Citizen Trump: Updated Classics for the New (Alt) Reality

As President Trump and his supporters have noted, Hollywood and the creative community, as a whole, has been loath to give the New York billionaire and former The Apprentice star much credit. They protest that Hollywood is out of touch with how common Americans feel about issues, which is part of the reason that the "elites" in NY and LA don't understand why they, as law-abiding, God-fearing, Constitution-upholding citizens, love a man of the people like Trump.

While others might be slow to get with the program, I'm happy to take advantage of an opportunity when I see one, and in a manner that Trump himself would surely appreciate, I'm not above stealing ideas for my own personal profit.

With The Donald now in charge of the entire world, there is a century's worth of films that can be easily reworked to fit in more readily with a Trumpian view. (And, before you say, "some of these were books first," let me just say this -- no one reads and no one cares about books, you elitist twerp. That said, we will, of course, modify the books to comply with the new versions approved by the supreme ruler.) This group of heretofore beloved classics should get a facelift pronto to make them more appealing to the Trump set.

A Christmas Carol - Scrooge is allowed to manage his rental properties however he sees fit, without interference from a bunch of liberal snowflakes. Bob Cratchit receives "family time" in lieu of holiday or overtime pay, and considering what a sniveling wuss he is, he should be happy he has a job at all. Unfortunately, because of Tiny Tim's pre-existing condition he's ineligible for coverage on Bob's employee plan, which Scrooge so generously supplies. The youngster dies, but that was obviously God's will.

Citizen Kane - As the only person publishing the truth in his newspaper (which, for the record, easily outsold every other newspaper in the country), Kane is, of course, vilified by the liberal mainstream media. While they attempt to derail his political ambitions just because of some floozy -- who seduced him, by the way -- the people of New York rightly see through the MSM attacks and elect Kane anyway. He turns out to be a brilliant politician, is elected President of the United States, and saves the country from the crooked Democratic congress. Oh yeah, and "Rosebud" turns out to just be the nickname that he gave his smokin' hot daughter.  

First Blood - John Rambo is welcomed to town by the Sheriff and his men, who thank the Vietnam veteran for his service. Rambo is enlisted by the Sheriff's department to assist them in dispatching a group of protesters who are unjustly holding up construction on a pipeline project that will reinvigorate the local economy. The whiny little tree huggers are dispatched with extreme force and Rambo gladly accepts one of the many jobs that are created by the pipeline.

It's a Wonderful Life - George Bailey, acting on some inside information, invests heavily in plastics and makes a killing. He trades Mary in for a younger model, while still occasionally banging Violet and, later her daughter, on the side. His real estate holdings explode in value once the suburban sprawl of the '50s takes hold and George eventually leaves his vast fortune to his ambitious, handsome son, who is an even better businessman than his father.

Fahrenheit 451 - Guy Montag turns Clarisse and her family in immediately for their subversive thoughts, and they are executed. He happily returns to burning books and lives a nice, conforming life with his wife, Mildred. In the updated book version, which is now only 20 pages long, readers are encouraged at the end to burn the book immediately and never read again.

Caddyshack - Young caddy Danny Noonan sees the error of his ways and takes Judge Smails up on his generous offer, earning a scholarship and, later, a prestigious clerkship thanks to the Judge's patronage. Al Czervik does, in fact, buy Bushwood Country Club, but instead of building condos on the site, hires Jack Nicklaus to redesign the course and triples the membership fees, smartly pocketing all of the profits. He keeps Smails around because it's never a bad idea to have a judge in your back pocket when you're in real estate.

Wall Street - Gordon Gekko is rightly hailed for his "greed is good" stance and becomes a sympathetic character for having to put up with squeamish little weasels, like Bud Fox, who don't have the stones to do something as simple as screw over their own father. He spots Bud's plan to undercut his deal for the airline a mile away, since he's so much smarter and better looking than his young protégé. Bud tries to entrap his mentor for the FBI, but since Gekko didn't do anything wrong, it doesn't work. The film ends with Bud begging Gekko for another chance, only to be told, "You're fired."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows - With bleeding-heart Dumbledore out of the way, Voldemort and his band of patriots take over the Ministry of Magic and, by extension, Hogwarts. Mudbloods like Hermione Granger are deported to the Muggle world where they belong, as the new leadership begins to immediately roll back the wizarding regulations that Dumbledore and his like thrust upon the magical community while ignoring the common wizard. "Crying" Harry Potter, as expected, can't handle his defeat and goes around blaming others for his failures. Voldemort doesn't kill him or sentence him to Azkaban because, really, who cares about losers?

No Country for Old Men - Now framed as a cautionary tale that Sheriff Bell tells Texas school children about why it is so important that we build a wall on the Mexican border to keep out the drug dealing bad hombres.

A Few Good Men - Crybaby Navy lawyer Lt. Kaffee realizes that he actually can't handle the truth and that he does need Colonel Jessup "up on that wall." He then excuses the Colonel from the stand so that he can get back to doing whatever is necessary to keep America safe, no questions asked.

Little Women - Instead of sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are now supermodels who are all married to very rich, very powerful and extremely handsome men. The ladies go shopping together, do yoga and spin classes together, take care of the kids and do whatever their extremely successful and powerful husbands tell them to do. Has franchise potential, since it could be updated every few years with the next generation of hot actresses (the male leads will, of course, remain the same).

The Birth of a Nation - Since it's nearly perfect, it just needs to be updated with sound and color. The D.W. Griffith 1915 KKK one, that is. The one with the same name from 2016 never should have been made, since the black guy who wrote and directed it probably should've been in jail.

Red Dawn - Well, since Russia is now our ally and wouldn't do anything that would be counterproductive to the welfare of the United States, the country is now attacked by the North Koreans after China refuses to do anything to rein them in. Wait, someone already did this one? No kidding… with one of the Hemsworth brothers? OK, well, never mind then.

An Inconvenient Truth - It's all a lie. End of movie.

Re-Living Aid

I mentioned in an earlier post that I saw a clip of Live Aid that made me think back to 1985. Spending the weekend largely with a series of writing projects that required some background noise provided the perfect excuse to dig out the DVD set of the event and watch it. I don't know that I actually set out to re-watch the whole thing, but that's what happened. Having also spent a chunk of my career reviewing music -- and trying to avoid the next project -- I decided that the hours shouldn't go past without offering my thoughts... especially since the cats have made it clear that they don't care about '80s music in the slightest.

I'm going to start with the social part of this little exercise. Included in the DVD set is the original BBC News report that caused The Boomtown Rats lead singer Bob Geldof to try to raise funds to assist the victims of the Ethiopian famine. As Americans, it's part of our Constitutional rights to complain about anything and everything... and we usually do. If you want some perspective, though, go watch a 10 minute news story that shows children literally dying from hunger while the cameras are rolling. It doesn't matter that the video is more than 30 years old because I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't take much at all to find similar pain and suffering right now in the areas of the world that we don't like to think about.

OK, with that out of the way, the most obvious question related to the little nostalgia trip is how does it hold up? Just sticking with the music, the answer is surprisingly well. The fashion is awful and I don't think anyone in their right mind is clamoring for a return of the mullet, but the music mostly still works. The set at London's Wembley Stadium is decidedly cleaner than the one at the old JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, but considering how poorly other events around the time hold up (I'm looking at you US Festival), there's way more good than bad.

Not everything falls into that "good" category, of course. REO Speedwagon hasn't gotten any better with age (and, as an aside, can someone remind me why the Beach Boys and Paul Shaffer were onstage with them?) The Black Sabbath reunion with Ozzy Osbourne has the singer being... well, Ozzy. He looks vaguely confused about where he is but also doesn't look like he cares enough to try to figure it out.

The set with Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood is as much of a mess decades later as it was on the night. (Despite three-fifths of the Rolling Stones being there, Mick Jagger played separately... I'm assuming because he and Keith were having a row.)

The Woodstock-era holdovers, like Joan Baez and Neil Young, fare particularly poorly. It's like they didn't know what they were doing there... as if they felt like they were part of a protest but no one told them what they were protesting.

The Philly set, as I said, seemed to have been thrown together with little thought of cohesion. How else do you explain Crosby, Stills & Nash being followed by Judas Priest, who are, in turn, followed by Bryan Adams. The whole day at JFK was a bit of a mishmash, plagued by sound problems and a Led Zeppelin reunion that was so bad -- with Phil Collins and Power Station's Tony Thompson seemingly playing different songs at the same time on the drums -- that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page still won't let anyone see it again.

"We Are the World" hasn't stopped being an awful song. Why no one ever stepped in to tell Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie that the song is annoyingly schlocky is beyond me. I'm not quibbling about the pair's songwriting abilities, especially Richie, but for the love of God, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder and Bob Dylan -- you know, some of the greatest song writers of the 20th century -- were all part of the recording. No one saw the song before they got there?

Like always the show closing sing-alongs with everyone on stage don't work, but like Geldof says before leading the Wembley crowd through Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?," "if you're going to have a cock-up, it might as well be a cock-up in front of 2-billion people."

Even though I was a teenager at the time, there are some things that I don't remember from when it happened live. For example, I have no idea where I was when The Thompson Twins, Madonna, Nile Rodgers and guitar god Steve Stevens did their rendition of The Beatles' "Revolution," but I have zero memory of it.

So, what is worth watching again, even if just on YouTube?

For the most part, the British acts, perhaps because it started out as their cause, are almost uniformly good. Acts that never gained as much traction in the States, like Paul Young and The Style Council have little trouble revving up the London crowd. Then, there's the reminder of just how staggeringly beautiful Sade is.



Bono and U2 has been around so long that we take them for granted, but at 25, Bono was a complete badass. He's in complete control at Live Aid. In another two years, The Joshua Tree would launch them into the stratosphere, but U2 was clearly just waiting for the world to catch up to them in '85.




The round-robin of Phil Collins playing with Sting, who then goes and plays with Dire Straits is fun, even if the former front men for Genesis and The Police didn't really capitalize on having an audience of 72,000 right in front of them. Still, if you're old enough to remember it, having Sting sing "I want my MTV," at the start of Straits' "Money For Nothing" while being broadcast live on MTV was about as cool as it got in the mid-'80s.



Queen's performance is legendary and it's still awesome no matter how many times that you've seen it. In fact, here it is:



There is nothing like the Wembley crowd doing the hand-clap from "Radio Ga-Ga." The story forever has been that every act who had to follow Freddie Mercury wanted to kill him for setting the bar that high.

Another story is that Elton John's set was almost cut for time in London before George Michael stepped in to offer up a portion of his Wham! time to his hero. Not only is Elton in good form, but there's a live rendition of "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" with Kiki Dee, and Michael nails John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down." (Then there's the added bonus of John forgetting that the other half of Wham!, Andrew Ridgeley, is even there, so he forgets to introduce him, and Ridgeley not caring because he looks completely hammered.)



Similarly, David Bowie is stellar playing his '80s edition of The Thin White Duke. If there's any artist who made those ridiculous '80s get-ups look good it was Bowie. While Paul McCartney's closing "Let It Be" is, at best, perfunctory, it's still funny when The Who's Pete Townsend decides to tickle Macca while he's tickling the ivories.

Even the Brits who were in Philly provided a spark. Even if they couldn't be further apart stylistically, Eric Clapton and Duran Duran sounded like they were trying to match what they had seen on TV from their countrymen. The Pretenders do the same, which the only American in the group, lead singer Chrissie Hynde, kept marrying British guys.



It's also funny to see Madonna in a mid-show slot, with her star still on the rise. Its more interesting to see the Material Girl getting winded as she whips through her choreography while she keeps singing. Remember when it was ok for a singer to do that?




It's even funnier to watch the almost entirely white audience in Philly figuring out how to react to Run-DMC in their Adidas and slamming through "King of Rock." About a quarter of the audience are into it, and it's not the segment that was there to see Sabbath and Zeppelin.




One of the other things that anyone who watched Live Aid while it was happening remembers are the spots that were played continuously during the broadcast, asking for donations and showing starving people while The Cars' "Drive" played. By the end, everyone was pretty much sick of hearing that song, but looking at it now, the set that Rick Ocasek, Benjamin Orr (the singer of "Drive") and the rest of the Boston-bred band delivered was mighty tight.



The most consistent part of the JFK show is the early evening portion. Philly native Patti Labelle crushed John Lennon's "Imagine" and Dylan's "Forever Young." It gets even better when fellow City of Brotherly Love resident's Hall & Oates invite The Temptations' Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin out for their performance.



Jagger's contribution is the part that a lot of Americans remember since it happened in prime time. It's also memorable because it's as close to a live sex act as you could get on television as the Rolling Stones singer and Tina Turner keep trading thrusts.




Again, that's an awful lot of highlights for a fundraiser held more than 30 years ago. It's also not a bad thing to remember that there was a time when the term Social Justice Warrior was a designation that most people wanted. The music wasn't bad either.

A Good Bet

My father was a bookmaker. Not like someone who binds books, but a guy who makes book. A bookie. Back before there was a government run lottery, guys like my dad were the lottery. It was just one of those things around the neighborhood... some of the delivery guys would even take bets for this or that bookie.

You would think that should make me someone who's interested in gambling, or, at least, someone who has some kind of unique insight when it comes to making bets. It does not.

Every year when the Super Bowl rolls around, when discussions of prop bets and point spreads reaches a crescendo, I'm forced to acknowledge just how little I know about the family business.

I'm the kind of person who used to drive to Vegas to see a show and not place a single bet. I always loved hanging out in Sin City the first weekend of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, but that was because I could walk into the sports books and see all the games at once. I don't think I ever actually made a bet on a single one of the games. I did place a Super Bowl bet one of the times that I was in Vegas around the time of the game. I lost.

Other than the fact that I know what a point spread is and I know how to correctly use the terms "vig" and "moneyline," I have no idea how to gamble. Not just sports betting and the like... any gambling. I suck at cards. I have to think hard to remember the rules of craps... and, I only know what I do because there's an Abbott & Costello routine about it. The randomness of a roulette wheel appeals to me... until I lose twice and then I'm done. I won once on a slot machine and stopped gambling for the rest of the day.

As a toddler, I was at a horse racing track so often in the summer that I still remember the office secretary who would watch me when my dad got sick of having to keep track of me. The smell of cheap cigars and stale beer still makes me feel all warm inside. Do I have any idea what horse I should be looking at on a racing form? Nope, none at all.

I've spent a chunk of my life writing about sports, but I can't pick against the spread to save my life. Not on football. Not on basketball. And, with apologies to Pete Rose, I don't have the first clue how you're supposed to bet on baseball.

I've never won an office pool. I'm bad at fantasy sports. If they were to invent a new way to gamble tomorrow, I'm sure I would be terrible with it.

I don't think that I'm missing out on anything. In addition to being a bookie, my dad was also a bit of degenerate gambler. There was either a lot of money around when I was little, or no money. I still remember the one Christmas Eve when my father hit a decent score and then bought me a bunch of toys at the last minute. I was confused about why there was only one year that Santa didn't wrap anything. But, he also took every bit of birthday money that I got and bet with it.

Still, when I tell people about my dad, I always have that moment of embarrassment where I'm afraid that I'm going to be asked about gambling strategies or for an explanation of how baccarat works (I've watched the stupid video on that in Vegas hotel rooms 15 times and I still don't understand that game, but it always looks cool).

I'm sure that I'm better off being a semi-well-adjusted, responsible adult than I am being too much like my dad, but I still wish I had paid a little more attention during those first seven years so that I could at least fake things a little better. ("little better," son of a bookie... get it? Yeah, well, they can't all be winners.)

Putting the Con in Confidence

While I was prepping for an article that I have to write on this year's Super Bowl commercials, I had mindless TV on in the background -- I've never been able to work in quiet -- and stopped when a clip from Live Aid was shown. 1985 celebrity philanthropy at its finest with mullets all over the place (Bono's was particularly glorious) and everyone on stage dressed in five layers even though it was the middle of July.

When Live Aid happened, I was 17. I took a second to consider what I remembered about the day that Live Aid happened. There wasn't a ton -- I was living in the middle of nowhere without cable so I remember both listening on the radio and watching whoever was carrying the MTV feed over the air. The only strong memory that I have is trying to time leaving the house to go meet up with a couple of buddies so that I was getting ready during an act that I didn't care about.

That's not what stood out about the memory. No, what caught me was that shot of my teenaged self. See, I was truly obnoxious. I know, I know... all teenagers are obnoxious, but I was pretty bad. Like a lot teens, I attempted to turn anger into an art form. Even my closest friends found my surliness annoying. The part that seems mindboggling now, though, is just how confident I was. Again, young men have a way of being over-confident and I took full advantage of society's forgiveness of that particular sin.

Sitting here now as a guy in his 40s whose career never quite reached the level of success that my younger self very much expected, the difference between the two versions of me is jarring. I don't know that I have zero confidence, but my cup in that regard is definitely overflowing.

Of course, the confidence that I had as a young man was a fallacy. It was just meant to cover up the fact that I usually didn't know what the hell I was doing. Even before my father died when I was 7, I think I was aware that I didn't particularly want to be like the people around me, as I shuffled around to bars and race tracks as a toddler.

So, I spent my childhood learning how to bluff my way through situations. I would play dumb when I felt that was what would work. If I decided that I had something to say, I learned early on that it was best to sound like I knew what I was talking about whether I did or not. I developed a deadpan delivery so that I could say anything and leave people wondering whether I was serious or not. I also decided that glaring a lot was a good way to get people not to question me.

I don't think that actually makes me much different than plenty of other people, but what I did learn was different was that I didn't really have an underpinning of core values that I had learned -- good or bad. I had tried to develop my own as a child and, it turns out, that doesn't really work that well. So, at some point, I started seeking that, latching onto other families that I thought displayed the kinds of values that I wanted. That did work, but it also always left me unsure which to follow -- my instincts or what I had learned environmentally.

The positive is that I didn't end up spiraling into substance abuse and unleashing the bipolar issues that run in my bloodlines. The downside, is that in trying to use blustering confidence to see me through, I didn't know how to handle the bouts of failure that invariably hit you. At some point, I just stopped trusting my own processes, and that confidence of youth slowly slipped away.

It happens, and the fact is that my life has never been particularly bad, no matter what my confidence level might be at anyone time. It is still a bit weird to be confronted with that difference. Out of my sons, Casey is the one who most closely resembles me when I was younger. While I had my father's death that caused me to alter my outlook at an early age, he had his parent's divorce.

Casey is sure that he knows what's best, even when it's clear that he doesn't. That doesn't affect him, either... he has a very Republican knack for turning the facts around to suit his needs. It leaves me with a conundrum, however: do I want to see what he can do with that level of confidence and a background of solid values that he's been taught by his family or do I need to make sure that he knows how to admit defeat when that's called for? Or, is it some balance between the two.

Luckily, he's not even 12 yet, so I've still got a little time to figure that out. Maybe I'll even rediscover some of my own lost confidence as I try to guide him.

My Baby Takes the Morning Train

In my day-to-day life, my birth mother doesn't come up very often. I stopped living with her when I was a teenager and, since I moved in with my best friend's family, there are some people who don't even realize that she's still around. She is, although we don't have anything resembling a close relationship... which admittedly, has more to do with me than with her.

What I was reminded of today, though, is the influence that the woman had on me from a musical perspective.

As I was driving home, and was flipping through radio stations, I happened upon Sheena Easton's "9 to 5 (Morning Train)," one of the biggest hits of 1981, which just goes to show that the '80s were the '80s right from the jump.

When the song was popular, my nieces -- who are 9 and 11 years younger than me -- were toddlers and would frequently be watched by my mother. The woman decided that the little girls loved that song and began playing it when they were at her house. Over and over and over again.

See, when it came to music the woman was basically a toddler herself. Playing music over and over again is annoying even if it's good music, but my mother had the taste of... well, to be honest, I don't even know how to categorize it.

She had a Slim Whitman album, the one that they sold on TV commercials, and it wasn't just an ironic conversation piece. Perhaps I should be glad that I know the lyrics to "Vaya Con Dios," but I'm just not. Nor do I choose to look at it as her trying to develop an appreciation for yodeling in me.

If I go to hell, I'm 99-percent sure that I will be made to listen to Side 4 of Barry Manilow's Greatest Hits for all eternity. That was my own special kind of torment as a youngster. I'm not a musical snob; I don't have anything against the guy who wrote the "You Deserve a Break Today" jingle for McDonalds and played bath houses with Bette Midler. It's just that she would only play Side 2.

You might have thought at one time in your life, "How many times would I have to hear 'Copacabana' before I went insane?" Well, I can only tell you that I snapped somewhere around the 15,000 mark.

What was always more infuriating is that it's a double-record set. The Manilow song that I always liked best -- "Weekend in New England" -- was on Side 3. I didn't mind "Ready to Take a Chance Again," from the Chevy Chase-Goldie Hawn classic, Foul Play, but I never got to hear it because it was on Side 1. Nope, just "Copacabana," "I Write the Songs," and "This One's For You" on repeat, before there really even was such a thing.

There was Engelbert Humperdink. She couldn't be infatuated with Tom Jones, so that I could listen to "It's Not Unusual" and "Delilah"... no, it had to be Engelbert. "Release Me"? I tried to, frequently. No matter where I hid that damn album, she would still find it. To this day, I blame the fact that I'm not big on cuddling on Humperdink because "After the Lovin'," I just wanted him to get the hell out.

Then, there were the acts like Easton that didn't rate an entire album of listening, but instead were granted just a single song. Before the rest of the world got sick of Lionel Richie around 1988, I had been done with him for almost a decade for writing "Three Times a Lady," which I heard a minimum of 20 times a day during one period of my youth.

As a gift one year she was given one of those compilation albums of hits from the '50s. Not Elvis and the other early rock-and-roll icons, but stuff like "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White," or "Mocking Bird Hill," or Rosemary Clooney's "Come On-A My House." At least, I thought, it's got variety and it's the songs of her younger years... it had to be a winner. She barely listened to it because she never found a side that she liked enough to keep playing repeatedly.

While it's true that hearing songs on heavy radio rotation can make me blanch, the real lesson that I learned was that I could take just about anything after listening to Kenny Rogers' "Lady" 856 times during December, 1980.

There are almost no types of music that I won't listen to for brief periods. I'll listen to anything, just so long as I don't have to hear the same thing over and over again.

I guess I should be appreciative of the mental toughness that I developed during that time of my life, and, to an extent, I am. Even so, I'm now all set with hearing about Sheena Easton's baby taking the morning train for another 10 years or so.

Fathers and Sons... and Headstones

There was another reason for the trip east... one that I didn't spend a lot of time discussing with the boys beforehand. I'm originally from Wilmington, Delaware -- about 2 hours north of Washington -- and we were making a side journey there for Easter weekend. The impetus for that came from something that I did about five years ago.

My father died when I was 7-years-old. At the time, my mother was in no shape to handle things, so my sister became the person that had to coordinate the estate. She was 23 and was overwhelmed. Things got done, except for one part... the headstone.

For years, my father was in an unmarked grave. My immediate family was never the type to visit gravesites, so in all honesty, I don't even remember when I figured out that there was nothing marking my father's burial. When I moved back to the area for a time during my early-20s, I know that I had older relatives bring it up to me then. My father's extended family are all in the same cemetery, so as we would go to a funeral, inevitably, one of my great-aunts would say, "Well, I was going to go visit your father's grave, but there's nothing there to mark it, so who even knows if I'm looking in the right place?"

I also had them helpfully point out that since he had served in the Army -- as most men his age had -- then all that was needed was to file paperwork with the Veterans Administration. At the time, I would listen politely and then go back to ignoring it.

Then about five years ago, my neighbor died... an extremely nice man, who's obituary caused a minor local controversy by saying "Local Santa Dies" (he was one of the mainstays in the area for portraying St. Nick during the holidays). He was also a prominent member of the local VFW. At his funeral, as they were giving a 21-gun salute, I was taken back to my own father's funeral. I don't remember everything, but I remember the guns and the American flag being folded. Suddenly, the idea of putting a headstone on my father's grave seemed important... perhaps because I was almost exactly the same age at the time as he had been when he died.

It really is supposed to be a simple process to get a VA headstone. They make it that way intentionally, of course. I contacted the cemetery and they happily e-mailed me the proper paperwork, along with where it needed to go.

In 1975, the paperwork probably would've been easy to fill out. 35 years later, not only did I not have the information about what dates he had served in the military -- beyond just knowing that it had been a brief, mandatory commitment -- I didn't even know his date of birth for sure, wasn't clear on the date that he had passed away and I had no idea about where to try to find his Social Security Number.

The date of birth and death turned out to be easy... the cemetery was able to tell me that from their records. In order to get the military portion, though, I needed the Social Security Number. At the time, I hadn't spoken to the one person that I knew would know how to get that in years... my sister. And, not a few years either, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years.

Once the process was started, though, abandoning it seemed wrong. So, I took the chicken way out and sent an e-mail to my sister via her work... just explaining what I was trying to do and asking for the information. It took a couple of days, but she replied with the information and told me that I was free to contact her if I needed any other information. A simple exchange that signaled the beginning of a thaw.

Because it's me, though, nothing can be too simple. When I attempted to get the dates of his military service and his serial number, I got back a form letter telling me that it appeared that his personnel file may have been destroyed. Turns out that there was a giant fire in the national archives in 1973 that wiped out thousands of military files. Something like 80-percent of the Army's personnel files from between 1912 and 1960 were just gone.... and because all they had were the paper files, there was no back-up. The letter said that they would have to go to other sources to find the information.

My father was in the Army for just a couple of years... but can you imagine if you were trying to get the information for someone that had been in World War II and they were saying, "Um, yeah, we don't seem to have that information anymore"?

It took a while, but eventually they were able to cross-reference military hospital records to come up with enough information for the VA. Basically, they gave me a letter to give to the VA that essentially said, "Look, we're positive that he was in the Army at some point. Now, give him a headstone and leave us alone."

That was that. I submitted the paperwork, paid the fee, and finally got a notification that it had been placed. At the time, I decided that I should go see it at least once... if only to just personalize the act of getting the stone.

Then my divorce happened, blindsiding me and putting the thought of anything else far on the backburner. Now, though, I was finally back on the East Coast with the opportunity to carry out the plan to put the finishing touches on marking my father's grave.

My memories of my dad are good ones, mostly because they are frozen in time as the thoughts of a 7-year-old... and just barely that, since I had just turned seven about three weeks earlier. He was just shy of his 42nd birthday. My siblings' memories though are far different.

My dad was a complicated guy. He was a bookie -- running numbers and taking bets -- but one with an addictive personality. An alcoholic from the time that he was a teen, he coupled that with a love for gambling that continuously put his own business in jeopardy. As quickly as he would take in money from suckers, he would turn around and blow the money at the race track... a sucker himself.

He was also 6-feet-6-inches tall, and weighed anywhere from 200 to 300 lbs. I'm not saying that because I'm not sure, but rather because that's really how much his weight could fluctuate depending on what year we're talking about.

When things were good, there was money everywhere (literally, there are stories about stacks of cash lying around the house). When things weren't good, there was nothing. Even I have memories about the difference in Christmases from one extreme to the other. Sometimes, Santa brought so much that you couldn't even step into the living room. Sometimes, Santa brought an IOU. Even my preschool self was aware of the fact that the birthday money that I would get from relatives never stayed in my piggy-bank very long... always sacrificed in an effort to turn around a losing streak.

When I was a toddler, my dad would take me with him to both the horse track and to the bar. Some of the earliest memories that I have are of the way that stale beer, cigar smoke and horse manure smell when mixed together and the awesome '70s décor that the track's offices had, since when he had business to attend to I was frequently babysat by one of the secretaries. I also have odd random memories from bars, like sitting on top of one, eating Andy Capp fries and watching "The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour." That show went off the air when I was four.

The "business" part raises a dilemma. Given what my father did -- taking bets and collecting the money from the losers -- there are unsavory elements inherent with it. There are stories about him leaving my mother for long stretches at bars to go tend to things. There are also stories about her confusion about why the nice men who would offer to buy her a drink would be gone when she came back from the powder room. She later found out that the bartenders were telling the poor schmucks who her husband was as soon as she was out of earshot.

To help illustrate the point, my godfather was a guy named "Tony the Shark." I have no idea what ever happened to him, but I know that it wasn't until significantly later that I realized what the "Shark" part of the nickname meant... or why there were never any customers ordering food at the small corner deli that he owned.

I've intentionally kept from looking too far into my dad's life in that regard. I like my childhood memories of the man, and I'd like to keep it that way. I don't really want to know what was happening while I was being watching by a racetrack secretary or a bartender.

Those experiences are the stuff of Hallmark cards compared to those of my siblings. For starters, I was too little and, by the end, he was too weak, for me to have ever had to experience the discipline of his belt. My older brothers were not as lucky. There was also jealousy that I was allowed into the bars with him. My sister and two brothers were typically left sitting in the car for hours while he was inside. Taken against today's standards, that sounds horrible, but in the late-50s and early-60s, it wasn't seen as any big issue... at least not to my father.

He died because of perforated ulcers... essentially, he bled to death internally. Even as a young child, I was aware of the fact that this was potentially fixable and that he was choosing not to fix it. See, in order to respond to the treatment, he would've had to stop drinking. He made a conscious decision that alcohol was more important to him than living was. (He was also seemingly an undiagnosed manic depressive, so that might have had something to do with it.)

My relationship to my father, however, goes far beyond just those memories and genetics. The death of my father has permeated my life in ways that I'm still figuring out in my 40s. In some cases, the effect is fairly linear. And, the two sons that are on this trip with me are a direct result of that.

If he hadn't passed away when I was a child, then my mother wouldn't have met the jackass that she eventually married at the beginning of the 1980s. That guy happened to originally be from a tiny town in Michigan and, for reasons that are still not very clear, they decided that it would be a good idea to move back there. I actually spent an extra year in Delaware living with my sister and her family -- after my mother and her new husband moved -- as the argument about where I would live played itself out. It turned out that the family that he still had in the area weren't overly thrilled to have him back and eventually my mother managed to figure out that he was a habitual liar. For me, though, as painful as the initial part of that journey might have been, the move to the Midwest was life-altering. When my mother moved back to Delaware when I was 16, I elected to stay in the tiny town, moving in with one of my friend's families.

My two closest friends are from that time of my life -- one male and one female -- and, while I was living in Los Angeles, the female part of that equation was living in San Francisco with her then-husband. When she divorced, she decided to come to LA herself. At the same time, one of her friends from college was just finishing up officers' training in the Air Force and was being sent to Los Angeles. They decided to get an apartment together. That friend soon became the mother of my sons.

My father doesn't die, I don't move to Michigan. I don't spend my teen years there, and I'm probably not friends with the boys' godmother, who introduced me to their mother. Kind of follows that if we don't meet, then it would be hard for them to exist.

It was with all of that swirling around my head that I set out to visit my father's grave for the first time since his funeral. Of course, that had to have an unexpected modern twist.

After all that effort and anticipation, I saw my dad's headstone first online. Thanks to technology, some cemeteries now have pictures of gravesites on their websites to help make it easier for people to find them. I went on to see if I could find the location of the grave before the visit and -- BAM -- there it was on my screen. A simple VA marker. I could lie and say that I wept at the site, but the reality is that the first thing I did was verify that they spelled his name right.

Being Holy Saturday, when we actually made it to the cemetery, we were far from the only people there to pay respects. Here's the other thing that technology has changed about visiting a grave site. Instead of a map, the websites give the coordinates of the plot that then go on Google Maps to show you where to go. That might work well on a tablet, but on my iPhone in the daylight, trying to find where the hell a tiny blue dot on the screen is in the real world is a pain in the ass.

The art historian that we are staying with in D.C. made the trip to Delaware with us to offer moral support. She was actually the one who eventually found it -- after we figured out that we were on the wrong side of the grounds initially -- and called us over.

Again, I would be lying if I said that I had a big emotional reaction. It's just not my way. I suppose that I could've brought flowers to lay at the site, but that's not really my way either. My way is to just take it in for a moment... look around and remember that the remains of my grandmother and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins are nearby... and then to be done.

For the boys, it was a weird intersection of their family history. Since they were born, the people that the would call their family on my side has been the family that I lived with as a teen. Those are the people that they spend holidays with and whom they call "Grandma and Grandpa." That's the family that they know. When I was working on getting the headstone years ago, I said something about my dad dying, and both boys bolted upright with panicked looks on their faces. It took a second for me to realize what was going on and for me to then reassure them that Grandpa was fine... I was talking about my birth father. But, I understand the confusion, since I call them Mom and Dad, and while the boys are aware on some level that we aren't blood relatives... well, how much does that matter to a kid, really?

I didn't ask them to feel anything really. I'm well aware that the person who's gravesite we were looking at had died more than 30 years before either of them were born. Other than having seem a couple of pictures, they had no concept of the man or of my early life. To them, my life started when I moved to Michigan as a 13-year-old.

Besides, how can I ask them to feel anything when I'm not sure what my own feelings are? How do you reconcile that it is very possible that your life is better because one of your parents died?
What do you do with that?

Personally, I've come to just acknowledge that it's true. As interesting as it might be to think about how my life would be different had my father lived longer, I honestly can't visualize it 40 years later. To do so, would be to imagine a life where I don't have the people that are closest to me -- whether that's my adoptive family, my closest friends, and my sons. Even the pain that came from the divorce is worth it from that standpoint. While I would just as soon never feel anything like that again, I never regret having met my ex-wife and the marriage that followed... and none of it happens without a man's death in 1975.

I have my sunny childhood memories of my father and he now has a headstone marking his final resting place. It might have taken a long time to get there -- both for me and the stone -- but that's just how life goes... death, too, I suppose.

What's D.C. Stand For?

I'm not an excitable person. I frequently don't react to... well, anything. Stoic is a word that I'm very comfortable with.

Unfortunately, it's a gene that has been passed along to my sons.

Martin and Casey saw the nation's capital for the first time... and whatever excitement there might have been was extremely muted. Sure, it could be argued that spending the first six hours of the day in a minivan may have sapped some of the enthusiasm out of them. I'm still going with their genetic predisposition to encounter something awe inspiring, nod their head and say, "Cool."

Panda's? Cool. Washington Monument? Cool. Cherry blossoms? Cool.

It is always interesting to see a kid's reaction to seeing things live that they've only seen on television (or, these days, online). Casey has long listed panda's as his favorite animal, and suddenly, there they were... right in front of him. He honestly didn't seem sure how to react to that.

He had a better idea of how to react when we were by the sea lions underwater viewing area and one became interested in Casey. For about a minute, the sea lion and Casey interacted with each other through the glass. If the sea lion was trying to get us to spring him, unfortunately, we couldn't get that on our side.

While having the boys see the National Mall and the monuments was fun (well, you know, watching closely to see if you can discern a reaction is kind of amusing), what was scary was finding out how little about history gets taught in school's now.

Maybe I'm nuts, but I figured that at least by 6th grade -- which Martin is in -- that the Constitution would've come up at some point. Neither son knew what it was. "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility?" I tried. Blank stares.

We walked past the Vietnam Memorial. "What do you know about the Vietnam War?" I asked. "It was a war," Casey offered back. That led to stopping and a quick lesson about the cost of war... especially since the father of our guide -- an art history professor who is kind enough to allow us to stay at her apartment in Georgetown -- fought in Vietnam. I told them to really stop and think about the fact that each of the names on the wall was a real person... with parents, siblings, friends, etc. That the 58,000-plus names carved there go far beyond just a collection of letters.

Slightly better was the Lincoln Memorial, if only because it's featured prominently in the movie "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian." By that point, I was just happy that they could identify a president.

As with the other stops, the boys seemingly had only the barest idea of what Lincoln had done. That's why it's handy that the Gettysburg Address is so short... it makes it easy to read the engraving out loud. Do I think that either of them fully grasp the impact of words like "that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth"? No, not really. I'm now at least certain that they've heard it, though, and that's a start.

Finding the Inner Griswold

After months and months of planning, I finally found myself faced with one of the great American traditions -- the family road trip. Just like Chevy Chase's classic Clark Griswold, I was set to load up the kids in an oversized vehicle and set out to see Washington D.C.

Of course, it wasn't quite the same as the Griswold clan. For starters, this was the first real trip that the kids have taken with either parent since the divorce. They've taken little side trips to Chicago, Detroit and Indianapolis, but those places are only a few hours away from home. Plus, in the cases of Indy and the Motor City, really those are just visits to see family.

No, this was a (sort of) honest-to-goodness vacation. One that was extremely well earned... you know, since it basically took a court intervention to figure out when the trip could take place, for how long, etc. Since I knew people spending the year in D.C. to work on research, I had broached the idea of the trip back last summer, when I originally wanted to tie the journey to my niece's wedding in Philadelphia in October. It took till late September to come up with the alternative arrangements of going over the boys' Spring Break.

There was an agreement that all of the driving wouldn't be done in one day, so that led to leaving late on a Thursday. I had agreed that the boys could spend a little bit of time with their mother prior to us leaving, which meant that I had to got get them before we could hit the road.

Once they were done saying their goodbyes and just as I was getting into the van, their mom looked at me through narrowed eyes and said, "If anything happens to them..."

She didn't finish that sentiment, but I'm sure that was just to leave it to my imagination. It wasn't the warmest send off I've received, but as I drove away, I had trouble mustering much anger about it. While it isn't how I would've expressed it, I understood the feeling of having the children going away for a period of time... even if it, in reality, was only five days. It took a really long time to get used to not seeing my children every day, and it isn't really that you become comfortable with it... it's more that you force yourself to stop thinking about it.

Taking a road trip these days is light years away from when I was a kid. My siblings are so much older than me, that I didn't have the experience of being crammed into a backseat with other kids. My memories are from being in the backseat alone... with nothing to do but listen to the radio, stare out the window or read. In my minivan, the boys have dual DVD players where they can either watch the same thing or two separate things. They have their iPad. They have their Nintendo DS. And, sure, they still had the books and the radio.

For the first two hours on the road, Martin and Casey didn't say a word. Not to me. Not to each other. Nothing. They were each watching a DVD and were so engrossed that they could've been anywhere. By the time that they were paying attention again, we had gone from Michigan to Indiana  and were now in Ohio.

We made it to our overnight destination of Cleveland in decent time. Martin has had to read a story set in Cleveland during the '70s and he was surprised to find that the Cuyahoga River wasn't on fire. I had to tell him that the city isn't as bad as it was when I was a kid. "Cleveland looks pretty nice to me," he said. I told him not to go too crazy.

With the trip underway, the boys ended the day with the one part of the vacation that they most cared about... the pool. As I was booking hotels the only question that they ever had was, "Does it have a pool?" When I told Casey to pack, I came back to find just a pair of flip-flops in the suitcase. When I asked if that was all he was planning on taking, the response that I got was, "Well, I couldn't reach my swimsuit in the closet." I had to explain that Washington D.C. is absolutely nothing like Fort Lauderdale... but that just led to him wanting to know if we can go to Florida next Spring Break.

They only got to swim for a short time, since there's a long day of driving ahead, but that was fine with them. For me, though, having the trip actually underway feels a little bit like Christmas morning. After all of the anticipation, there's that slight let-down when you realize that things are probably going to go quick from here.

Nun the Wiser

When my life went to hell in a hand-basket, part of me wanted to throw myself into my work. They only issue was that I didn’t really like my primary work and my second job – covering high school sports for a local newspaper, which I did very much like – I had to quit so that I could be a half-of-the-time single father.

Not having the standing writing gig left me with a void any time that Martin and Casey weren’t around. For most of a year, I just filled that emptiness by feeling sorry for myself. It’s amazing how much self-loathing you can squeeze into a couple of days by yourself.

Eventually – thankfully – I got tired of wallowing in my own pity. I explored the option of getting a part-time job again, but it turns out that most employers have trouble working around an amoeba-like child custody agreement. The one offer that I got was willing to work around my time with the boys…if I committed pretty much every free minute that I had to them.

I was so tired of being in my house by myself that I actually considered that…right up until I started to remember the physical and mental toll that working 80-90 hours a week used to take on me.

Still, I really was sick of sitting around during the times that my sons weren’t around, so I started casting about for another idea. It took a while, but the thought of volunteering occurred to me.

Now, my initial thought was, “Heck, there’s gotta be a ton of places that could use a volunteer like me.” Well, that might be true for some people but it wasn’t for me. It didn’t dawn on me at first, but the same issues that I had with a part-time job – the fact that I have a rotating schedule of single fatherhood – was a hindrance for most organizations as well.

I was on a website looking at volunteer opportunities when I stumbled upon one for a convent…as in a place where nuns live. I was raised Catholic. I went to parochial school until junior high. Nuns are all right, I thought. So, I sent an e-mail asking for more information.

Within an hour, the volunteer coordinator was calling me to find out my availability. It didn’t take long after that for me to agree to become a part of their volunteer group that helps out with activities for elderly Sisters.

My initial gig there was to run a weekly trivia hour for whichever Sisters wanted to join in. The crowds were small, but it was fun to try to find trivia questions that are appropriate for nuns. (There’s a whole lot that aren’t.)

Part of the reason that I was asked to do that is because I actually do have a wealth of useless information in my head. Unfortunately, an awful lot of it revolves around pop culture…entertainment, sports, that kind of thing. As it happens, nuns that have devoted their lives to making the world a better place don’t really care which TV actor wasn’t allowed out of his contract to take the role of Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Even if you just tell them the answer, they don’t really know nor care who Tom Selleck is…not even when you explain what an awesome mustache he has.

Instead, I would go to subjects like geography or who is the patron saint of what or history. The questions were rarely too hard, but when you’re in your 70’s and 80’s facts that you might have learned when you were in school years ago don’t come to you quite as quickly as they once did.

My absolute favorite point in doing the trivia was when a question would spur a brief discussion of a topic. For example, one of the questions that I asked touched upon the Second Vatican Council from the early 1960’s, which led to things like Catholic services being done in languages besides Latin and advocated allowing nuns and lay people be more involved in services. I hadn’t picked the question – I honestly don’t even remember what it was – for any other reason than I thought they would know the answer to it.

What I ended up with was a 20 minute discussion and lesson from a group of women who had already taken their vows by the time of Council and the subsequent changes. The struggle to figure out who the first American president was that was born a U.S. citizen was replaced by passionate discourse and insight from people that didn’t just watch it from the outside, but saw the history up close and personal. I’m not even particularly interested in the Vatican II reforms, but it was fascinating to watch.

Late in the summer, a construction project at the convent interrupted the ability to do the trivia hour, so the volunteer coordinator asked if I would be interested in teaching a creative writing workshop. It felt kind of odd to offer writing tips to nuns that could very easily have been friends with the ones that taught me to read and write, but I agreed.

The Sisters at this convent have done things like provided humanitarian aid all over the world and helped build schools and medical centers in Third World countries (and some Second and First World ones as well). For most of their time on earth, their real lives have been plenty interesting enough without having to use creative techniques to jazz up the telling.

Still, I was given a group of six very willing Sisters as my class. They came in, sat down and stood at the ready to take notes. It was like the kind of weird dream that second grade me might have had.

Over the course of the six weeks, I asked them to do various writing exercise and one overarching assignment of creating a short fictional story based on an event from their real lives. It was fascinating to watch these women whose entire lives have been grounded in working in very real service capacities try to take the ropes off of their imaginations.

It was awesome when one of them would just completely go away from their training and come up with something that was a complete flight of fancy. It was just as satisfying to see them stretch and add some flair to events that had happened in their lives. Most of them were so used at looking at those events in black and white that it was fascinating to watch as they added color.

And, I can honestly say that I never would’ve thought that I’d be using the parables of Christ as a way to get into a discussion about using creative imagery to make a larger point, but that’s exactly what I found myself doing.

The biggest thing that the entire experience has done, however, is to keep me from feeling sorry for myself. No matter how bad my day might have been – no matter how challenging recent events might be in my life – it’s hard to sit across from women that sacrificed themselves for a cause. You don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate the fact that these women have spent a lifetime trying to make things better…oftentimes for the least amongst us. Maybe some people can face that and still complain, but I can’t.

It ended up being just what I needed. I’m not sure that you can ever actually plan to get more out of something than what you put into it, but it sure is a happy occurrence when that’s what you get.

Maybe I’ve even bargained down some time future Purgatory time for the rotten way I behaved as a child in Catholic school.

(And, just in case anyone is actually wondering about the presidential trivia question referred to somewhere in the post…technically, it’s John Tyler because he was the first president born after the Constitution was ratified. Martin Van Buren was the first president born after the Declaration of Independence, so he’s the first that wouldn’t have just been considered a British citizen at birth but really he was kind of born without a country. The rest of the first group of presidents would’ve started out as subjects of the crown.)

Little Villains

Do you think the parents of Hans Gruber knew that they were raising perhaps the greatest movie villain of all time?

I don't mean Alan Rickman's parents. I'm sure that somewhere along the line those Brits realized that they had a pretty good actor on their hands. No, I'm talking about the fictional Teutonic two-some that gave life to young Hans. At what point did their sweet little boy turn evil?

If you're not one of us that pulls out "Die Hard" to watch every Christmas (yes, it is a Christmas movie, but that's an argument for another day), then here's a reminder of the brilliant Mr. Gruber:

Here's why I'm asking...I think that there's a possibility that I'm raising a pair of budding super-villains in Marty and Casey. In particular, the youngest of my progeny seems to be cultivating an evil genius persona. I tried to tell him that one of the pre-requisites to being an evil genius is that you have to actually be a genius. I mean, it's right there in the title.

He rebutted with all of the stupid things that evil geniuses do that get them caught, so obviously the title "evil genius" is an honorary one.

Last year around this time, Casey actively recruited a henchman. He picked out the biggest kid in his grade and involved him in his schemes. This was through no fault of the other child, who is in reality a big sweetheart. No, Casey seemed to be doing it without the other child knowing.

The biggest indicator of this came when Casey convinced two different teachers and a bus driver that his henchman was to come home with him. The other boy was led to believe that he was going along to a birthday party...which is the same deception that Casey used on the adults. It wasn't until he showed up at the daycare with his henchman in tow that my son's plot was thwarted. Of course, the grown-ups had to figure out where the extra kid was really supposed to be.

Last night, as brothers do, the two of them were fighting. Recently, when these arguments have arisen Casey has taken to cribbing lines from the old Bill Bixby-Lou Ferrigno TV version of "The Incredible Hulk." Only he's ammended the famous line of, "You shouldn't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

Casey keeps saying, "You keep pushing me right to the edge, and you do not want me to go over. You don't know what I'm capable of...nobody does!"

Typically, that leads to Marty accusing Casey of being overdramatic, which is a personal afront to the acting ability of the younger one. "NO...I'M...NOT!" is usually the reply.

Since Thursday of this week, they've been arguing over a library book. Yes, I said a library book. Casey took out a book that Marty wants to read, and now won't let him read it until he's finished with it. Just for fun, Casey is reading the book at the rate of about one page a day. There are 216 pages. He quickly brushed aside the idea of just letting his brother read the book first because...well, I guess it's because that isn't what an evil genius would do.

Things came to a head last night and suddenly my home became the set of a really bad Sylvester Stallone action movie. (Do you say "really bad Sylvester Stallone action movie" or is the "really bad" just implied from the rest of the statement?)

I walked into the kitchen and Casey was standing in the middle. When I entered, he slowly turned and looked at me. "You say that payback is not the answer, but I say that it is. I'm about to get my revenge on. For eight years, I've had to put up with that brat and now it's time to get even. Oh, Marty! Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

Luckily, Casey only weighs about 40 lbs. so it wasn't that hard to grab him as he tried to run past, ready to get his "revenge on."

Now, I'm sure that from this it sounds like I've only got one super-villain walking around...but in my opening I included Marty. He's just a little less committed to the role. Sure, he likes the idea of world domination as much as the next guy, but he's a little more squeamish about getting there.

However, after Casey had repeatedly kept pushing buttons after his grand speech, Marty had finally had enough. He suddenly lunged at Casey and hissed through clenched teeth, "You think you know discipline? You don't know anything. I'll teach you discipline."

I managed to stop him before he tied up his brother and started reenacting the torture scene from either "Lethal Weapon" or "Casino Royale."

The funny thing is that neither of them ever actually watches movies like that. The closest they ever come are the Marvel superhero films...which have some of that stuff, but they're not quite in line with the Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Willis school of bang-bang, boom-boom filmmaking. Joss Whedon can write a lot of quippy lines, but he's never quite gotten to the level of "I'll be back" or "You're the disease, and I'm the cure" or even, "Yippe-kay-yay motherf***er." (And, yes, action geeks, I'm aware that only one of those lines was uttered by a villain.)

Casey even dresses the part. For two of his last three school pictures, he's worn a black tie on a black button-down shirt. He's asked repeatedly to be allowed to buy a suit. It's only a matter of time before he makes the transition to the tailored European fare sported by Hans Gruber and his ilk. If Casey is going to be an evil genius, he plans on being one of the nattily attired ones.

Thankfully, having known Marty and Casey all of their lives, it seems much more likely that they are preparing for a career making movies about bad guys that give cheesy speeches before their doom than to actually be one. Both hate any kind of pain and they both hate getting into trouble...and while they like to argue with each other, neither is particularly enamored with fighting.

Considering, however, that I've heard them argue over which would be better at taking over the world, I'm sure there will always be a flicker in the back of their minds of the path (hopefully) untaken.

Unemployment

I'm not sure why anyone would think otherwise, but make no bones about it...being unemployed sucks.

Wait...I take that back...being unemployed doesn't necessarily suck. There's plenty of free time. I recently discovered that a local channel shows old shows from my childhood in the afternoon, like "Emergency!" and "Dragnet" -- not the black & white one but the color version with Harry Morgan where Joe Friday keeps saying that all the kids are hopped up on drugs. Were I a stoner, I would be in total nirvanna.

Plus, it's almost fall. The weather is really nice and I can take advantage of the kids being in school to take long walks in the woods and find myself. I'm the catch and release sort, so when I do occassionally find myself, I just look for a minute and then let me go free.

Not having a standing income and having to try to find work is what sucks.

I hate looking for work. Part of the reason that I've spent my adult life working a series of jobs I didn't particularly like is because I hate looking for work.

Being a writer as well as a business professional gives me the chance to apply for both working stiff office jobs and freelance writing work at the same time. Basically, I have double the amount of people that can judge me and reject me.

Luckily, thanks to my early days as a writer I'm so used to being rejected that it almost doesn't register. I can tell from the first sentence that I'm looking at a rejection e-mail or letter and I stop reading at that point. A friend recently said, "But what if they tell you what you did wrong."

What I learned a long time ago is that if someone thinks that you suck or that your work sucks, they aren't going to tell you anything that you don't already know. The reason that they think you suck is based on their own perception. Either it was just their opinion or your work really did suck...and I know that I'm self aware enough to have probably already known that when I submitted. Reading the letter where they reaffirm it for me doesn't do any good.
There are times where they say that you suck and your tempted to say, "What the hell are you talking about? That was at least better than average!" or "My qualifications were exactly what you said that you were looking for!" The problem is that your opinion really doesn't matter. I've hired people before and I know that the opinions of the people that I didn't hire were pretty inconsequential to me. No sense railing at someone that couldn't care less about what you're upset about.

Originally, I wasn't planning on including a chapter in my forthcoming book "My Boss is an Idiot...Now What?" on searching for work but this is making me rethink that. After all, that idiot that you interview with today could be your idiot boss tomorrow. I'm fairly certain that my own idiocy as a boss started right from that first phone interview.

I'm going to add that to my chapter outline right after I get done checking Indeed.com and Media Bistro for the fourth time in the last hour.

After all, it's been a full 12 hours since the last time that anyone has told me that I suck. 

Go To H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks

My sons have developed a fascination with swearing. I don’t swear around them and neither does their mother. That lack of exposure has led them to be curious about the social constraints regarding swearing.

They don't actually swear, but they like to point it out when they see a bumper sticker with a curse word on it or when they see an ad promoting "Kick-Ass 2." Sometimes that can be amusing, such as when I heard them arguing about whether shit was the ‘S word’ or the ‘SH word.’

The other day, and not for any other reason than sometimes I say things like this, I said, “What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks was that?”

Casey looked at me quizzically and said, “What does that mean?”

“That I don’t understand why that person just pulled in front of me,” I explained.

“No,” he said. “What does H-E-double-hockey-sticks mean?”

Suddenly, I was in a parking lot trying to explain to an 8-year-old kid that hockey sticks kind of look like L’s…even if it’s just barely...so I was kind of spelling hell instead of just saying hell. As my sons are wont to do, he immediately told his mother about his newly found knowledge at the earliest opportunity.

The troubling part is that I inadvertently added spelling as an option for swearing. I’m sure that it’s only a matter of time before I hear, “Why don’t you go f-u-c-k yourself?” coming out of his mouth.

Casey has already amped up his use of substitute words like ‘heck’ and ‘fricking.’ I thought about trying to get him to switch to ‘frack’ instead…you know, to at least give him some geek cred…but then I would’ve had to borrow a season of “Battlestar Gallactica” from a friend and then try to explain the socio-political undertones to him.

Grown-ups didn’t swear around me when I was a kid, at least for the most part. I learned about profanity the old fashioned way…from comedians.

While the generations prior had learned various naughty words from listening to Red Foxx albums when the adults weren't paying attention, I was at the forefront of using bad stuff from cable television.

My older sister was the first person I knew who had cable in the mid-1970’s. She tapped into the new medium early enough that HBO wasn’t even in existence when she first had it. When the premium channel was first added to her lineup, the now titan of the entertainment industry wasn’t even broadcasting full-time yet.

Thanks to HBO, I was able to learn George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine around the time that I was Casey’s age now…making me, I believe, one of the first of a new generation that heard Carlin’s routine for the first time while watching him say those words on television.

I didn’t even know what two of the words meant (hint: one rhymes with hunt and the other had something to do with a rooster lollipop). When you’re watching Carlin on the sneak, you can’t just go off asking people what the words that he used mean.

 While that earned me an unending appreciation of Carlin – when I saw him live for the last time before his death, he was still closing some shows talking about words that you’re not supposed to say – there was another comedian had a stronger influence on my thinking regarding profanity.

Freddie Prinze – not the Sarah Michelle Gellar/”Scooby-Doo”/”I Know What You Did Last Summer” one, but his father – was an actor who I liked on his sitcom “Chico & the Man.” Then I saw his stand-up routine. Suddenly, the sweet and safe generically Hispanic guy from the sitcom was a cocksure New Yorker who hung out in comedy clubs. Instead of the pat lines produced by necessity by network sitcom writers, Prinze on cable seemed inclined to say whatever he felt like saying.

When you’re eight, having the realization that you can be two different people if you want – one in polite society and another if the setting is more relaxed – can be pretty liberating.

 

However, I’m finding it hard to teach that to my own children. It’s probably just one of those things that they have to learn on their own…but I’m impatient and would just as soon help them figure it out quicker. Of course, there’s a possibility now that I might need to rethink my lessons on patience.

If you can’t teach your kids the “Seven Words That You Can Never Say on Television” – most of which now get said even on network broadcasts with regularity – you might as well find something else to teach them.

Not to be overly sappy, but I still remember where I was when a newscaster announced that Freddie Prinze had shot himself (he died the following day). There’s a scene in the movie “Fame” where the high school student that wants to be a comedian talks about Prinze’s influence on him...that scene almost made me cry when I first saw it as a kid.

 

It’s not every role model in your life who teaches you about freedom, death AND the skillful use of profanity.

Here’s a clip of Prinze’s HBO special from when I was a kid:

(Disclaimer: One, yes, I realize that he doesn’t actually swear all that much in his routine, but I was eight when I saw it. Saying hell a few times would’ve qualified to me. Two, I also realize that the routine would now not be considered politically correct. It was 1976. There was no such thing as politically correct. I apologize for not being able to go back in time and adjust the social mores of 40 years ago.)

For those wondering about the debate from the opening paragraph, the floor eventually resolved that since they couldn’t figure out another ‘S word’ that the more streamlined designation would be used instead of ‘SH word.’ It’s so nice when profanity can be used as a civics lesson.

Swearing Addendum

There was a story from my youth that came up in the writing of the post about profanity that subsequently didn’t really fit in. However, never one to edit myself down, I decided to just include it separately.

When I moved to rural Michigan as a youngster, it was because my mother married a jackass who was originally from there. Now, you might be thinking that you’re not supposed to say anything if you don’t have something nice to say about a person. While I normally appreciate that line of thinking, the fact of the matter is that the guy my mother married was a jackass…empirically.

I did not swear in front of my family when I was young. I don’t really swear in front of my family now. In an Irish household growing up, using the Lord’s name in vain (“Jesus!”) was infinitely better than telling someone to fuck off.

One evening when I was around 14, I was sitting on the floor watching television while my mother and her jackass husband were behind me. For reasons that I have no recollection of, her husband began flicking me in the back of the head. Perhaps I had done something that annoyed him, or more likely he was just doing it because he was a jackass.

He seemed to have it in his head that he was going to get his shots in on me while I was still skinny as a rail and before I grew to the stature of my brothers…who are 6-foot-4 and 6-foot-8, respectively.

That’s the kind of person that he was; only pick on someone when you clearly have the upper hand.

I started out casually saying, “Quit it.” When that didn’t work, I
upped the volume of my “Quit it!” as the anger built.

Finally, I reared around and yelled, “Keep your fucking hands off of me, old man!”

As soon as I realized what I just said, I took a look at my mother
whose back had stiffened at the offensive language. For a brief
second, it looked as though she was going to explode at me.

Then our eyes met. I’m not sure what expression I had on my face, but I watched as my mother became less sure of what she wanted to say, eventually deciding not to say anything and then finally moving her gaze away from mine.

I went back to watching television and her husband kept his hands to himself for the rest of the time that I was sitting there.

That didn’t last, of course. Being a jackass there were plenty of
other occasions where he tried to pick fights with me, but I learned quickly that it got me nowhere to take the bait and figured out how to control myself.

That actually led to one of my favorite stories about him, even if it
doesn’t cast me in the best light. One time, I thought that the
fighting between he and my mother was progressively escalating into something that might become physical. So, I waited until a point when it was just the two of us – he and I – and said, “You better make sure that you keep your hands off of my mother.”

He sneered and said, “Really? What are you going to do about it if I don’t?”

Quite calmly I looked at him and said something along the lines of,
“I’m not going to do anything by myself. The first phone call I’m
going to make will be to my brother-in-law explaining the situation and asking him to arrange for things. Then I’m going to have him fly out here with my 6-foot-8 brother – you know, the crazy one – and I’m going to tell him that you hit our mother. We’re then going to lock the two of you in a room for a little while and let him do whatever he wants to you. Once he’s done, we’re going to bring in my other brother – you know, the 6-foot-4 one with all of the military training – and let him finish the job. He’ll then tell us how to clean up and dispose of you so that no one ever knows what happened. Then we’ll all go back to our normal lives and forget that you ever existed. That’s what I’ll do.”

By the time that I was finished, he wasn’t sneering anymore.

Funny thing…he also didn’t act like he was going to hit my mother any more after that.