Category: Humor

‘Good Boy!’

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“Try saying something other than ‘Good boy’ to your dog the next time you reward them for good behavior,” said a human who claimed to know more about dogs than other humans. “Your dog gets tired of hearing the same phrases over and over again. Mix it up and keep it fresh to allow for greater stimulation of your dog’s mind.”

I am not an expert on dogs, but if this is expert advice, then I wonder how we qualify the term expert. “They spend a lot of time around dogs,” you say. Okay, but I spend a lot of time around my dogs, and I notice that they prefer that we keep it simple and consistent. This expert is basically suggesting that the best way to enhance our relationship with our dog is to complicate our relationship with them.

This expert is not talking to dogs here. He’s talking to us, trying to justify his title as an expert. If this expert said, “The next time you want to reward your dog for good behavior, say ‘Good boy!’” We would all question his title for saying what we already know. They know this, so they tweak our common knowledge in a harmless way that most of us won’t follow. If we do, we might try it once or twice and realize it doesn’tmake a difference, and we’ll all go back to saying “Good boy!” again to enjoy the simple, fun, and loving relationship we have with our dog.

My guess, if we could talk to our dogs, they’d say something along the lines of, “I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t know what you’re talking about 95% of the time, I don’t speak English, but I know tones. I’mperfectly happy with the arrangement we have right now, but if you feel the need to start messing with the five percent I understand, do what you need to do, but keep the tone the same.”  

If I could gather a group of experts to comment on this situation, I’m sure they would all condemn this expert advice, and I’m sure that their condemnation would leave me feeling temporarily validated. Yet, the other thing we know about experts is that they get their validation condemning another expert’s advice.

The Suspect 

If I walk into a public restroom, and it’s obvious that something awful happened there, you’re the primary suspect if you’re the one walking out. You’re guilty until proven innocent, and there’s really no effective defense.  I thought this was pretty damned hilarious, until I concluded my activities and realized I would be someone else’s primary suspect if I timed my exit as poorly as my primary suspect.

The Relative Definition of Beauty 

“If you’ve ever been to a male stripper’s joint,” Jane said. “You’ll see that nearly 100% of the female patrons of the joint are ugly, old, and out of shape women. How can these men enjoy that?”

“Have you ever been fawned over?” I asked her. “Most women have. Most men haven’t. I’m sure gorgeous men get fawned over all the time, but most men don’t know they’re attractive, until it’s too late in life. They look back at pictures of themselves and realize that they were a lot better looking than they thought. Women aren’t as generous with their praise. They seek to humble men. So, when a man gets fawned over by women, it doesn’t really matter what they look like.  

Everything in its Right Place 

I could never be a slob again. I’m not talking about the difference between clean and unclean as much as the difference between being organized and unorganized. Losing things bothers me more than being unclean. If I place a toothbrush on a bathroom sink, for instance, I’ll think about that toothbrush until I have a chance to put it in its proper place. If I don’t, I fear that it will somehow become lost before I need to use it.   

The History of Propaganda 

Most people have heard the phrase, “If we repeat the same thing often enough, people will believe it.” Evil historical figures have proven this is an effective tool to fool some of the people some of the times, but as Malcolm Gladwell wrote there is a tipping point to everything.

We’re all subjected to various forms of propaganda, everything from the more obvious political slogans to advertisements, but there is a moment somewhere between “I got it already” and “They’ve been pounding this drum SO often that I’m starting to think they’re up to something.” Some call this Message Fatigue and others call it the Backfire Point.

I don’t think this deduction requires a level of ingenuity or cleverness. It’s such a basic understanding of human nature that it’s kind of boring to read and write about. There’s one nugget that contributes to the survival of this myth, the stupidity of the man of yesteryear. Since most men of yesteryear lived without modern technology and conveniences, we all think they were a little dumber than we are. C’mon, admit it. We see old black and white daguerreotype photos of people, and we think hayseed, yokel types who barely knew how to read. “They fell for it,” we think, looking at them, and those of us who have iPhones, Google, and AI feel so much more advanced, even though we had nothing to do with those technological advancements, and we think we would never fall for propaganda. Or, if we did, we would have a tipping point, and they probably didn’t, because “Look at them. Look at what they wore.”

The ‘S’ 

I found a trivia question to stump the band: “What was the 18th president Ulysses S. Grant’s middle name at birth?” Answer, Ulysses. Easy right? Wait a second, how did they get from S. to Ulysses. Not so easy, right. His birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant, but everybody called him Ulysses. If you had the opportunity to choose between the name Hiram and the central figure of The Odyssey, wouldn’t you choose the latter? Some sources state that the young Hiram Ulysses Grant hated his name, because his initials were HUG, but that doesn’t answer the question of how they went from Hiram Ulysses Grant to Ulysses S. Grant.

The confusion began after “Grant was nominated to West Point in 1839 by Ohio Congressman Thomas Hamer, who wrote Grant’s name in the application as “Ulysses S. Grant.”” Everyone called him Ulysses, so Congressman Hamer just assumed that was Hiram’s first name. Middle names weren’t as common in this era as they are today, as evidenced by the fact that Abraham Lincoln did not have one, so we can only assume that Hamer assumed Ulysses Grant didn’t have a middle name. The problem for Congressman Hamer was that the West Point application required a middle initial, and due to the fact that Hamer couldn’t just text Hiram to sort matters out, or call him, he decided to just fill the blank in that application to get it done. Congressman Hamer found out that Hiram Grant’s mother’s maiden name was Simpson, so he just added the famous S. on the application. (Another interesting piece of trivia regarding the S as a middle name is Harry S Truman. Harry’s “S” was a standalone. His parents couldn’t decide whether to name him after Solomon Young, Harry’s maternal grandfather, or Anderson Shipp Truman, his paternal grandfather, so they compromised and just gave him an ‘S’ as a middle name with no period, because it wasn’t abbreviated.) “Grant made several efforts to correct the mistake [Ohio Congressman Thomas Hamer made], but the name stuck.” As with every military institution, Grant’s fellow cadets at Westpoint developed a nickname, because of his “unintentionally patriotic initials U.S.” They called him Uncle Sam, or just Sam. That man had several names in life.

“In an 1844 letter to his future wife Julia Dent, Grant wrote, “You know I have an ‘S’ in my name and don’t know what it stand (sic) for.”

So, the correct answer to the trivia question is that the ‘S’ stood for nothing but a mistake by a congressman, but that error was based on his mother’s maiden name: Hannah Simpson Grant. So, we could say that his middle name was Ulysses, but we could also say that the ‘S’ we all know and love stood for Simpson. The confusing element, for me, is that after West Point Academy refused to correct the record, Hiram Ulysses Grant became Ulysses S. Grant permanently, from that point forward. Did the bureaucrats at West Point say, “Do you know how much paperwork changing a name involves? It’s incredibly tedious, and are you really going to fight for a name like Hiram?” this lazy bureaucrat probably said to avoid having to go through paperwork. My guess is Hiram Ulysses Grant didn’t give up easily, because he was a fighter, and it was his name. My guess is the lazy bureaucrat pounded it home with a compelling argument along the lines of: “I think the congressman actually did you a favor by fixing the error your parents made by giving you the incredibly nerdy name of an accountant. Ulysses was the name of Homer’s warrior, and it could help you rise through the ranks of the military if you have the name of a warrior.”

Hiram Ulysses Grant did, in fact, rise through the ranks of the military, becoming General of the Army of the United States, a four‑star rank created for him in 1866. This rank made him the senior officer of the U.S. Army and the first person since George Washington to hold a comparable level of authority. Then, of course, he became the 18th president of the United States. If we could ask Abraham Lincoln how the Civil War would’ve progressed without General Grant, he probably would’ve said, “I don’t even want to think about that.” If Grant managed to correct the record and made Westpoint change his name back to Hiram Ulysses Grant, would Lincoln have trusted the fate of the nation to an accountant? I’m sure soldiers and generals offered testimonials to bolster Grant’s credentials, but Lincoln would’ve ended each reading with, “But his name is Hiram.” Some historians would suggest that the Civil War wouldn’t have ended as quickly as it did without the leadership, and some might add the utter brutality, of Ulysses Grant’s leadership, tactics, and strategies. Some suggest if it weren’t for him, the nation might not be united in the manner we know it today, and his stature might not have happened without the mistake of one bureaucrat and the probable laziness of another. Now, you might say that I’m connecting and disconnecting a lot of dots to complete a story with ifs, buts, and what-ifs, but isn’t that how a number of stories of history were made and unmade?

“That’s My Name, Don’t Wear it Out!” 

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“That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” was a sassy, cheeky way to respond to someone calling us out in the 1970s.

Generations who weren’t on planet earth when this line was in the hot space can’t believe we were so into it. When I put it in context for them and informed them that this was our playful way of saying that we did not fear confrontation, they didn’t say anything. I told them it was the equivalent of, ‘Hey, I heard you the first time,’ when someone confrontationally called our name out a second time. When I told them that line could engender a “Woh!” from onlookers, they couldn’t understand it. “It’s not funny, it doesn’t sound effective, and are you sure this wasn’t just a you thing?” ‘No, it was all over the movies, the TV shows, and the commercials,’ I informed them. ‘We really thought we were onto something with this line.’ I twisted and contorted this so many ways I wasn’t sure if I was trying to defend the line or pursuing the most objective response I could possibly get from the other generation, but when they said, “It just doesn’t work on any level,” the matter just closed. 

I could not be objective on this topic, because when this idiomatic expression, or saying, first hit the streets, I was in grade school, and all the cool kids were saying it. For a short time, it was the definition of a wise-cracking, cool fella making his way through the world. I tried to make it work for me to make it work for them, but I either didn’t have the level of creativity or the intellectual heft necessarily to pull it off. It was too situational, and I could never find the perfect situation. I don’t know if I needed an older brother, or a neighborhood kid to bully me into perfecting the nuances of such a situational joke, but it always sounded awkward coming out of my mouth. My struggle with this, even decades ago, left me almost incapable of providing an objective viewpoint.

Since I didn’t have anyone to teach me, when I’d hear the cool kids around me say the same thing more than once, I would ask them where they got it. How uncool is that? 

“It’s just something I say,” the cool kids responded, and I’d drop it after that. I didn’t know how to be cool, but I knew the pratfalls to avoid to appearing too uncool, and I knew it was so uncool to try too hard to figure out how or why something is cool. Cool is what it is, as they say. I knew trying to define the indefinable was not only difficult, it was self-defeating, but I’d obsess over trying to figure it out.

As usual, with someone trying to figure out something so nebulous and ever-changing, I overestimated my peers. I was always late to the party, but when I found out that the cool kids learned their favorite sayings from TV, movies, and music lyrics I couldn’t help but be disillusioned by the whole process. I thought the difference between cool kids and me was their ability to organically create sayings. I wanted to be them, so I copied them, and I thought more of them. Learning that their sources were as simple as mine made it feel like all that I wasted a lot of time idolizing them. Then, when I saw one of their favorite sayings appear in a wiener commercial, and I realized I really needed to figure this out because I impulsively thought less of them, but I also realized that it said something about me too, because they were my personal inspiration for what it meant to be cool?

Another huge inspiration for my definition was Danny Zuko, but when I heard him say, “That’s my name, don’t wear it out!” I was so late to the party that I didn’t know that all of the cool kids got this line from that movie, because they saw Grease long before I did. I was also surprised to hear Danny Zuko say it, because I didn’t think he needed it. I thought he was so cool, so charismatic, and so everything that I wanted to be that I couldn’t believe he was saying what we were all saying to try to appear cool. It was the first time in my life that I thought someone was already so cool that they didn’t need to do anything to achieve that lofty title. I thought he was the personification of cool, and he had that it quality that the rest of us would never know. I wasn’t sure if I considered his effort redundant or overkill, but it tainted the character in a manner I couldn’t quite grasp. 

I was an eight-year-old who knew nothing about screenwriters and directors. I didn’t know that their primary job was to manipulate us into thinking their characters were cool, and I didn’t know that casting agencies were hired to hire supporting actors for the expressed purpose of further manipulating the audience into believing that Danny Zuko was cooler than we were. I didn’t even have a firm grasp on the idea that there was an actor named John Travolta playing the role of Danny Zuko who had makeup people to enhance his skin, hair stylists to fashion his hair, and wardrobe personnel to fashion him into a cool character. I knew I wasn’t seeing 90 minutes of a person’s life captured for my enjoyment, but I didn’t know how manufactured and choreographed the images on the screens were. I just thought Danny Zuko was the essence of cool, and when I envisioned what it meant to be cool, he was my prototype. 

I’d love to say I quickly processed the difference between the definition of cool and cooler than cool as effortlessly as John Travolta, and the team behind Grease did, but I didn’t. It took me a long time to grasp. The writers, directors, and supporting actors made it look so easy to be cool that I developed my personal definitions. We all did. We learned what lines to say and when to say them, but when Danny Zuko used that line we were all saying, it exposed the effort he put into it. If a Danny Zuko needed to learn the lines of the zeitgeist necessary to get in the club, in other words, then everyone did. When I later saw other screenwriters and other directors pursue the cool motif for the characters of their movies, it further exposed the effort to me. Danny Zuko and The Fonz were my prototypes for cool guys, and the rest of them were frauds chasing after that characterization.

If we could be cool by following their formula, my mind went to how do I become cooler than cool? If everyone followed that formula, what would they think of me if I refused to follow it? 

The first thing I learned is no one appreciates a ‘dare to be different’ motif when it’s subtle and silent. We prefer the shocking and provocative definitions of that term. Quiet nonconformity doesn’t sell. It doesn’t impress people to the point that they want to be our friends. It confuses them, and they rarely seek to define that confusion. They often just back away. When we want friendships, especially in our youth, we have to offer the kids around us a comfortable place they know. I struggled with all this, until I lost my conviction, and I didn’t try to find it again for years. No one who knew me then, or now, would say I found a “cooler than cool” place, and if you asked them if I was even cool, they’d probably laugh, “I don’t think so.” They would probably also add, “But I can tell you that I’ve never met anyone quite like him.”  

That was kind of it. They knew I was different, but they couldn’t see how those differences were in service of anything, so I didn’t really see a return for my efforts. They just thought I was weird. 

Between ages eight and whatever age led to my personal age of enlightenment, I had no writers feeding me lines, and no directors giving me notes on how to project cool. I realized that I was on my own when it came to trying to figure this big mess out, because I wasn’t good-looking enough to play Danny Zuko, and my supporting cast was either not able or willing to play their roles in such a way that would manipulate our audience into thinking I was cool. The best course of action I found was “To be [my]self, because everyone else was taken.” I knew I’d run the risk of “impersonating my shadow” and I’d eventually become a shadow of my former self, but I already tried to be other people, I tried those masks on, and while I admit that it was a lot more fun than playing myself in this production, it never worked out the way I thought it would.  

Gomers’ Piles

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The Gomer

Most of us have been insulted so often and in so many creative ways that it’s almost impossible and pointless to catalog. Nestled within those insults are a few jewels that are so colorful and intriguing that we cannot wait to use them. I’m not exactly sure why I latched onto this particular slang insult from the 90s, but when Ty said, “You’re such a Gomer!” it sounded so much like an insult I would use that if an insult can ‘fit like a glove’ I could almost feel the leather sucking on my contours.    

“Gomer?” I asked. “What is a Gomer?”  

“If you have to ask,” Ty said. “You’re a Gomer.” That reply wasn’t new to me of course, but it informed me that I was stepping into a kafkatrap in which I was The Trial’s Joseph K., accused of an infraction against cultural awareness, and any effort I put into clarifying the situation only deepened my apparent guilt and reinforced the accusation. It also created the perfect insult loop, because any questions I asked only further authenticated the insult and somehow brought the condition into being.  

Most subjects of this insult loop would recognize the kafkatrap for what it was and drop the line of questioning there, which would allow the accuser to bask in their glory. Yet, I found it so delicious that I thought I might want to test drive it on my own one day, so I wanted to fully understand its power base. “Does it date back to the 60s television show Gomer Pyle?” 

“I don’t watch TV.” It was cool back then, as it is now, to feign ignorance.  

“Well, what does it mean then?”

“I don’t know,” Ty said with impatience. “But it fits.”  

After obsessing over this, I discovered that the term began after the prophet Hosea’s wife, Gomer, acted unfaithfully, and it thus served to symbolize God’s relationship with unfaithful Israel, but I was pretty sure that didn’t form the basis of Ty’s insult. I was also sure Ty wasn’t referring to the emergency room jargon from a book called House of God by Samuel Shem that referred to them shouting, “Get Out of My Emergency Room,” to annoying patients who repetitively took beds that should’ve been reserved for more deserving patients. No, I decided, the term was derived from the TV show Gomer Pyle, a character played by Jim Nabors, as a clumsy, unsophisticated fella who was folksy and awkward.

Even though the truth was somewhat anti-climactic, as I expected a more sophisticated and nuanced answer, I still enjoyed the sound of the insult “Gomer”. I don’t know if it was the syllabic nature of the word or the enunciation, but “You’re such a Gomer!” just felt like such an airtight insult that I couldn’t wait to use it on the unsuspecting. It just seemed so me. To my memory, I never got around to it. I know it’s not too late, but I forgot to use it back when it had the flamboyant style and battlefield visibility of prominent feather plumes (AKA panache), and it’s one of the great regrets of my life.

Dads

We all enjoy hearing about the father of an extremely successful person remaining stubbornly unimpressed by their son’s success. The rest of the world cannot believe how talented this man is, but his dad, the man he probably strove to impress more than anyone else in the world is, “Meh.” It’s your child, the little fella you could hold in one hand while you changed his diaper with the other, all growed up ruling Hollywood, and you’re, “Meh.” It’s funny and sad at the same time. 

After reaching the pinnacle of success in Hollywood, Jerry Lewis decided he wanted to share the wealth with his father. Lewis came up with what he considered the perfect way of doing it. He approached members of the General Motors corporation and asked them to build his dad the finest automobile they could possibly build. When the father, Danny Levitch, was presented with this gift, he said, “What you couldn’t get me a convertible?” That’s so cynical it’s funny, right? It’s Seinfeld funny. We can’t decide if it’s so funny it’s sad, or if it’s so sad it’s funny, but it strikes us as sounding so true that it is funny … and a little sad.   

This story provides a small window into Jerry Lewis’s relationship with his dad. Due to the comedic nature of it, we might consider it a highlight, but what happened in the days in between? What happened to Jerry Lewis when he was too young to understand it all, then old enough to know that he was being raised in a loveless home? The car story provides a laugh, but what happened on those boring Thursdays and during the Holidays in that home Jerry Lewis grew up in? According to Lewis, he was never close to either of his parents.

Danny Levitch was a failed vaudeville actor who may have been jealous of all of Jerry’s success, and he may have considered the car an example of Jerry Lewis rubbing his nose in his success. Hard to know what happened in the inner sanctum of the family dynamics, but Jerry and his parents never reconciled, and Jerry was later known to be a distant father to his own kids, as all six of them had a strained relationship with him throughout his life. He even went so far as to cut them all out of his will before he died. 

I don’t know if Mr. Levitch was a “tough love” proponent, who was constantly pushing Jerry harder, because he thought praise weakens, or if he did what he did to try to keep his wildly successful son grounded, but at some point he probably should’ve closed the loop. These loops are facades we create to force our children through for their betterment. Some parents create beautiful! and wonderful! facades of too much praise, because they believe it strengthens their child’s self-confidence, their morale and resolve, and some parents do the opposite to keep their kids grounded and to prepare them for the perseverance required for the rough world that awaits.  

My dad was an opposite. Whenever we accomplished what we accomplished, he spotted the possible fly in the ointment that no one considers while in the glow of accomplishment. He often talked about how luck always plays something of a role, and the lucky should always prepare for the times when they aren’t so lucky. “It’s great advice dad, but how about we take a moment to bask?”  

Whenever we saw an individual driving a high-priced vehicle, my dad would say, “We don’t know how much he owes.” When everyone else was buttering our bottom, our dad was warning us about the other foot landing a solid blow to the keister. It was what he considered “the real” side, which just happened to be the critical, cynical side. He did this throughout our maturation and into adulthood. The difference between my dad and Mr. Levitch, and all those negative Nancies who focus far too much on the dark side of life, is that he eventually closed the loop.

“I’m so proud of you and your brother,” he said one day, almost out of the blue. If someone threw out a hypothetical scenario, beforehand, in which my dad offered me unqualified praise without conditions, I would’ve said, “First of all, it will never happen, but if it did, it probably wouldn’t mean a lot to me.” Much to my surprise, it turned out to be one of the more meaningful moments of my life. I still remember the intersection we were approaching when he said it, and it’s been fifteen years since that happened.  

Did Mr. Levitch build a facade for his son by withholding praise, love and forgiveness for the expressed purpose of making his son a hard man who is invulnerable to insults and criticism? And did he maintain that facade, even on his deathbed? We don’t know, but we know Jerry Lewis did by cutting his children out of his will. While I’ve never been on a deathbed, I have to imagine that would be a pretty good time to let bygones be bygones and let our guard down to express love, pride, and forgiveness. It’s also an excellent time to close all the loops we’ve created for their own good, and … it’s actually hilarious when we don’t. Except to those who want to hear their loved one say one kind thing to them before they go to the great beyond. I didn’t have to go through this, because my dad eventually closed that loop, but if he didn’t, I can only imagine that all of the holes in my soul would’ve coalesced into one big, hilarious black hole. 

Mary

“You don’t like Mary?” I ask. “I can understand not liking Trisha and Natalie, they’re 50% people; 50% of us like them and 50% don’t, but Mary? How can you dislike Mary?” Mary has her flaws of course, and we all become qualified professionals when it comes to spotting other people’s flaws, but with Mary, we really need to dig deep to find them. The next question we will ask ourselves, soon after we find ourselves in the depths of Mary’s caves and caverns, is why am I here again? That’s right, we started this whole expedition because there was something about Mary that exposed something we didn’t like about ourselves.  

Funny is a Funny Thing

I knew a life-of-the-party type who could just dominate a room when he was “on stage” at various get-togethers and various shindigs, but he couldn’t even make you smile one-on-one. I knew “a quiet guy” who could drop you with a perfect comeback, a great one-liner, and an incredible story. Call him out at a party, and he clams up. He said things in those group settings, but they were all self-conscious. “I get nervous,” he’d say. He basically experienced stage fright in front of seven or eight people, even when they were just family members. I met a guy who was a hilarious writer, but in person he could never quite pound a joke home. He was one of those joke tellers who was always editing, and by the time he got to the punchline, we were basically exhausted, and we laughed sympathetically. As an amateur student of psychology as it pertains to humor, I’ve never met anyone who was funny in person, on stage, and on the page.

Your Fly is Down 

As a failed student of comedy, I cannot abide by the “Your fly is down!” joke. One character in the series Stick made a funny, insightful comment about how wolves must be embarrassed to see what we’ve done to manipulate their species into yorkies, pomeranians, and shih tzus. The other character says, “Your fly is down.” This is now so common that it’s a trope in most comedic productions, and I don’t understand how it became something we consider a pointed, substantive, or even clever comeback?  

If someone asked me my least favorite joke, I probably couldn’t come up with it on the spot, but if someone else said, “What about the ‘Your fly is down’ joke?” 

“That’s it!” I’d say. It’s one of those jokes that only works in-person. In a situation comedy, written in, presumably, a writer’s room, how does this get a thumbs up from a head writer? How does the head writer not say, “We can do better than that, c’mon guys. That’s a Friends joke. Surely, we can do better than recycling a Friends joke.” If I were writing this exchange, I would have the butt of this fly joke say, “Okay thanks,” as he zips his zipper up, “but that doesn’t take away from my observation.” The ‘Fly down’ rebuttal is somehow viewed as one character putting another in their place, and it must be viewed as effective in some quarters, because so many writers write it in as dialogue. Personally, I’d like to have a word with the world to have them help me finally put this insipid “Your fly is down” joke out of its misery. 

Tictacs de un Reloj 

The ticks of the clock in Mr. Harrington’s Spanish II class were so painfully slow that I still remember looking up at that clock with clenched teeth. When the second hand descended from one to six, that clocked performed its functions as we’d expect. When it ascended from six to twelve, the most important part, it struggled. It bounced a little, as if the mechanisms behind its ascent were lacking power. Even though I had nothing better to do at the time, I thought nothing was better than anything we did in that classroom.

As we age and look back at our schooling years, most of us regret not paying more attention in school. I’m as guilty of that as anyone else, but after crossing that bridge o’ regret, I now recognize that I would be just as bored in Mr. Harrington’s class today as I was as at sixteen-years-old. I now have corporate boardroom meetings to remind me how slow a clock can tock. 

Prison guards often say that after spending years in their profession, they often begin to feel held captive as much as the prisoners. Mr. Harrington was our warder, as he appeared to loathe being in the class as much as we did. He often joked about how many hours he was away from his retirement package, and he obnoxiously calculated that over the course of two years of in-class hours. 

Now that I’m old and happy, time ticks away so quickly that the only thing that makes me a little unhappy is watching how efficient our clocks are now. Yet, if I were on my death bed watching those clicks of the clock bounce by far too quickly, and an entity appeared offering me six more months of life, I would accept it of course, until he offered me the requisite “catch” of such offerings. “The catch is you have to go back in time and attend Mr. Harrington’s class for one hour of each day you’re being offered.” I would still eventually accept his offer, because life is life, and I have to imagine I would recognize its value in that moment, but I might ask the entity to explain the glory of the unknown to me to weigh it against my personal definition of earthly hell.   

Permission! Permission

“It’s pointless to give advice to young ‘un’s,” old people often say about the young. “They don’t listen.” True, but we didn’t listen either. We heard them, but everything they said went in one ear and out the other. Before it went out the other, however, it did hit a way station. We were teenagers, we had our first job, and we were cashing our own paychecks, so of course we weren’t listening.

I’m not going to say, “I never got nothing,” (triple negative) but everything I got, before those paychecks, came with a whole lot of begging, pleading and badgering. I’m not still complaining about that but illustrating that everything “I got” came with the most evil word in the teenage lexicon: Permission. 

Those first, sweat-drenched paychecks taught me about something I only heard about when I was a teen, purchasing power. Purchasing something without permission was the greatest high I received to that point in my life, a high no drug or alcohol could duplicate. To me, it was better than a girl’s smile. And the “Theys” in my life tried to coach me into being more responsible with my money. It didn’t happen right away, as the dizzying feelings of euphoria lasted long after I went broke displaying that power. It took a number of paychecks and repetitive feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, and feelings of utter powerlessness before I tried to find that way station again and the advice therein to try to put it back in the other ear. If that young ‘un you’re trying to advise is anything like I was, give them that advice and realize that “they won’t listen,” until they make their own mistakes so often that they try to remember what we said.  

The Relative Quality of Relative Quality

“That’s such an awful book (album or movie),” they say about the works with which I develop a relationship. “I can’t believe you liked it.” Tommyknockers is often deemed one of the worst books Stephen King ever wrote. The ending was so anticlimactic that I think it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, but there were moments, in the buildup, when Tommyknockers captivated mein a way few books ever have. Rock critics and KISS fans say that their Music from The Elder album was not only KISS’s worst album, but it might be one of the worst rock albums ever made. I’ll never know the truth, because my connection to that album is so strong I’ll never be able to analyze it objectively. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the greatest divide between my friends and members of family and I arrived with a production called The Blair Witch Project. I’ve never watched the movie again, after seeing it at midnight on the night (morning?) of its release, but that movie reached me on a level no other movie has. “Isn’t that the whole point,” we ask critics and fans. To paraphrase Picasso, “The writers’ job is to create something and then give it away.” When they create it, it’s a nutshell of their passion, and they hope to give that passion away to us. Those of us who love these artistic creations cannot answer questions of quality in a dispassionate manner, because the authors of these creations reached us in a way that led us to fall in love with them in a manner similar to teenage, puppy love that is so irrational that it cannot be factually supported or refuted.  

Fix-It Man!

Some of us are perpetually caught between our inability to fix our things and not wanting to spend the money to have another fix them. It’s always kind of embarrassing to admit we were not born with the ability, or more importantly the patience, to fix things. I make a mistake, and it becomes clear to me that I’m a total screw up who can’t do things. Other people make the same mistakes, and they simply start over from scratch and fix it correctly. My inferiority complex leads me to panic when I don’t do things perfectly. 

The Conditional Secret

Just out of curiosity, I read Secrets to a Happy Marriage articles. I’m not going to write that they’re totally useless, but they contain advice that falls under the term The Forer Effect. The Forer Effect is most often witnessed in horoscopes, in which their writers apply descriptions, advice, et al. that could apply to everyone. Personally, I think the best advice I’ve ever heard is that relationships between adults are not unconditional. My guess is that most marriages end because the participants mistakenly believe that their marriage should be unconditional, and one or more of the spouses fail to express what their conditions are. Unconditional love should be reserved for the parent/child relationship. As fortune seekers often say, in their quest for treasure, more adventure and glory is found in the chase than in actually securing the pot of gold. If we want to make an individual, who happens to be our spouse, happy, we should know that there are super-secret elements to a happy marriage to be found every day. If you’re a great spouse who wants to have a happy marriage, you’ll seek those super-secrets and capitalize on them when they make their appearance, but there will probably be more glory found in the chase.  

Hiding in Hyde

In the movie Entourage, based on a TV series of the same name, the main character secures the rights to a movie called Hyde. The main character (of Entourage) informs his agent that for him to participate in Hyde, he wants to direct it. The agent begrudgingly concedes, and to make a long, boring story short, Hyde turns out to be: “Brilliant!” of course. If you watched the TV series, you know the main character is a leading man who has leading man, movie star good looks, and he gets everything he wants in life. No one, agents, directors, friends, family, or women, dare say no to the man. He’s the top of the list, king of the hill, and an a number one of the charmed life demographic. 

Those of us on the outside-looking-in know such people exist. We’ve met them, viewed them from afar, and we’ve even developed relationships with some of them. Some of them are athletically gifted, intellectually superior, and/or charismatic types who light up every room they enter, but in my experience, they’re almost never creative types.

The typical creative type is not born with the gifts of the charmed. Their creatively is honed through effort, failure, and the struggle to succeed. Failure is often the key, because the typical creative type starts out awful, laughably awful, and some of their beta readers are not afraid to laugh. The typical creative type perseveres, not because they want to prove their detractors wrong, but because it’s who they are, or who they’ve become.  

Those of us on the outside looking in must grapple with the idea that we’re jealous of “IT!” guys, because we are. Who wouldn’t want to live one day of their lives? If we can step beyond that argument and have a rational discussion, I don’t see how anyone can lead such a charmed life and be creative. We all know there are exceptions to every rule, but it just seems implausible that this charmed individual can create something “Brilliant!” in his directorial debut. (It should be noted that the Vincent Chase character did not write the screenplay for Hyde, but there are so many ways in which a director creatively shapes a script that requires creativity.) 

If Entourage: The Movie wanted to have a deep, psychological hook, it should’ve carried a central message that this main character could have it all, in all of the believable ways he did, but he could not achieve creative brilliance too. He’s never had to struggle to develop such skills, and he’s never failed to the degree that he scorched the earth of his initial plans, started over, and learned from all that humiliation and embarrassment to create something “Brilliant!” It should’ve carried the message that something “Brilliant!” is often created in the ashes of all that. 

The main character, as depicted throughout the eight seasons of the Entourage series, never had much of a struggle. The fictional film in the movie, Hyde, should’ve bombed critically and commercially, as a superficial film of no substance. It didn’t, of course, as the star proved his detractors wrong, which in effect made the film Entourage: The Movie, a superficial film of no substance.