
• I've been to 19 states
• I've had 7 jobs, with an average tenure of 3.4 years.
• I better get back to work now or this stat may be in danger

Left Behind

I am forever fascinated when people don't embrace new technology. I have friends and family who aren't on Facebook because they aren't on the internet and don't even have a computer. WTF? There are two adults and a child in our house and we have ten internet access points (3 smart phones, 2 tablets, 2 PC's, 1 Laptop, 1 PS3, and 1 Wii), and I'm about to add an eleventh (a Roku player). The reason, it seems, that so many people aren't connected to the web isn't money based, and it's not because they're old and don't understand the technology. It's because it's just not a priority to them.

Newsflash! Technology should be a priority to you. It's not just about Facebook. We don't just use technology to stay connected, and to stay informed. This is how we advance our human civilization.

Google's Autonomous Car

Google has developed a fleet of cars that drive themselves. They've clocked over 160,000 miles. The precision android driving of this technology will one day eliminate traffic by allowing us to have smaller lanes and leave smaller gaps between moving vehicles. There will never be an auto accident, a speeding ticket or a drunk driver.

I have an app on my phone (a devise that fits in my pocket and has more computing power than we took to the moon) that allows me to have a spoken conversation with someone who doesn't speak English. I say something in English, and it speaks it in Spanish. The person speaks to me in Spanish, and the phone speaks it in English. I've almost eliminated the need for a wallet because there are apps for store cards and library cards, and coming soon a debit card app. And you want to know something? If I could get this technology off my phone, and implanted in my body, I'd be first in line to do it.

I can no longer conceive of a world in which I'm not constantly connected. I use the internet on the fly to find directions, movie times, restaurants, to settle arguments over trivia, to read, to watch movies, to listen to music, to work. Today we have all the world's knowledge at our fingertips. We can't be many years away from brain implants that give us the internet in our heads. Imagine all that information instantly available as a thought.

Cybernetic implants and prosthetics are already common place. Some day soon, every part of you will have the potential for an artificial replacement. Immortality can't be far behind. I'll tell you now, that as my human parts give out, I will harvest parts from the people who today don't even have internet access. That will be their punishment for hiding from the forward march of civilization. Their parts will be harvested by the cyborgs. And when those parts give out, I will replace them with robot parts. Then finally, even the last remaining bits of the people who aren't able to read this will get left behind.

Suck on that!

Walmart: Hell's Vestibule

Every Sunday, like Dian Fossey, I spend time in observation of my closest relatives in the animal kingdom. I feel as though I've been sent by National Geographic to observe the native population and their social habits. Only instead of watching chimps fashion tools from twigs and share bananas, I see huge women on motorized carts loading up on Ramen Noodles, and double size family packs of Nacho Cheese Doritos. That's right, I'm talking about the weekly trip to Walmart.

I struggle to find the right words to express how much I hate going to Walmart. Just thinking about it makes me want to curl up on the floor and go to sleep. There are always so many people, and they're always right where I need to be. Even in the produce section. I can tell by looking at them that these people don't eat vegetables, but there they are hogging the space.

This is a true story. One week Lisa was working on Sunday so I went without her. I went late in the day and during a Cowboys game in hopes of avoiding the crowds. Even though the aisles were less crowded, there was someone standing in front of every item on my list. This is true. I wanted bacon, but there was a couple arguing in front of the bacon. I wanted soup, but there was guy on his cell phone leaning against the soup. I needed toilet paper, but there was a lady standing indecisively in front of the toilet paper I wanted. It felt like a set up for a hidden camera show.

If we're going to make this recession work, we need some ground rules for Walmart shopping.

1. Crowd Control. Each family can only send one delegate to do their shopping. It doesn't require the whole family, and the entire process will go more smoothly if there are fewer people involved.
2. Freak Factor. When choosing your family's shopping delegate, pick the least freaky person.
3. Dress Code. If your family's least freaky person is still side-show worthy, here are a few dress code tips:
• Underwear goes on the inside of your pants.
• Just because you can tuck your boobs into your pants doesn't mean you don't have to wear a shirt.
• A skirt and heels is never an option for a man.
4. Courtesy. If your shopping needs fill two carts or if you are an extreme couponer, you'll need to shop on a weekday while the rest of us are at work.
5. Self Control. Those motorized carts are for the handicapped. Lazy is not a handicap. If your too fat to walk through Walmart, it may be time to switch to Whole Foods. I'm just sayin'.

Together we can get through this. We're going to have to share this world until one of you rednecks pisses me off for the last time. So lets pull together and make the best of a bad situation. Ah, forget it. I'm going to Kroger.

The Third Place

Here's a qucik one.

A wise man once said your life is out of balance if your time isn't spent in at least three places. After that he was no longer called the wise man. Presumable two of the three places are home and work. The challenge is finding your third place. The third place has to be equally important to your story, like Arnold's, Central Perk or Cheers.

I spend my time at home and work, but I don't have a third place. Can a book be considered a place? What about a video game, movie or TV show? What about "in traffic"? Can that be considered a place? If so, my third place sucks.

I suppose church could be. You'd have to spend a significant amount of time there, otherwise it's just a place you go once a week, like the grocery store. Maybe if you have a close friend and spend a lot of time at their house. Maybe this is why continuing education is such a draw. College, combined with work and home is clearly a proper division of your time and resources. Some people go to the gym for an hour or more three or more times a week. That would count.

The changing way we interact with the world brings this concept into a new light. Is Facebook a place? What about the combined social network; Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc.? What if you spend most of your day with your head up your butt? Can you count your butt as your third place. We all work with people like that. But then, they can no longer count work as a place. Anyway, that's more like having an alternate state of being than an alternate location.

My Testimony

Religion. Here's a topic guaranteed to piss off anyone. If you don't believe me, take a minute to turn to the person on your right and say, "I'd like to talk to you about Jesus." Believe me now?

I don't consider myself to be a religious person. I go to church most Sundays, more for my family than myself. I believe in the organized church and all the good that can be done in a church community. Unfortunately, a lot of bad can also be done by church communities. It's possible to convince a person to do almost anything if they can be made to believe they are doing it for religious reasons, and groups of people are more suggestable than individuals. It's my opinion that religious faith is a delicate balance of hope, ignorance, and suppressed disbelief. As long as the latter makes up less than half of your faith triangle, you probably consider yourself a religious person. If a big enough piece of that pie is made up of ignorance, you could probably be incited to blow up yourself or your neighbor if the request was preceded with "God says". If your triangle is made up only of hope and ignorance, you should probably let someone else hold your wallet.

As a child my religion was built solely on ignorance. I believed because I was told to. The same is true of a child's belief in Santa Claus. As I matured, hope moved in. My hope was informed by my burgeoning fear of death. I hoped there was a heaven, and I hoped to go there if I died. As my experience grew, I began to find there were many religions that were different from my own, some even disagreed with the most fundamental things I believed in. Some have a hell and a devil to stand in contrast to their god and heaven, and some don't. Some have a messiah and some don't. Some don't have a heaven at all, but instead believe in reincarnation. Some have no heaven and no reincarnation. Some religions once dominated the earth, and are now laughable and quaint. Some have many gods, and some just one. Some have demi-gods and some don't. Which one is right?

Let's check the evidence. Uh oh, there is no evidence. None at all. Well, there are a bunch of scientific studies showing that prayer has absolutely no impact on results. There are also a bunch of studies attempting and failing to prove the existence of the human soul. This is where disbelief was born, and immediately suppressed. As Christians, we are taught that the only unforgivable sin is to deny the Holy Spirit, and God knows what we're thinking. So I had to work hard to suppress the doubt and the denial that would surely follow. Because if we doubt, and then deny we'll go to Hell (assuming, of course that all the other stuff isn't bullshit).

Once doubt met logic, the scales began to tip. As hope and ignorance fell away, the triangle of faith became a circle of reason. Now here I am with only my experience to trust and only myself to believe in. I have only myself to blame for my failures and no where existential to look for support in times of crisis. I am the master of my own destiny. And you know what? It's pretty sweet. There is great relief in rising from the attitude of penitence. There is liberation in knowing the laws of man are sufficient, and that progress, both social and scientific, is a good thing. There is great motivation in knowing I have only one lifetime in which to accomplish and experience everything I desire to.

I am not writing this as a condemnation of anyone else's faith. It is not an argument for atheism. This is just my testimony. As for who is right and who is wrong, only the dead have seen the ending.

Cruising Poetic

So we'll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart still be as loving,

And the moon still be as bright.

                                 -Lord Byron

Those lines makes me think of all those teenage nights spent driving around with my two best friends, Matt Petty and Lee Walsh. We never seemed to have a destination, but we were always going somewhere. It was freedom like I had not known before. We were the Lewis and Clark Expedition of the streets of Fort Worth.

There's an episode of the Wonder Years right after Kevin gets his license. He and his friends go out wandering. At the end the narrator says, "We didn't really accomplish anything that night. Nothing of any real importance, anyway. But through the high school years that lay ahead... there would be a thousand other nights, just like that one. Stupid, ridiculous... and glorious." I love that line. It says it all.

It's a rite of passage for young American men after getting a driver's license. As long as there have been cars and roads to drive them on and cities to drive them through, boys have sought their freedom behind the wheel. Its more about the journey than the destination. Its about constant discovery and endless change and the element of chance. You can control the vehicle, but not always the conditions. Ahead lies risk and danger, joy and exhaltation. You can't easily turn around so you only move forward, pushing forever away from the place of your birth and constantly toward the grave. If you're fortunate you have close friends to share the wonder with you along the way.

Ah that's just drunk talk, sweet beautiful drunk talk.

Alcohol... There are few things closer to my heart, and none closer to my liver. Come to think of it, there are few things closer to my heart than my liver. They say to write about what you know. Not sure who "they" are, but I'm certain I was drunk when I heard it. (The entire opening of this blog should be read as though spoken by Groucho Marx.)

                          

I'd like to preface the remainder of this blog by saying:

1. I don't have a problem.
2. I can quit any time.
3. I learned it from watching you, okay!

I can't remember when I had my first taste of alcohol. My dad used to let me have a sip of beer if I brought him one from the fridge. (No need to alert Jeff Foxworthy. I know what I might be.) I've been drinking for the joy of it since High School, but I don't think I came to a mature approach to drinking until my late twenties. Before then it was always about getting drunk, usually for social reasons. These days I'm more of an anti-social drinker, and only occasionally drunk.

My favorite drink is wine. I prefer a Chiraz or Cabernet. This is a great cheap way to get woozy, and one of the only ways I can get a buzz without getting full. As cocktails go, I like Jack and Coke or Pineapple Rum and Coke. I drink my Jack and Coke from a special cup used only for that purpose. The Rum and Coke I drink from a 44 ounce glass filled over halfway with rum. I also enjoy a sweet salty Margarita. That taste of tequila triggers a puke memory in most of us, right? Of course beer is universal. It goes with everything from Monday night football to Saturday night baseball. (Don't let that sentence fool you into thinking I take Sundays off.) I hate it when I get to that first Budweiser commercial and there's no beer in the house. I will pause a game and go buy beer if that happens.

Most nights I have a drink when I get home. Usually it's just a glass of wine, but at the end of a difficult day it may be far more serious. I have no qualms about drinking alone. I don't know where that social hang up came from, but "drinking" and "alone" go together quite nicely. Sometimes they like to invite "in the dark" and "in my underwear" to the party. 

One night I got tired of getting up to refill my wine glass, so I brought the bottle back to the living room with me. Lisa saw me refilling from the couch and said, "You don't have to use a glass on my account. You know you want to drink from the bottle." I considered it, but decided that's a line I don't need to cross. Not yet, at least.

Bananas Foster or: How I Almost Married a Chubby Girl Because Her Hot Cousin Dumped Me

Thanks to Facebook, I have reconnected with a bunch of people with whom I have been out of touch for many years. When I look back at the past 20 years, I find there is not a single person I've been in touch with consistently. I suppose this is normal in the years after high school. So I will quickly fill in the gaps for all my new friends and reconnected friends and family:

1990 – 1993 Hot Tub Time Machine

In Hasbro's "The Game of Life" you get to choose the path for college or career. Both paths lead to the same place, and ultimately come out pretty even, but the career path requires crap work and low pay at first. In my life I tried college briefly, but chose the career path. I worked lame jobs and hard jobs during those years and many of the years that followed.

Most of that period was spent hanging out with Matt and Lee, my two best friends from High School. Those were wasted years, but fun times.

1994 – 1998 The Empire Strikes Back

I was orphaned in my twenties. I lost my mom in '94 and my dad in '98, both to cancer. I lost both of my grandmothers in the same week in February of '99. I lost my faith somewhere along that road. Then I found it, then I lost it again. That's probably a story for another blog.

I've been married twice and almost married a few times more. I married my first wife a month before my mom died. I almost bolted from the church that day, but I looked out of the groom's room and saw my dad rolling in my mom in a wheelchair. She had literally left her death bed to see my wedding. So I went through with it. Four years later, a month after my dad died, I threw out the first wife. If my first marriage was a book, it would be children's book, the kind with big innocent cardboard pages, simple words, and almost no sex, like "Goodnight Moon".

1999 – 2001 Doctor Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I highly recommend first marriages. It's a great learning experience. For example, I learned you shouldn’t marry your prom date. I also learned that I love sampling wedding cake, but I hate weddings. So after my first marriage ended, I got engaged a few times, but always avoided setting a date. Between 1998 and 2002, I sampled a lot of cakes.

2002 – present Field of Dreams

I met my second wife, Lisa in 2002. Our marriage is a dream. Lisa is my best friend, and my one true love. I could write pages about Lisa, and I will, but not yet. We have a terrific son. He's a smart and talented kid with a well developed sense of humor. It sometimes really pisses me off to see myself reflected so perfectly in another person.

I learned the value of hard work early on, and those lessons have served me well. I now have great job that I enjoy going to every day. What I do is also fodder for another blog post.

As I approach my middle years, I am satisfied with my life. I am married to a woman I love. I have a job I would do for free. We're mostly healthy and mostly happy most of the time. My life is full of laughter, and when I see the bald guy with the grey chin whiskers in the mirror, I generally like him.

Now… we’re all caught up. I’d ask how you’ve been for the last twenty years, but I’d rather read it in your blog. So get to work everyone, and start sending me those links.

Thoughts From Anna

My cousin Anna has a great blog that she updates almost every weekday (http://annah40.blogspot.com/). I admire her dedication to maintaining it. Even more, I admire the thoughts she shares in her blog. It's all very personal. The topics range from the mundane to the deep. She's covered topics from her love of Easter hats to her waning spirituality. Early on she blogged about the death of her father. He was a huge influence in my life. I keep a picture of him on my shelf at home even all these years later. That blog entry hit me hard. It brought back so many feelings and memories, that it took fully a week for me to get back to normal.

Her blog has made me think about my smart-assy poorly maintained blog. I wonder if these are the thoughts we leave for posterity. When we die, will they somehow be maintained by ancestry.com or whatever archive we're using when that time comes? Will our children, grandchildren or future decendants read our blogs to find out what we were like at this moment in our lives? Do I want my message to the future to be a list of things that make my ass sweat?

The short answer is yes. I do want my great great grandchildren to read about the things that make my ass sweat. I hope they get a chuckle out of it. But I also want to say more. I am going to try to do a better job of updating my blog. Five days a week is never going to happen, but a few times a month is a commitment I can probably keep. It may often still be things that make me laugh, but I won't avoid covering other, more personal topics.

For the faithful five following my blog or those who browsed here from Facebook or Twitter, every entry may not be for you. Going forward, I may only link the funny ones to Facebook. For those in the distant future reading this, I hope your robot overlords don't catch you slacking. If Ray Kurzweil is right, then I am probably one of your robot overlords, and I promise vengence on anyone caught screwing off. For my lovingly tolerant wife, this may be as close I am able to get to sharing my thoughts and feelings... so stay tuned.

Couple Friends

I'm certain most married men can relate to this. My wife, Lisa, is frequently trying to find us couple friends to hang out with. This involves starting with a woman she is already friends with, usually someone from work or from high school, then introducing the husbands into the mix. In order for this to be successful, the husbands (me and the other guy) must become friends. Ideally we would become the kind of friends who would hang out without our wives around, thus creating a sub-group within the couple friend dynamic. The statistical probability of this formula working is approximately 285:1 against. The obstacles to success are abundant, but I'll pick off a few obvious ones.

Social Science. Men don't quickly bond with other men. The bonds among men take years to form and are often shaped by shared tragedy or at least shared adversity. I'm pretty sure this is true of most male mammals. If you need examples, check out monkeys, lions or elephants. The herds, or whatever, are made up of females and babies. The males are either off somewhere alone or with males with whom they grew up. If a new male is introduced into the pack of males, it is summarily humiliated, beaten and assigned a lesser position in the chain of command or it takes control of the pack by ousting the current leader (this might happen in human groups if The Rock showed up).

Social Disorders. I used to think I was introverted, but now I'm certain that I'm antisocial. I'm comfortable in crowds, and I'm okay being openly antisocial. There is a quote in the new BBC "Sherlock Holmes" series where Sherlock says, "I'm not a psychopath. I'm a high functioning sociopath. Do your research." I get that. As Lisa has tried to bring her friends' husbands around, I have picked them off, one by one, as unworthy. I am willing to admit that if I had a problem with one man or two or even three, it could be them. But if my problem is with every man (or, let's face it, every man, woman and child), it may be me. I remember when I was much younger, choosing not to ask a girl out because she had a bunch of friends, and I really didn't like them. It seemed easier to just not try, than to start a relationship that would end with me telling her that everyone she knows is an asshole.

Offspring. We have a twelve year old son. If the other couple has a child of similar age, then they must also get along. If the other couple has a baby or toddler, then it's just never going to work. I am past the point in my life where I want to make social arrangements around a little child. I don't want to double date to a Pixar film or have to work around naps or listen to tantrums. Sometimes Lisa, who is a Labor and Delivery Nurse, will meet people at work who are having a baby and who seem like a perfect match to us socially. All I can think when I hear this is, "do I really want to spend a lot of time around a baby?"

Alcohol. We like to drink. I like it a lot. I drink in crowds. I drink alone. It's one of the only ways I am able to function socially. That Lisa also likes to drink, and is okay with my constant drinking is one of the magic bonds that hold us together. Trying to be couple friends with people who don't drink is a deal breaker. If their reason for not drinking is religious, all the more so.

Humor, politics, and religion. I have a very dry sense of humor, and a caustic wit that is fully engaged 95% of the time. If you look up caustic wit, you will probably find sarcasm as a synonym. If the other couple is not of a similar demeanor, this could be a problem. Lisa and I are both quite liberal in our social politics and in our religion. Of the two of us, she is the one you would describe as having a religion. Any one of these factors if discussed openly can make or break a friendship.

So if you've been friends with my wife for years, and your husband and I are on an equal socio-economic plane, and we have shared a trauma together, probably brought on by being drunk, funny and antisocial in a public place, then this could work. If it's not a perfect fit, but you'd generally describe yourself as a secular humanist and you're willing to let your husband narrowly avoid being arrested or beaten up in a bar fight then it may be worth a try. Provided you don't have small children.