The Unwanted Heritage

September 25, 2023February 11, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“How many grown men in the audience tonight grew up wanting to be their dad? If TV is anywhere close to the truth, previous generations revered their fathers. They didn’t call them their dad, they called them father. They did everything they could to impress their father. My dad often talked about how much he respected his father, and how the image he had of his father shaped his maturation. Those days are gone. They just are. We now actively work to disappoint our fathers by becoming artists, influencers on YouTube, writers and standup comedians. We don’t even mind disappointing our whole family now. Is that weird? I don’t know one guy, in his 20’s or early 30’s, who wanted to be anything like their dear old dad when they grew up. Our goal was to be everything but. I’m not just talking money, success, or anything like that. I’m talking about everything.

“Have we changed this dynamic, or did our dads? The dads on those old fifties and sixties shows never had a hair out of place, and they wore a suit and tie at all times, even to dinner. It’s TV, idyllic images, all that. I got it, but if you talk to people from my dad’s generation, you’ll hear them talk about how different things were in their day. We all make fun of such talk now, but things were so different back then. They respected the people, places, and things around them. They respected personal property. I had no idea why our neighbor, Sam, kept yelling at me for stepping his grass. It’s grass, why do you care? They wore suits to work, to church, on airplanes, and at restaurants.

My dad, I’m not sure if he owned a pair of underwear that didn’t have at least one stain. I’m pretty sure he didn’t buy them that way. He just missed opportunities so often that he didn’t have one 100% clean pair of underwear in his wardrobe. I also think he committed every violation of decorum he could think up on an ear of corn. He’d breathe through his nose while eating it, he had to, because he’d suffocate if he didn’t. There were a couple of occasions when our eyes met, while he was doing it. It was so uncomfortable. “Take it easy on that thing Dad,” I said. “It’s not trying to get away.” Why would I strive to be that man?

“Then there were the farts. The opportunity to hear my dad fart was one of the primary reasons I had friends. They didn’t get in line to hear them, but once he started in, they didn’t want to leave our house. “This is funnier than anything on TV,” they agreed.

“How many times can you hear a fart and still think it’s funny?” I asked them. It was an endless source of amusement to them, and my dad loved them as much as they did. He built material around his gastric releases. “I just blew her a kiss,” was his favorite. He said that once, when he accidentally let a loud one go on some innocent, unsuspecting woman in a grocery store, and my friend was laughing so hard he couldn’t walk right for minutes.

“Dad also learned what he considered an award-winning phrase, following any expulsion of gas from his intestines, “Better to let it out and bear the shame than hold it in and bear the pain.” It rhymed, so Dad thought he was doing Robert Frost or Shakespeare. It was as close as my dad ever came to citing poetry. I don’t know who came up with that phrase, but I’d have fantasies of doing vile, disgusting things to them, and I am not a violent man. I don’t view violence as a way of dealing with confrontation, but after decades of hearing that phrase, I developed some empathy for those in a desperate search to find something to end their pain. I’ve heard some talk about getting in a time machine to kill Hitler to save humanity from what he inflicted upon so many in the world at the time. I’ve thought the same about the originator of this phrase. Whenever my dad would say it, my friends would just devolve to gales of laughter, and those vile, disgusting thoughts of violence seemed like the only solution to me.

“When they’d turn to me with their laughter, I basically said, “I find him absolutely vile.” Yeah, I was the priggish old woman to my dad’s Rodney Dangerfield character in a movie. If you’ve ever seen one of those old movies, a rich, snobby old woman would say, “I find you utterly repulsive,” with her nose up in the air. Rodney would say, “It’s a party babe, loosen up.” To which the woman would punctuate her disgust with some final sound of revulsion. My dad was the Dangerfield character who stuck his thumb up the arse of the institution, and I was his institution.

“I heard so many farts by the time I hit my teens that I could no longer find humor in the fart as a teenage boy. Does that strike you as profound, because I think about all the great jokes I missed out on, because I was so tired of the fart joke.

There was one time when our teacher, a prim and proper nun, let one go in church, and it was loud, and it was during the service. That’s funny now, right? To 99.9% of the pre-teen, male demographic that’s not just funny, it’s once-in-a-lifetime, you-had-to-be-there hilarious. Church is one of those places where every pre-teen gets the giggles over the dumbest stuff, but a nun farting in church might qualify as the most shockingly hilarious event in a pre-teen boy’s life, and to the 99.9% contingent, it is. There is a .1% of grade school-era boys who have heard so many farts in life, so many fart jokes, and so much fart laughter that our reservoir of fart laughter is so dried up that we can’t even smile at a prim and proper nun farting in church. We know each other too, we .1 percenters. We spot one another, down the pew, and we nod one of those closed-eye nods, amidst all the other students gasping for air. It’s the we-have-the-same-dads nod. We’re members of this very exclusive club we wanted no part in, so we smile and force laughter, all the while knowing that our flatulating fathers deprived us of our golden era of the fart joke.

***

“My mom had her quirks too, and she had her own unusual sayings and traditions. The traditions she learned and passed down had nothing to do with farts, or anything as revolting as my dad’s. She was our version of a normal person, and we needed her dose of normalcy to combat everything being thrown at us. She used to read to us every night, she tucked us in, and gave us one of her sweet, motherly kisses before heading to the door. Then, right after she told us how much she loved us, and before she closed the door she’d say, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

“I didn’t even know what bedbugs were back then. Are there really tiny, little bugs crawling all over my bed and my body? Is this common, and what do we have to do to prevent them from biting me? She didn’t intend to introduce this horrific thought into our already creative minds. She thought this familiar, little rhyme conveyed sentiment. I love you, and have a good night’s sleep. Oh, and don’t let the bedbugs bite. This was my mom’s idea of punctuating love. She did it so often that by the time I started thinking about what it was she was saying, it was already an accepted part of our parting ritual at the end of a night. I also think she just liked the phrase, because it rhymes, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

“What you may not know, because I didn’t, is that fossils and early writings discovered that bedbugs date back to ancient Egypt and Rome and industrialization and colonization brought them here. So, when ancient Egyptians issued such warnings, they meant it. The mattresses they slept on were made of straw and feathers, and they were held up on a series of latticework ropes. The origin of the phrase sleep tight was probably made in reference to the parents warning their children to tighten their ropes to prevent sagging. Bedbugs cannot jump or fly, but they probably didn’t know that. Another theory speculates that sleep tight referred to keeping pajamas tightly wound to prevent bedbugs from getting in, but all these theories involve speculation over the origin of the phrase. The point though is that it’s possible that some form of this phrase could be hundreds to thousands of years old.

“If we took a step back to realize what we’re saying about bedbugs, before we close the door to immerse our kids in total darkness, where their unusually creative minds spin just about everything we say into some form of horror that causes them insomnia and nightmares, we might want to give some thought to ending the tradition that suggests these nasty, little germ-ridden insects are probably going to bite us unless … unless they somehow don’t let them. That’s a question I never asked “How do I go about not letting them?” Seriously? “Are there proactive, preventative measures I should employ here, and why are you requiring me to do this alone?” Isn’t this basically what we’re saying when we say, good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite? We’re saying that we’ve found proactive, preventative measures pointless, and you’re kind of on your own here. Now, good night, and don’t let them bite. Slam! We may have found the answer for why Joey always sleeps with his cute little Mattel swords and shields, he’s preparing for battle.

“Traditions are what they are, thoughtless traditions,” Barry said, “but they are also an inner node of our family tree that we consciously, and subconsciously, use to connect us to our mothers, our grandmothers, and their definition of love. There’s also that added ingredient, in some weird and inexplicable way, that we see it as a definition of quality parenting. We don’t think about it. We just do it. It’s a set of parental instructions or system of rules written into our code and our peculiar programming language. It’s as much a part of our fabric as familial tales of our cranky old uncle swearing every time he has to stand up, the way our grandpa makes noises when he sits, and playing cars with our cousins on kitchen tile in our pajamas.

***

“These generations-old, odd traditions that influence and enhance who we are surfaced when I picked my kid up from school. Some kids, somewhere on the playground, began singing the borderline horrific song Ring around the Rosie. Everyone knows this singalong song, right? Why do we all know it, and who taught these kids this tradition? We did. Who taught us? We just sort of pick it up from somewhere, and no one remembers where. It’s a tradition that was, is, and probably will always be. I smiled when I heard them sing it. Ring around the Rosie, sing it with me now, pocket full of posies, ashes ashes, we all fall down.

“Apparently, there are numerous versions of this song sung around the world, and some of you might know a different one, but that’s the one we sang in my pocket of the world. For as many versions as there are, there are nearly as many interpretations of the lyrics. As kids we sang it just to sing something while we did something else, but some folklorists suggest the lyrics ‘ring around the rosie’ might have developed as a result of kids teasing other kids when they spotted a red owie on their arm. Any owie, I assume, was subject to ridicule, and if you know a kid, you know they can get bruises, bumps, and red spots walking through an aisle at Walgreen’s. “Where did you get that bruise on your arm? Joey” “I don’t know,” and they don’t. They really don’t. It’s as much a mystery to them as it is to you.

“When one of these 1665-era kids of London spotted an owie on one of their friends arm, they sang Ring Around the Rosie to tease him that he might want to consider the idea that he might have …. the plague. The plague! Some call it The Great Plague of London, others called it Black Death, and historical chroniclers called it last major epidemic of The Bubonic Plague in England. Some trace the origin of this little song to this Bubonic Plague that slaughtered over 100,000 Londoners at the time, and the total population of London, at the time, was around 460,000. So, it killed nearly one in four Londoners.

“Ring around the Rosie! Yeah, we saw your little owie, Joey, and we’re pretty sure that means we’re going to be throwing your body in one of the local burning, plague pits soon.

So many people were dying from the plague that they couldn’t keep up. If you’re from an area of the country that can be affected by wintry conditions, you know that there are times when police won’t respond to minor car accidents. They tell you to exchange information, and drive on. This is what was happening in 1665-England. If a loved one dies, just wait till nightfall and give them to a corpse carrier, who would stroll through the night with his agricultural cart, yelling out, “Bring out your dead!” Fans of Monty Python’s 1975 movie Holy Grail know this scene well. When his cart was full, the corpse carrier would take his load to a plague pit to burn and bury the corpses. 1665 England didn’t bother with funerals, ceremonies, caskets, or graves. There were just too many corpses in too short a time. So, unless you had the money to get a proper service, they threw your corpses in a plague pit, and we can only guess that little Joey probably saw a few of his cousins, aunts, and friends thrown onto the corpse carrier’s cart or into the pit. We all use various mechanisms to deal with the horror happening around us, and kids are more sensitive, thus more brutal, in trying to prevent the horror from getting inside their head, so they developed this cute, little rhyme to suggest that their friends, or that kid who sits two seats up and to the right in class, is headed for the burning corpse pit soon. Isn’t that just the cutest thing? What do you say we teach our kids to sing that for the next three hundred, plus years?

“Some folklorists suggest that the ‘pocket full of posies’ verse was used to mock those kids whose parents believed that if their Joey carried flowers in his pocket, it was a homeopathic remedy to prevent the onset of the plague. So, this portion of the song basically says, “Even though you had a pocket full of posies, you still caught the plague, Joey, SUCKER!”

The conclusion of the song might be the most horrific, as the “Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down” lyrics suggest that Joey’s tormentors realized that they were acknowledging that they were going to get it too, we all will, and we’re all going to die en masse. One would think that in the age of COVID, we should consider ending the tradition that involves a sing-a-long about catching plagues, airborne or otherwise, that could slaughter hundreds of thousands.

“I’ve heard that the folklore surrounding these interpretations of the lyrics might not be true, but even the most obnoxious, cellphone-checking sleuths will have to admit that there’s enough speculation among folklorists who’ve examined the lyrics of the song that we should probably stop teaching it as a sweet, pleasant “singalong” rhyming song our kids can sing on a playground. I mean, how can anyone spin “Ashes ashes we all fall down?” as anything other than a relatively disturbing dystopic image? A creative, young mind might even spin the lyrics as a warning for all participants to prepare for a nuclear winter?

***

“Almost everyone here tonight is a complex, fully formed adult who has lived through several different, complicated eras of life, met thousands of different people, and read at least a few books,” Barry said. “Yet, we don’t know what we’re doing anymore than our parents did when it comes to parenting, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do about it. I’m sure some of you are more confident in your parenting skills, have a master plan, or whatever, but most of us are just making it up as we go along.

Have you ever had another parent look to you as a model of good parenting? It’s unnerving. You’re looking to me for some sort of guide for good parenting? What kind of dysfunctional and confused parent must you be to look to me? Good God man, I’m a mess. My model for everything I do, as a parent, is my dad, and he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. I mean, look how I turned out. I’m this big ball of the contradictions, hypocrisies, and family traditions that involve dystopic songs and nighttime warnings of bug infestations that my parents taught me. The greatest thing my dad ever taught me was independence, and there are a vast number of merits to teaching your children how to solve their own problems, play alone, and to prepare them for the reality that they’re going to spend most of their time alone, but the constant refrain of my dad’s parenting was, “You’re on your own kid.” I learned most of the strengths and weaknesses of total independence at 11. “Don’t get in trouble, keep your grades up, and don’t touch my stuff.”

“One interesting byproduct fell out of my dad’s relatively dysfunctional definition of parenting, and that was that I learned that he didn’t care about me near as much as I thought he did. He didn’t attend my sporting events, so he wasn’t cheering me on from the stands, but he wasn’t booing either. This led me to the notion that no one’s cheering us on from the proverbial stands either. We’re on your own here. They might applaud an accomplishment of ours in the moment, but they really don’t care near as much as we think. But, and here’s the element of life it took me decades to fully comprehend, no one cares as much as you think about our failures either. It’s one thing to say people don’t care much about our success. That’s yours to love, cherish, and celebrate, but when we fail, we’re sure that everyone from our parents to that guy in the checkout line at The Supersaver knows too. The truth is, they’re not paying near as much attention as we think. This is not only a bizarre way of thinking, it’s wrong, right?

The fact that people don’t pay as much attention as we think, or fear, is actually documented in various psychological studies. They’ve performed tests that involved a student walking in front of a huge college classroom to interrupt a professor and ask them a question. That student, in question, was wearing one of the loudest T-shirts he could find. The result, 10% of the people noticed that shirt. When a separate but similar test was done with a student wearing the finest suit known to man interrupting a class to ask the professor a question, 10% noticed that suit. We’re not paying as much attention as we think, and they aren’t either.

Some might find it depressing to learn that we’re all alone in the world, but if you turn that study around, you might find that it frees you up to try things we otherwise wouldn’t if we thought anyone was paying attention. If you latch onto the idea that no one’s near as much attention to what you do, who you wear, or those silly jokes you tell, then just do what you do with the knowledge that no one’s really paying any attention.

I Love to Drink!

September 20, 2023November 23, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

“Do you love to drink?” Barry told a Pocatello, Idaho audience. “Of course you do. Everyone does. We’re not talking about Kool aid, or anything that hydrates you either. We’re talking alkie hall, girls and boys. The National Food and Nutrition Board recommends that we drink eight glasses of alcohol a day, and I think that’s a bit excessive, but I … what? Oh, they were talking about water, eight glasses of water a day. Water. Thank you for the correction. “Eight glasses a day,” they say. “It cures what ails you.” All that. We know it, we’ve heard it, we got it. We should drink more water, we know we should, but it’s just so blah.

Now, I have had some incredible, absolutely unforgettable glasses of water, and they came out of the tap. How could a glass of tap water be so incredible that I’m still talking about twenty years later? You ever drink alcohol to excess? You ever drink so much the night before that that morning glass of water teaches you what euphoria means? You ever dehydrate your body so thoroughly that when you finally drink that glass of water, it’s … it arouses you a little? I’ve put those eight glasses down in the space of about ten minutes before, but that first glass? That first glass makes you happy you survived the night before. It’s like a reward for damaging your body. If you do it right, you can feel that first glass soothing your throat, hydrating and healing whatever ball of hell we threw into it the night before. We can feel it circumnavigating the stomach putting a cool coat on all the wounds our violent, projectile vomiting caused. Do you love to drink? Let me hear you knock one back. Let me hear that after-the-drink sigh.

“Very few people applaud that line wildly, especially on a date. We might love to drink, but we don’t love telling people that, especially on a first date. It’s not a good look. ‘You like what you’re hearing here? I’m pretty charming, right? Enjoy it while you can, because in about a half an hour, I’m going to have trouble remembering your name, Jennniferr?’

“I’m not an alcoholic anymore, but I used to be (pause here) I used to be (add menacing soft chuckle that lasts a little too long). I am probably going to hit on some other girl on our way out, just so you’re prepared, and let’s see here, oh, oh and I almost forgot I’ll probably fall on someone on the way out too. I do that silly stuff like that all the time. I just fell on someone last weekend. I almost forgot about that. Yeah, he was on a date with a certain someone he considered special, and he threatened to have me prosecuted, because he said (stifle laughter here) he said that he thought I fell on him on purpose.” Barry looked over both shoulders and leaned in to whisper to the audience, “And, just between you and me, I kind of did. That’s right, I picked out some fella who appeared to be having a very pleasant date with a polite, young woman, and I fell on him for no reason. Just to see what he’d do. It’s not funny, I know, but I wanted to hear this little feller scream a muffled scream under my shoulder as I writhed around like a turtle on its back trying to regain its footing.” Barry reenacted the effort of a turtle with its arms flailing. “I was almost blackout drunk, so that might be why I did it, but I was also so bored with everyone filing out of the comedy club single-file, like fourth graders. I wanted to see how it would affect his date’s impressions of him when she heard him scream his muffled scream. So, just to let you know, I probably have a trial date in my near future, but they got nothing on me. It was an … accident,” Barry said to the audience with an exaggerate wink.

“That was me. I was what you would call a happy, fun drunk when I was about … your age,” Barry said, picking a random member of the audience, “but I hate the ‘I was so drunk the other night, that I …’ tales now. Are you with me here? I loved them when I was your age. Hell, I was probably telling them most of the them, because I was a sloppy, pathetic drunk, but I had a big old smile on my face when I was falling all over your tables, and I was usually the only one laughing when all your drinks crashed around me. Why were people so disgusted with me, because sloppy drunks aren’t funny in the present tense. They’re kind of sad and pathetic in the present. I didn’t care about any of that at the time. I was having a blast, and I was feeling good. He knows what I’m talking about. High five? Air high five? No? First date? Ok, well, he knows alcohol makes us feel better, even if he doesn’t want to shout loud and proud … stupid, yeah, but better. We love to hear about alcohol stories from the past, because we love to hear about stupid people doing stupid things … if it’s from the past. Some of us are old and boring now, because we’ve learned our lessons, but our stories, the one’s we try to frame in a serious way to teach lessons, they’re knee-slapping-hilarious. If we’ve learned our lesson, it sort of gives us all a pass to laugh, because the guy telling the story is all clean and sober now. What if I told you I’m still quite the drunk? What if I told you I’m tanked right now, as a matter of fact, and I’m working on my tolerance level, so I can drink you under the table? Not funny?

“How did that start? How did that almost universal ‘drink you under the table’ challenge catch on?” Barry asked the audience. “I think the modern incarnation in the United States tradition started in the Old West. We romanticize the Old West now, but if you’ve ever studied it to any degree, one word comes to mind: boring. Boring and grueling. The primary jobs in the Old West were either farming or mining. You could also be a blacksmith, a lawman, a teacher, a prostitute, or a bar owner or banker. All of those jobs, except maybe the teacher, involved consuming massive amounts of alcohol either because it was part of your job, or because it was so boring or grueling that you needed alcohol at the end of the day just to convince yourself that you should go back to your miserable existence tomorrow. They didn’t have the internet, TV, or even books. Books, their sole source of entertainment, were so scarce that most families had the book. The book was called the family book, and everyone had to share the family book, or read it aloud, and they usually had enormous families so that the children could help out on the farm. The book was often some compilation of Shakespeare’s greatest plays or The Bible. They also had little in the way of transportation. If you were wealthy enough to own a horse, you were usually limited to traveling to and from town, and that could take hours depending on your location. So, when the twelve hour day of farming was over, and you couldn’t travel, and you couldn’t read the book, because one of your thirteen brothers or sisters had it, you drank and played cards. And anyone who has played cards, a serious game of cards, knows the rule. You can’t just play cards for an hour or so, especially if you’re lucky enough to win a couple hands. It’s an insult to everyone at the table. You have to give the other guys a chance to win their money back, and that can take hours, five to six hours. So, what do you do in those five to six hours, you drink, and if you drink enough for long enough, even that can get boring, and when your sole source of entertainment gets boring, what do you do? Anyone? Anyone? Drinking games and contests. And contests. That’s right. The act of consuming more alcohol defines your character, and the starting gun for these contests is, “I can put your ass under the table.”

“I was really clicking with this woman in that manner that men and women sometimes click. We all know that moment when a conversation with the opposite sex clicks just past harmonious enjoyment to hormonal. Nothing we say is half as intelligent or as funny as we think it is when this happens, but we’re both in the zone. While she and I were in this meticulously balanced aphrodisiacal, nearly anatomical, part of the conversation, she drops it on me, ‘I might be a ninety-pound woman, but I can put your ass under the table.’ Why? Where the hell did that come from? I should’ve given her a: ‘I don’t give a crap. I’m sure that you can drink more alcohol than me, and I don’t give a crap.’ We can’t say that though, because we’ve trained one another to accept that these moments define our character, and we can’t give up the dream that we’re the Clint Eastwood, John Wayne character in this production. We’re not the supporting actors who revere the main character. We’re the confident, she-doesn’t-know-who-she’s-messing-with Clint Eastwood character.

“I was tempted to play this stupid game with more than just this one woman. I’d have to check my ledger, but I’m pretty sure women have challenged me as often, if not more than men. They think that just because I’m staggering and slurring my words after three beers, they can take me, and you know what they’re right. I have always had the tolerance of a sixteen-year-old girl who hasn’t tried alcohol before. No matter how often I drank, it never translated to a greater tolerance. If a guy challenges me to a drinking contest, I say no thank you fine gentleman. That’s usually not enough, because I’ve usually done something to make this guy challenge me. It’s so stupid. For some reason, they need you in a supine position with unconditional surrender in your heart. You’re going to put me under the table, you’re superior, and … and what else you want? You’re the better man, how about that? Is that enough? Whatever I have to say to avoid drinking whatever the hell a man challenges me to drink, I’m going to say. I truly don’t care what some guy, I’m never going to see again, thinks of my drinking tolerance. It’s different when a woman challenges you though, it’s tough. Even if you’re not attracted to the woman, it’s tough. It’s tough, in general, for any guy to say no to a woman.

“And then there’s Bob. Bob. I got along with Bob. He was a nice guy, deferential, and all that. Bob showed us all the roadmap to becoming Clint Eastwood. It involved drinking massive amounts of alcohol, massive, my-brain-is-probably-half-gone amounts of alcohol to increase the tolerance level. Everyone knew a Bob, back in the day. The Bob I knew was the man when it came to drinking. Someone said he put beer in his Cheerios. Did anyone ever actually do this? I can’t count how many times I heard that such and such was such an alcoholic that he put beer in his Cheerios. I don’t know if anyone ever did this, or if Bob did it, but Bob was our king of the hill, top of the heap, an ‘A’ number one drinker. It didn’t matter what the drink was, Bob could put you under the table. When we spoke of Bob, we did so with reverence. We townspeople whispered tales of the legend of Bob in the hopes that Bob would not hear us and become so enraged that he might challenge us to a drinking game, because Bob could, repeat it with me now, drink twenty beers without even getting a buzz. I will now allow for an obligatory moment of silence to allow you to gasp. I think it’s a rule or something that we’re supposed to gasp here and consider all the ways in which Bob is one of our betters.

“Every culture had a Bob. In Ancient Greece, Bob was the smartest philosopher in the cave; Bob was the greatest gladiator known to man in Rome; and the Spanish Bob was the greatest matador in the ring. When we all came here, we decided to give up on all that junk, because they’re all so hard and time-consuming. We’d much rather commit our lives to destroying as many brain cells as we can. We’d much rather celebrate and venerate a Bob who can drink people under tables. If someone vouches for us and says, “Don’t challenge Bob, he’ll put you under the table,” that’s probably one of the top 100 compliments we Americans can say about another.

“If the bar is our arena, Bob taught me one crucial element to defeating an opponent in drinking contests, stats. What’s more satisfying than actually defeating an opponent in drinking contests, or any contest, drinking or not? Anybody? Anybody??” Barry asked the audience. “Intimidating an opponent from even daring to challenge us. Bob had his twenty beers-without-a-buzz stat line, and everyone knew it. If you didn’t know it, we told you, warned you. Don’t mess with Bob. He’ll put you under the table. But I don’t have stats, you say, I have the tolerance level of a sixteen-year-old who’s never drank a beer before. How do we normal people, who don’t put beer in our Cheerios, intimidate someone from challenging us? Get some stats and make them up if you have to, because very very few will call you out on it. My encounter with Bob taught me that stats silence the mob. I never challenged Bob’s reign, because Bob’s twenty beers without even getting a buzz stat line intimidated me, because anyone can say I’ll put you under the table, but stats prove that you are so capable of it that no one will dare challenge you.

“I used to have a 150 I.Q.,” I told this ninety-pound woman, “but I’ve dropped down to a ninety-seven.” Then I gave her one of these intimidating looks,” Barry said glaring at the audience with raised eyebrows. “It was one of those Clint Eastwood, quietly confident raised eyebrows. The raised eyebrow asks us to ask ourself, ‘Do you who you’re messing with here?’ She asked how an I.Q. score mattered, and I said, “I’ve destroyed more brain cells than everyone in this whole bar put together, and if you think you can put me under the table, sweet mama, you got another thing coming.” I thought of dropping my improvised I.Q. score to the mildly impaired or delayed levels, but I realized that that would probably do more harm than good, so I decided to go from some gifted or very advanced level to just a tad below average, and it worked. Now, she didn’t want to date me after that revelation, but she didn’t go anywhere near trying to drink me under the table either. She was intimidated by my stats.

“I never had Bob stats, or any other kind of stats, but I did my darndest to work on a tolerance level. I didn’t drink the massive amounts of alcohol I did for the expressed purpose of increasing my tolerance level, but it would’ve been a nice byproduct. It never happened for me though, and this aspect of my life comes with a big old asterisk. At the bottom of that page, is a short paragraph that reads, “I don’t care. I have a number of character deficiencies, missed opportunities, and things I wished I did sooner and better. If I had a time machine I would go back and try to fix all of them, except for my ability to consume massive amounts of alcohol.”

“Whatever problems I may have had with alcohol, I had my high school buddy to thank. I don’t blame him, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have to drink, I could’ve made other friends, but Lou was so well-schooled, and so gifted in the art of persuasion that I fell in line. He and I didn’t drink all the time. We played sports every chance we could. We watched sports, read about sports, and talked about sports when we weren’t playing it or watching it. Sports is so compelling, because it’s a natural, adrenaline high. Competing against your fellow man, and defeating them in what they practice at as hard as you do is an adrenaline rush to adrenaline junkies. The one negative element to sports is that you can’t play them all the time, so what do adrenaline junkies do when they can’t play? They do drugs, they drink, they gamble, or whatever they can find to try to replicate that high.

“When Lou and I drank, we put that stuff away! We didn’t consider ourselves alcoholics, of course, because we only drank on weekends, at parties. Alcoholics, to our mind, were people who drank alone, because they either enjoyed the taste, the high, or the combination thereof. We didn’t drink, because we liked the taste. We drank alcohol as a social lubricant to unlock those incredibly fun personalities that only come out at night. We drank what we could afford, and the stuff we could afford was the kind of alcohol that we had to force down until we couldn’t taste it anymore.

“I don’t know if the term binge-drinking was invented in those years, but if it was, we never heard about it. When we did, and we went through the bullet points, we were like check, check, check. Woops! We were party fellas.

“Where Lou and I parted ways was his desire to see to it that others got hammered too. I didn’t really care if others drank, and I didn’t understand his obsession with it. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to drink alone, and I never did, but I didn’t really care too much if you knew when to say when. Lou did, and he was so skilled at his trademarked brand of peer-pressure that he should’ve probably considered putting a college course together. He could’ve called it Killing Them Softly 101. He didn’t mush us in the manner mushers will in the Iditarod with those kissy sounds. Lou’s mush words were, “Drink!” and “Drink gawdamnit!” and he considered me the international pace car of his parties. If Barry doesn’t get hammered quick, no one else will, or so he feared, and Lou feared that if we didn’t all get hammered quickly, we could, could end up talking about deep thoughts and feelings. To further prevent this, he refused any requests to play Pink Floyd at his parties. He liked Pink Floyd, in casual moments, and in his car? But Parties? Drinking parties? “Nope, Pink Floyd leads to thinking. It causes deep conversations.”

“Don’t think! Drink!” would be the first thing Lou wrote on that college chalkboard, and, I know, they don’t have chalkboards anymore, but he would probably have those words displayed behind him in some manner, for his Killing Them Softly 101 lectures. “Don’t think! Drink!” He’d say pounding each word with his professorial pointing stick. “It’s what you say loud and proud, if you want your party to be considered a success.”

“If you’re a proper host, you’ll work the room, asking them, ‘How much have you had to drink so far?’ And don’t believe what they say, check. Ask to see their bottle in a polite, interrogatory manner. Tell them you’re just curious. “Let me see your bottle, Barry?” Then, when they show you, you not only condemn him, but his mother for ever giving birth to him, and whatever the hell he drove in on. “What are we doing here tonight, Barry? Drink. Drink gawdamnit!” We’re to say that as if we’re disgusted by their pace, and we’re always disgusted by their pace. Never satisfied. That’s vital. Focus your condemnation on someone who can take it, and the weaker ones will fall in line to avoid your condemnations.

“Your drink of choice should be whatever drink gets your party goers get so hammered that the fun portion of your party only lasts about a half an hour. If you do it right, that half hour will be the only thing anyone remembers anyway. You might want to refrain from confrontationally shouting “Drink!” in their faces when they’re drinking the hard liquor that you two fifteen-year-olds found in old, aged decanters in his parent’s basement. We grew up hearing that alcohol gets better with age. They vintage right? It turns out that that depends on how they’re stored. Yeah, so that bourbon your parents housed in decanters, in some dark, dank closet in the corner of a basement no one has opened for thirty years might not be vintage. They might’ve been fermenting, and some fermenting processes can kill you. “Rock on!” the fifteen-year-old says when they’re downing eleven shots of fermented bourbon in a little over two hours. The proper host should know that if that happens, their party goers will probably learn less about hooking up and fighting, and more about creating interesting murals on your walls with projectile vomit.”

“Who loves to drink!” Barry asked the audience. “Let me hear you!”

I Love to Eat: Part Deux

September 16, 2023December 2, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“You don’t know how to eat,” a friend of mine said. She wasn’t talking about health and nutrition, or the staples necessary for informed eating. She was talking about the method I used to eat food. I chopped up my spaghetti strands, and this offended her Sicilian spaghetti sensibilities.

“You’re supposed to fork twirl the strands on a spoon! Like so,” she said, showing me. “It’s so much more elegant.”

When I said, “Nah!” she hit me with another:

“You don’t know how to eat.”

“Have you heard this line? People love it. It’s sweeping the country. They have this method of eating that if you just followed it, or tried it out, it would unlock the floodgates to the glory of eating. My dad used to tell me to combine roast beef and mashed potatoes on the same fork. He considered it divine. I disagreed.

“You don’t know how to eat.”

When a friend told me about his ingenious method of combining marshmallow and chocolate on a graham cracker, that we would all later call a s’more, I said, “Nah!” Boom:

“You don’t know how to eat.”

“I don’t know if they say this to humiliate us or just break us down, but I rebelled against the whole notion of it. I kept eating the way I enjoyed eating my whole life. My dad was the exception. He was so constant, and so insistent, that it’s basically his fault that I eat the way I do,” Barry said, “and it’s his fault that I place such value on food and eating too. My mom shares some of the blame. She was a pretty decent cook, and she made some decent choices for our meals, but she decided to die, so we were stuck with my dad’s definition of a meal.

My dad was an old man when he took the reins. He lived through The Depression, he was a military man, and he spent the next twenty years a hard-working bachelor. My dad spent the majority of his life eating whatever was placed before him, and he was grateful, so grateful that he’d eat just about anything.

“Dad didn’t understand this notion of preferences. Finicky was the ‘F’ word to him. We displayed some preferences, but in the grand scheme I’d argue that we weren’t finicky. We just preferred to avoid eating crap whenever we could. “You’d eat that,” he’d say over his schlop, “if you were starving in The Depression, or all you had to eat were C-Rations.”

“So, if you were to put two plates before us, one with this piece of crap on it, another plate of worse crap, and nothing at all, we’d choose your plate?” we would ask. “You’re right, we’d probably choose yours, but that’s not what I’d call a brilliant marketing strategy.”

“This isn’t to say that my dad didn’t enjoy a well-prepared and flavorful meal. He enjoyed it as much as the next guy, but in his mind, any man could eat a meal that tastes delicious. What separated the men from the boys, in my dad’s worldview, was what that man did to a meal that was less than flavorful. Based upon his internal sliding scale of characterization, eating a foul-tasting, poorly prepared meal was a tribute to his ancestors.

“You ever see those Old West movies with characters eating pork and beans on a slice of buttered bread? That was my dad’s definition of nirvana. We all know this image of a bunch of carriages surrounding a cook, usually named Schmitty, who cooked up some beans and put it on bread. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I have to believe the traveling cowboys would’ve loved it if Schmitty dropped some fried chicken in their lap.

“The pièce de résistance of my dad’s personal campaign to pay homage to those who came before him, arrived in the form of a flavorless, bare bones sandwich. This hallowed sandwich consisted of one slice of the cheapest bologna mankind has been able to produce, between two slices of bread so flavorless that I doubt any competitors in the bread industry even knew this manufacturer’s name. Did he enjoy a condiment or two, well sure, but he didn’t need one. The notion of needing condiments was my dad’s definition of inherent privilege. “You mean to tell me that you can’t eat a roast beef sandwich without barbecue sauce?”

“No, dad, but we prefer to eat it with a little barbecue sauce on it,” we said. “That makes the sandwich taste better.” He tried to break us down on the differences between need and want, and we conceded that it was all about want. He backed off a little, but he was disgusted by our preferences, because we never could’ve survived on World War II’s battlefields with our preferences.

“Even with all that, though, it was obvious that if he had his choice, he wouldn’t eat his own schlop, and he made that apparent when an aunt informed him that she wanted to come over to our house to prepare a meal for us.

“Your aunt has agreed to prepare a meal for us,” he mentioned to prepare us for the moment of her arrival. Nothing wrong with that, right? Like just everything else my dad did, he overdid it, “and it might just be the last decent meal we ever eat.” His intention was not to scare us, of course, but to instill in us a sense of gratitude for all of her efforts. He scared the hell out of us. I considered it possible that I might never eat another quality meal for the rest of my life after we finished The Last Supper of any quality.

“Comparing this meal to The Last Supper might sound like hyperbole, but that was my dad. He had us so amped up for the arrival of that meal that when it was placed before us, my brother leaned over to whisper something to me, I shushed him. “Shh, for God’s sake, eat. This could be the last decent meal we ever eat.” And, boy, did we laugh. My aunt laughed, my dad laughed, and we all had a whale of a time analyzing my admonition. I wasn’t laughing. I didn’t even smile. I didn’t get it. I thought it was almost a guarantee that I would end up eating schlop for the rest of my life after this meal, and I wanted to silently enjoy every last bite, as if it might be my last.

I didn’t care about the quality of the food but what kid does? If we drill a kid down to their basics, it’s all about Burger King, McDonald’s and Taco Bell for them. They’re forced to eat just about everything else. A nice, home-cooked meal is little more than a mandatory break from playtime. “Kids, it is now time to eat!” Aw, crap. You have to eat when you’re a kid. You have to take a break when it’s time to eat. You don’t care about quality. You just eat to shut your parents up, unless those who know the definition of quality food insinuate that it’s possible you never will.

“My dad’s war on food, namely eating, and the proper procedures therein, might lead one to believe that he was a strict father. He was anything but. In every other area of life, my brother and I had total freedom, perhaps too much. By the definition of our friends, we lived an almost parent-free existence, but they didn’t have to abide by my dad’s near-militaristic meal time rules that would’ve been welcome in most penitentiaries throughout the world.

“Much later in life, decades later, I found out my dad was actually quite proud of my eating habits. He didn’t say anything about the emotional or financial stability I achieved as an adult, and he never mentioned my ability to attain consistent employment through the years. For him, it was all about eating. “You’d eat anything,” he said to begin the greatest compliment he ever gave me. “I never had a problem with you, but I had to constantly be on your brother at the dinner table, or he’d drift off into la-la land.” My brother would chat at the table, he’d pause for a brief period of time that drove my dad crazy, and he’d drift off, or space out, as we called. My dad called it going off into la-la land. My brother didn’t do this to rebel, or to be naughty. He’d just forget to eat in the systematic keep-your-utensils-locked-and-loaded procedures my dad required. If he slipped into la-la-land, my dad would pounce, “Eat Arnie!” My brother would shake out of whatever daydream he was in and resume eating. My dad tried everything to keep my brother on task. He tried patient reminders, and he tried heavy-handed scolding. Nothing worked. His frustrations eventually drove him to develop a little ditty that we now call the Eat Arnie Eat song, and it went a little something like a this,” Barry said clearing his throat and humming out a couple chords, until he could find the right one. “Eat Arnie eat, eat Arnie eat. Eat Arnie eat, Oh, eat Arnie eat.”

“Anyone eavesdropping on this one-off performance might have mistaken my dad’s brilliant “Oh” crescendo with a pleasing and creative bridge to the fourth stanza, but aesthetics did not motivate this tool man. Creating tools was his profession, and it defined him, outside-in and inside-out. He created tools to fill a need. His whole world was about need, not want, need, and he created that song to fulfill a need. He composed no other lyrics for the song, and once it served its purpose and my brother began eating, dad had no further use of it. He never sang the song again. He didn’t create this brilliantly simplistic song to be humorous. If you laughed, or thought it was funny in any way, that was your preference, but that wasn’t why he created his incredible Eat Arnie Eat single. If humor, or the looming threat of it, got my brother to eat then his brief foray into the world of art was worth it. Once that tool fulfilled its utilitarian purpose, my favorite single of all time could whither on the vine for all he cared. When we called for an encore at get-togethers and company functions, he shot them all down. He was not one to perform on demand, even with a couple of beers in him.

“I wish that I could look you all in the eye tonight and say that all these exaggerated concepts and rules of food appreciation are complete nonsense. I wish I could say that I considered them such nonsense, and the minute I became an adult I laughed them all off as so over-the-top foolish that is nothing more than halfway decent material for a joke.

“I mean, who cares if we chit-chat when a meal is before us? Who cares if we look around the room when we should be eating? The big difference between my dad and I is I don’t talk about this nonsense, because I know it’s nonsense, but that super-secret part of me that no one will ever see or hear is absolutely disgusted by signs of a lack of appreciation for the food before you. I cannot stand it when you chit-chat with a perfectly good meal before you. When you take a break, I have to swallow my disgust if I want to have friends, or I want to avoid having others consider me a special freak. “Your entrée is getting cold!” I want to scream. The idea that you can’t, or won’t eat food without condiments absolutely disgusts me. I’ll talk about the need, need, that you have for mayonnaise on a ham sandwich for years. Want is fine, but need? C’mon, isn’t mayonnaise a first-world preference? Then if you dare to commit the cardinal violation of food appreciation, according to my dad, of leaving a restaurant with some food on your plate, and you don’t ask for a doggie bag? I will secretly decide, without noting it for you in any way, that I might never be able to dine with you again. Seeing it once will forever affect our relationship, but putting myself in a position to view it twice is a shame on me, in my book.”

“I still don’t understand why my dad was willing to go to war over food appreciation and eating, and I’m sure if some psychiatrist asked him why he did all that, he’d say, “Hey, I don’t get them all either.” The question I have for myself now, standing before you tonight, is why did I start doing it, why do I still do it? Why, after I spent my teens and twenties trying to do everything 180 degrees different from my dad for the expressed purpose of doing it different from him, do I now mimic all of his quirks and eccentricities? The only thing I can come up with is his great-granddad probably did it to his dad, and his dad did it to him, and he did it to us, and I now do it to you. I would love to be that fella who broke the chain and allow my friends and family to eat normally without some form of internal, critical analysis, but it’s too late for me now. It’s ingrained the way propaganda ministers once taught us that if you repeat the same line often enough, it becomes true to you. And if you insist on eating the way rational, well-adjusted people eat, I’m eventually going to implode in such a way that a “You don’t know how to eat” comment is going to rain down on you in the fallout.

[Standup comedian Barry Becker is The Unfunny comedian, and this is one of his sets. If you enjoy this style of comedy, there’s more available at The Unfunny.]