Sam's Blog

It’s a classic question for kids:  What kind of superpower would you like?  And, with the massive comic book industry, which has given us a giant mix up of all sorts of superheroes, there are plenty of options, from classics like flight or super strength, to more exotic ones, like the ability to manipulate certain elements, mental powers, or stones stuck in the forehead that shoot rays or something.

My daughters and I have had this conversation, and they want mental powers.  A common choice for adolescent boys is X-ray vision, but I firmly believe that anybody that would choose that one is . . . well, you know.

For me, it’d be flight.  Since I was a very little boy, I wanted to fly like Superman.

Of course, this is a bad idea.  If I had this superpower, short-lived mischief and mayhem would ensue.

I’d probably kill myself immediately.  First of all, I’d want to go fast, really fast.  In the movies, Superman and Ironman zip about at thousands of miles per hour.  But speeds above Mach 1 tend to create heat buildup. This is not from friction, which is a common misunderstanding that people have about high speeds.  When flying above the speed of sound, the air in front of me would not have time to move around me, and so I’d be ramming into air molecules with my face.  This shock wave increases pressure and compresses the gas, which would increase temperature.  The Concorde flew at Mach 2, and its nose heated up to over 300 degrees Fahrenheit, even in the high altitude where there were less air molecules to compress and where ambient temperatures were 60 below.  That’s the equivalent of getting my face hot enough to cook meat, just to go twice the speed of sound.

Of course, I would not want to settle for that maudlin pace.  I’d perhaps need to save some astronauts or something, and they go about 17,000 miles an hour to maintain orbit (or nearly five miles a second) up there on the International space station.  When they return to atmosphere, the crafts they use heat up to nearly 3000 degrees as they reenter the atmosphere.

So, to fly at a goodly pace, even in high and cold atmosphere, I will get so hot that my clothes will burst into flame and fall away behind me.  My hair and skin will melt or catch fire or whatever, and I will die a flaming death.

Also.  At nice high altitudes, the air is really cold.  Remember that 60 below, up at 50,000 feet or so?  Anytime I would fly up real high, I’d burn my clothes off, and then I’d slow down so that I didn’t catch fire, and I’d be stuck up there, without clothes, in the cold, and I’d freeze like a block of ice and fall out of the sky.

There’s not much air up there, either.  Climbers need oxygen when they go up Everest, and that’s only half the elevation of the Concorde.  I’d die of asphyxiation.  Oddly, I might not notice this until I blacked out.  From what I’ve heard, a very painless way to die is to just breathe an atmosphere that is too low in oxygen.  The person is breathing, so they don’t even notice that they’re dying until they pass out, and then they still don’t notice, because they’re unconscious.  I’d fry, freeze, and faint.

So, at this point, I’ve decided to not fly too high.  Like Icarus, I recognize the danger.  I’ll fly lower.

At lower temperature, I can breathe and not freeze.  However, the thicker air will not be as beneficial as one might hope.  At higher speeds, air viscosity and behavior changes significantly from what we are accustomed to as we walk or run.  The engineers who made the Bugatti Veyron and now make the Chiron have to deal with air turbulence in their design plans—at 270 mph, at sea level, air feels like a thick soup.  The reason those cars can’t go even faster is not a function of horsepower—it’s a function of increasing air resistance.  The cars are designed to be very slippery in shape, to cut smoothly through that soupy air, and still, it holds them back.

My body is not designed for aerodynamic slipping through thick soup.  I imagine the first time I flew at low altitudes about 500 miles an hour, the wind resistance would crush my own spine into my pelvis, causing all sorts of long-term damage.  If I tried the classic flying pose, with hands out in front, the wind would also rip my own arms right off my torso.  The first time I’d open my mouth for a breath of air (this is why I’m flying low, remember?  To breathe?), the air would be forced into my lungs so hard that in a fraction of a second, they’d both pop like balloons, exploding my chest cavity.

So, here’s the scene.  Somebody is in dastardly danger, nearly falling from a cliff, holding on for dear life.  The local rescue service is unable to help.  Many miles away, I leap from my couch, step outside, and rocket into the sky to offer assistance.  To avoid causing panic and damage to surrounding areas from my trailing sonic blast, I go high and fly fast.  On the way, my legs freeze solid whilst my head bursts into flame, leaving shards of my clothing fluttering behind.  When I come back down into the lower atmosphere, I try to breathe, which causes my torso to detonate, just as it’s being horribly compressed and my arms are being ripped off by air turbulence.  What’s left of my half-crisped, half-frozen naked corpse slams (at several hundreds of miles per hour) into the cliff right next to whomever I was coming to save.  They plunge to their death, so aghast at what they just saw come plummeting out of the sky at them that they don’t have time to be afraid as they fall.

And that’s why it’s probably best that I not fly like Superman.  Even though he makes it look so easy in the movies.

Which leads, obviously, to an interesting question.  Why the sudden explosion in the popularity of superheroes on-screen?  The comic book industry has been alive and well for several decades now, but in the last 15 years or so, we’ve seen movie after movie.  You’ve got six Spiderman movies since 2002.  Seven Batman films since 1989, plus the Lego Batman movie, and the Dark Knight has been a character in several more . . . and that’s ignoring all of the Batman cartoon movies.  You have 14 movies in the Avengers universe (I counted) since 2008, with plenty more planned.    Netflix inundates its subscribers with superhero miniseries.  This is not to say that there didn’t used to be superhero movies.  But they used to be considered silly, kid stuff.  And they weren’t well made.  No, the adults were busy watching serious fare, like The Godfather.   Now, they’re big movies, with big name actors and big budgets and respected directors.  What’s going on here?

Well, here’s my take.

First of all the special effects technology has recently reached a level where Hollywood can finally get superheroes right.  Remember the old Incredible Hulk show, where Lou Ferrigno played the Hulk?  Lou was a seriously oversized man with bulgy muscles and such, but he wasn’t quite what we wanted with the Hulk. When he got angry, he generally threw a chair or a table.  That wasn’t exciting.  Shoot, I can throw a table. Not as far as Lou, perhaps, but still.  Now, the Hulk destroys entire buildings.  Now the Hulk picks up Norse gods and treats them like Raggedy Ann dolls, and it feels good to watch.  “YEAH!” is what we shout when we watch the Hulk do hulky things.  When I see the Hulk do his thing, my inner man-child, Magnus Bicep, giggles with glee.  Remember watching Superman fly in the original 1978 movie?  He flies sloooow.  Now, his flight just looks better.  Now he’s fast.

So, there’s a whole world of things Hollywood can do now, visually, and so they do them.  And as long as the customers keep paying to watch it, they’ll keep giving it to us.

But that’s not enough.  There’s also the Magnus Bicep issue.

When guys watch these types of movies, they want to see the destruction.  They want to see the power.  Because guys want to be destructive and powerful.  That’s why there are all these different organizations and social phenomena and such that channel guy power: the NFL, boxing, UFC, body building, the marines, fireworks . . . and even some less obvious iterations, such as Pokémon (which involves constant battles and power ratings and such).  Superheroes themselves are nothing but modern mythology.  Worldwide, cultures have stories of people with great power, from Thor and Beowulf to Hercules and Samson, from John Henry to Lancelot to Gilgamesh to Karna and Rama.

People (not just guys) are attracted to power.  When I watch the Hulk go rampaging away, I secretly imagine it’s me.  I’m know that I’m not the only one, either.   Pick out the most destructive character in any superhero milieu, and that’s gonna be a lot of people’s favorite.  Avengers?  Hulk.  Guardians?  Drax.   DC?  Superman, because he could destroy everything.  He’s different because he never uses all his power, but he could.  For these people, the recent anime One Punch Man is the culmination.  One Punch Man is about a superhero who is so powerful that he can destroy any enemy with a single punch.  His power is infinite, and as a result, he’d constantly bored.  The show is a careful deconstruction of the whole superpower concept, and it’s hilariously insightful.  But no matter.  I watch the show, and I wish I was that guy.  Even if he’s bald and his superhero outfit is kinda’ cheesy.

Why are we attracted to this?  Why do we want this power?

Because the world is a scary place, and we feel impotent.  The explosion of superhero movies can be loosely tied to September 11, 2001.  We saw evil people do evil things, right here on American soil, and we felt helpless.  We watched those planes go into those buildings, we watched the smoke pour out, and we knew that we were seeing real death, real evil.  I think we had forgotten about evil.  Communism was mostly gone, and the economy was fine, and America had just finished the Clinton presidency, and now we had George Bush.  In many people’s minds, we were done with this horny guy, and now we had this dunce, and politics were carrying on . . . but there was no sense of the struggle between good and evil.  And then 9-11.  Death and destruction.  Where would it come next?  Who would die next?  The news gave us plenty of coverage of the rescue efforts, and we watched real life heroes, firefighters, police officers and the like, risk their lives to pull people from the rubble.

And we thought, somewhere deep in our soul . . . that’s not enough.  It’s not enough to try to clean up the mess afterwards.  We wish, down there underneath our conscious minds, that we could stop it from happening at all.  Well, superheroes . . . that’s exactly what they do.  Superheroes stop evil, every movie.  That’s what makes them superheroes.  In these movies, the evil is often cartoonish and simple to understand.  The bad guys want to take over everything, or to destroy the world, and they often wear nazi-looking outfits, and they have funny accents.  This concrete moral vision is often criticized, by the way.  But it serves a certain function.  In the real world, the evil is not always so clear and simple.  It’s hard to recognize.  In fact, there’s a large cadre of intellectuals and such out there who have been saying (for some time now) that there’s no such thing as evil, really.  Evil is always tied to a certain point of view.  Evil is a concept applied to the other as a subjective interpretive attempt to create a sense of well-being.  You may remember that George Bush was roundly criticized when he framed the struggle with Islamic terrorism as one of good versus evil.

We have these philosophical currents leaking down from Nietzsche and Sartre and inundating us in so many ways.  And so when we see evil, we don’t know what to do about it.  We don’t know how to react to it.  Culturally, superhero movies are a response to the nihilism of a philosophy that mocks the very concept of evil and that has crept deeply into our American zeitgeist.

Of course another criticism of superhero movies is that they’re fundamentally childish.  Back when adults were adults, they watched movies like The Godfather, which is an extremely adult movie in that it’s boring for kids.  Not to say it’s not a great movie—it is.  But it’s not entertaining.  The Godfather is a beautiful, perfect piece of moviemaking art.  It’s like a Rembrandt painting, where you can study it, carefully, for a long time, and not be wasting time.  But it’s not fun.  According to this criticism, superhero movies are essentially childish, and they’re popular because we are a childish culture, chock full of arrested development.

This criticism, I think, is valid.   We are suffering from prolonged childishness.  We are children, all of us, perhaps.  We are, grown men and women, getting excited to see a kid’s comic book character wear a silly outfit and wreak justice on a recalcitrant evil.

We want to cheer.  We want fairy tales.  We know that the world is messed up, and we want heroes.  We want to be heroes.

And I want to fly.

And now, both of my children are in junior high.  My memories of Junior high are full of nervous consternation.  Everything was difficult in junior high.  Everything, I think.  I don’t have fond memories of Junior high.  But I do have strong memories.

First of all, the puberty issue.  Some little innocent boy will be minding his own business, climbing trees and shooting his bb gun (back when I was a kid) or playing hours and hours of shoot-the-bad-guys video games (now), and taking breaks to eat Twinkies and hot dogs, and suddenly, boom, puberty will smack that kid’s body, all unexpectedlike!

That kid will start sprouting black hairs right out of his armpit!  And other places.  These hairs will be pointless, unnecessary.  What are these stupid armpit hairs for?  This is the thought of the kids who get smacked by puberty relatively early.  The problem is that puberty does not smack all of the kids at the same time.  Oh, no, some kids get smacked at around 9 or so, and others wait until they are 15 to get smacked.  So, if a kid is a “late bloomer,” his armpit hair thought will be, when do I get MY armpit hairs?  He will not notice the pointless nature of the armpit hairs—he will only notice that he doesn’t have any of them, and this will cause mental pain.

Along with armpit hairs come varieties of other physical issues.  The boy’s feet will start to grow, grow grow, until it looks as if he has swim flippers hanging down there from his ankles.  The boy will start wearing clown-size enormous shoes.  These oversize feet will cause a general sense of clumsiness that will last from anywhere from a couple of years to the rest of the boy’s life.  Also, the boy will sometimes start growing zits right there on his forehead.  These happen because his forehead has, due to the smacking of puberty, started producing enough grease to fry potatoes.  This grease clogs up his skin, which cause acne.  This acne will cause mental pain.

So, this boy has suddenly become unfamiliar and a bit unsure of his own body.  He won’t trust it . . . he will be ashamed of it.  For years, this poor kid’s whole life, this body has worked just fine.  And now, it’s sprouting hairs and zits and absurd feet.  Also, the boy’s body will start to smell.

This boy will go to school, and he will see a variety of different people, all pretty much his age.  But some of them look nearly like adults, with beards and height and muscles and such, and some of them will look like fourth graders.  This dichotomy will cause mental pain.

And the girls.  Oh, yes, this boy will realize that the girls are changing as well.  Suddenly, the girls have . . . grown . . . certain . . . things . . . that the boy finds absolutely, totally, completely, inordinately, fascinating.  And they’re everywhere!  Where did they come from?  All of the girls are getting them, right there in front!  What am I supposed to do about all these breasts? he will think.   And the reality is that he should do nothing at all about them.  But that just doesn’t seem right.  He feels an intense need to do something about them.  This confusion will cause mental pain.

An issue that has always been there for this little boy will suddenly, because of the evil puberty, become about 400 times as important:  Don’t look stupid.  The boy will do absolutely anything to not be laughed at.  This is difficult, because of the big feet and the klutziness and the grease and the smells.  But it is doubly hard because the boy has an equally powerful urge, an urge that is pushing in an opposite direction: don’t be invisible.  Now, either of these urges, alone, can lead to a perfectly acceptable game plan.  If he has only the first urge, then he should walk silently through the halls, sit quietly in class, be polite and boring and pleasant.  If he has only the second urge , then he can be loud, and friendly, or obnoxious, and everybody will know his name.

The problem is that most junior high kids have both of these urges warring inside their little puberty-smacked heart.  This leads to odd behavior.

Let’s say, just as a hypothetical example, that this kid is sitting in English Class, and he’s just told somebody (somebody that he thinks will be impressed) that he can belch with extreme volume.  This person’s name is Kurt, and the boy doesn’t really like Kurt, but Kurt is further along in the puberty game, and so this kid really wants to impress Kurt.  Say that Kurt is interested, but not exactly impressed with this information, and asks for a demonstration.  Say that the kid has a sneaking suspicion that the middle of class is not the best time for a demonstration.  But the desire to impress Kurt is still strong.

So, let’s just say that Kurt cajoles this kid until he says—whispers—because it’s the middle of class, of course, “Okay, but it’ll take me a minute.”  The kid starts doing this thing with his throat and stomach that will, in about thirty seconds, produce the belch.  The whole time, Kurt is fixedly watching, waiting.  This attention from a more-advanced-in-puberty person is intoxicating, exciting.  Mrs. Day, the teacher, is up there teaching away, because it’s the middle of class.  There are lots of girls.

Then, let’s just say that the kid feels that little click in his gut, when he can pull the air into his stomach.  He fills his stomach with air.  Kurt is watching.  Nobody else is aware of what is happening.  Right before he does it, the kid feels a slight hesitation—he really isn’t sure that the middle of class is a good time for the demonstration—but Kurt is watching, and so he lets it fly.

Let’s just say that it’s a magnificent belch.  It fills the room with all the depth and volume of a high-priced audio system, turned up to eleven, for about six full, long seconds. Let’s just say that the whole class turns, as coordinated as if this was a movie scene, and stares.  Mrs. Day stops, flabbergasted.  The boy is not big.  He’s a skinny little thing, and he’s always been a good student (he will grow up to teach English, as a matter of fact).  She is standing there, wondering, how did that sound come out of him?  Kurt sits there, his face blank.  The boy slowly looks around, and sees everybody’s eyes.  The girls are looking, looking, but they are not impressed.  The boys are all grinning.  For them, this has been a nice deviation from the normal English class lesson.  He scans up to the front of the room, and Mrs. Day is . . . disappointed.

The boy’s face turns bright red.  This red is a combination of pride and mortification and clarity and confusion and hope and love and lust and many other indecipherable emotions and feelings and inclinations.  He feels as if his whole body is going to explode.  But it doesn’t.  He just sits there.  Mrs. Day pauses, takes a breath, and continues with whatever she was doing.  The girls all turn back away, glancing at each other and rolling their eyes.  Kurt turns away.  The moment passes.  After class, Mrs. Day will ask him to stay for a moment, and she will tell him not to do that again, and he will agree, ashamed.  He will slowly walk home after school, alone, and wonder why he did that.  However, he will also practice the loud belching some more.  Somewhere out there, there are people who will be truly impressed.  He’ll find them.  He knows this in his soul.

And that’s why I tell my daughters, today, to avoid those boys in their class.  Not that the girls need much encouragement to stay away from kids with zits and enormous floppy feet and bad smells who belch in class.  But I still say to them, gently, with my best father voice, “You girls should stay away from the boys.  They’re insane.”

Here is a story to illustrate the difference between me and my wife.

Last night was a back-to-school party for the girls.  They go to a small Christian school called Gloria Deo Academy.  I don’t like that they go to school.  It creates all sorts of socially awkward situations.  In a perfect world, I would go to Gloria Deo Academy once a year—the day that I present them with a check for my daughters’ tuition.  For the rest of the year, Gloria Deo Academy would be like Washington DC, or like Europe, or like the Moon—invisible entities that occasionally affect me in ways that I don’t fully understand, but I don’t have to think about them often, and I don’t go there myself, because there are lots of people that I don’t want to see.  You may be thinking that the moon is not overpopulated.  To my knowledge, 12 men have visited.  It’s a tourist trap.  I don’t like tourist traps.

The problem is that Gloria Deo Academy, being a small private school, is constantly making efforts to get parents involved.  They have functions and meetings and get-togethers and committees and clubs and projects and all sorts of random blither.

Ashlei signs up for all of this stuff.  I counted, and last school year (2016-2017) we went to 81 school functions, meetings, get-togethers, committees, clubs, and other random blither.  She went to even more on her own.

This year, school has not even started yet.  NOT EVEN STARTED YET!  There have been 3 events.  One of them was planned and produced by my wife.  That was a swim party/potluck meal.  Ashlei, of course, has gone to all three.  (The one that she planned also cost us $60, and I don’t want to get into a digression concerning our very different attitudes about spending money.)  I managed to avoid one of these events by claiming to have scurvy.  “Scurvy?” she said, staring at me.  “Yes.  Scurvy.  Can’t go.  Very contagious.”  She berated me for a while—don’t think she believed me—and then tried kicking, but I just lay on the ground and rolled away from her, and finally she gave up.

Guess what was planned for yesterday?  A swim party/potluck.  “We already did one of these,” I pointed out.  She twitched her kicking leg, so I gave in.

So.  Yesterday, it was 70 degrees out, dark clouds, rain in the air.  The school has planned a swimming party for 4 o’clock.  It seems that God himself is frowning on this particular affair.  I don’t bother mentioning this to Ashlei, of course.  No. We go to the swimming party.  Actually, I go.  She manages to be an hour late.

Guess how many Gloria Deo kids show up to the swimming party?

Six.  Total.  1/3 of which are my own children.  It’s at a big public pool, and the water is not heated, so the kids don’t want to get in.  But I’m not having any of this.  I’m in a bad mood.  They stand there by the water, shivering, and they look back at me.  “I paid five bucks for you to be here, you better get in that water!” I roar at them.  Sobbing, they get in.

Because it’s a public pool, it’s open to the public.  Well, the public isn’t very interested in swimming on wet rainy 70-degree days.  No, Just Gloria Deo Academy and Ashlei think that this is a good idea.  So, there we are at this enormous public pool, with about eight lifeguards, and six little kids shivering in the water, and I realize that one single member of the public is here.  It’s an older gentleman, perhaps 60.  He’s got a nice big scraggly beard, and a nice big potbelly, and he’s wearing a speedo.  He’s frolicking in the shallow end.

“Girls!” I shout.  They look over at me.  “Stay away from that guy!” I shout, pointing.  Because the place is so empty, all six children, and all eight lifeguards, and the creepy old speedo man himself all hear me.   I have to shout it loudly, though, because I am on the other side of the fence, because I didn’t want to pay another three dollars, because I don’t want to swim, because it’s cold and wet and rainy.  But if that guy starts frolicking in the direction of my daughters, I’ll head right over this fence to speak with him.

He does not.  He frolics alone.  This “swim party” takes two hours.  Afterwards, it gets worse.

The potluck supper.  Well, all the families show up at six.  They’re not stupid—they know not to go to a swimming party in this type of weather.  I thought that Gloria Deo was a small private school, but I was wrong.  About two thousand people show up.  Lots and lots of children.  I believe I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs about my feelings concerning children, but just as a quick reminder, I’m generally against them.

We sit down at a table.  Ashlei goes off to talk to people.  I don’t recognize anybody.  Even the people that she is talking to don’t look all that familiar, except for one lady that I do vaguely recognize, who admonishes me for not writing more blogs.  “I don’t even know who you are, and you’re admonishing me?” is what I want to say, but I don’t, because Ashlei is right there, and might start kicking again.  So in the end, I sit and look vaguely at nothing.  Then the lines start, and people start getting their food.  Abbey, who is like her mother, comes and sits down with a large passel of other children.  I don’t recognize any of these children, although I’m quite sure that I’ve seen them all before, probably at some of the 81 events from last year.   They sit around me and talk.  Abbey is very popular at Gloria Deo, but not with kids her own age—she is popular with younger kids, 3^rd and 4^th and 5^th graders.  And so, I am surrounded by little kids.  I get my food.  I eat it.  Anna comes up to me.  “Let’s go sit in the car,” I say.

Anna is like me.  She says, “Okay.”

We walk over to the car.  It’s sprinkling.  We get in the car and wait.  “Ah,” I say.  “Much better.”

Anna says, “Yes.  Much better.”

45 minutes later, the rest of the family joins us.

My sister named Christian married a guy who apparently had a rotten jaw.  He had to have surgery, and she said that his neck swelled horribly, and he looked like something from the circus.

John (That’s her husband, the one with the rotten jaw) recently texted me and asked for advice on how to deal with the debilitating effects of rotten jaw surgery.  This is because, anticipating that he might need my moral support and advice someday, I went ahead and had jaw surgery myself, back in 1994.  I didn’t have a rotten jaw; I had my surgery because somebody hit the side of my face so hard that my entire mandible came disconnected and moved to the right, about half an inch.  He was not very in control with where he swung his hands.  I did all of this so that, one day, I would be able to offer encouragement to a brother-in-law in need.

That’s the kind of guy I am.  One cannot properly empathize without having gone through a similar experience.  So, here is some advice and empathy for John, who looks like he got a balloon stuck in his throat:

1. Use this time to go ahead and lose some weight. If you’re like most Americans, you’re overweight.  This is because you have no self-control and you eat all sorts of processed semi-food products.   When I had my jaw surgery, I had my teeth wired shut for many days, during which I survived on Ensure shakes.  These products are designed for old people that are senile.  They are disgusting, so you can get a good side benefit, because you won’t want to eat them.  You will long for pizza and Twinkies, but all you will be able to do is drink slimy nastiness.  I lost a good 10 pounds due to my situation, and I didn’t have much to lose; I weighed 145 pounds and had 7% body fat.  You, because you’ve become slightly jiggly, should expect to lose 30 or 40 pounds.
2. Do not expect any sympathy. Having gone through quite a few adult surgical procedures (42, to be exact, although who’s counting?), I can tell you that nobody will care about your pain.  Nobody will even notice that you’ve had surgery, unless of course your particular surgical procedure causes your neck to swell like a bullfrog in heat.
3. Speaking of using throat swelling to attract members of the opposite sex, I also had horrible throat swelling. I don’t know how that tactic works for frogs, but it’s not too effective for human women of the female species.  I clearly recall one moment, standing by a building, when a young lady that I considered quite attractive walked by me.  She looked at me, at the monstrosity with eyeballs that was rising up out from between my shoulders, and I saw a clear reaction, but it wasn’t any sort of oh-take-me-you-man-in-heat reaction.  It looked more like disgust to me, and I suspect that I saw her retch a bit.  There was another girl (this one knew who I was) who, when she saw me, started crying.  I am not making that up.
4. Take drugs for the pain. I had lots of pain.  Part of the reason was that, halfway through the surgery, the doctors decided that they wanted to do a different surgery, after they’d made several cuts and slices in my tender flesh.  This change in direction caused them to make several extra cuts and slices.  They also made a few dozen slices inside my mouth.  I have horrible inside-the-mouth scarring.  My advice concerning pain is, take lots and lots of pills.  Tell the doctor that you have pain, and that you want a giant Sam’s Club/Costco 12-month jug o’ pills, the kind that involve prescriptions.  Then, after your pain has lessened, you can sell the extra pills on the secondary market for a nice profit, although I’ve heard that this is slightly illegal.  Or, if you get hooked on the pills (painkillers are quite addictive) you’ll have a nice big jug of them.
5. Use this time to take up a new hobby. You’ll be sitting around a lot in a fog of drug addled misery, with hours upon hours of empty time.  What better time to try your hand at the bagpipes, or day trading?
6. Don’t let your (or any ) children see you while you are hideous. If grown women cry or vomit at the sight of you, think of how important it is to not subject your own children to an R rated vision of your own face.  They might need therapy when they get older, and they might expect you to pay the bills.  So you should hide out in your bedroom, with the door locked.  Also keep the lights off, because your wife shouldn’t have to look at you either.  Also, you should not look in mirrors.  When I looked into the mirror, I felt nauseated disgust, and I started crying.  You don’t need to be dealing with clinical depression because you’re hideous at this important time of your life.

So that’s really all there is to surviving hideous jaw rot surgery accompanied by hideous throat swelling and pain and misery.

Well, as you recall, we left the story with my daughter, Annaleise, being whisked off to surgery as her parents argued.

At around 10:00, she was done and awake.  Of course, no going home just yet: she had to pee for them again.  I do declare, Cox Hospital certainly does seem fixated on the urinary habits of their patients.  At 2:00 or so, Anna managed to take care of her business, and then she could go home.

Lots of people sent her all sorts of exciting crap:

1. She got some flowers.
2. She got more flowers.
3. More flowers.
4. More flowers.
5. Andy’s frozen custard gift card. Regrettably, her painkillers cannot be taken with excess sugar, so I had to relieve her of the gift card.
6. A book.
7. Another book.
8. A puppy. A beautiful tiny golden retriever. Ashlei doesn’t like dogs, so the puppy is now dead.
9. Pretty socks.
10. A third book.
11. A large bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. See comment on item #5
12. A box of macaroni and cheese.
13. A gift card to Amazon.
14. A gift card to Barnes and Noble.
15. Just kidding about the puppy. It’s not really dead.
16. A shirt that says “gymnastics!”
17. A gift card to some other restaurant.
18. Actually, there’s no puppy at all.
19. But the rest of these gifts are not made up.
20. A letter from the hospital, praising her for bravery.

I have been very pleased with Abbey.  She watched all of these gifts come for her sister, and she was completely not at all jealous.

Surveying the kitchen table, with all of this swag covering it, Ashlei said, “Man!  We should have surgery more often!”

I said, “Nope.  People only gave her stuff because she’s young and looks innocent.  Adults don’t get this kind of sympathy.”

She shook her head.  “You’re so cynical.”

“No, I’m serious.  Nobody even notices if an adult has surgery.”

“Sam—”

“Ashlei, I had surgery in February.  How many gifts and such did I get?”

“You . . . what are you talking about?!?

“Yes.  I had my gall bladder out.  And my spleen.  And my lungs.  I didn’t get one gift.”

“You didn’t have surgery last month!”

“See!?!  Nobody even notices.”

“Wait . . . your lungs?!?  How do you breathe?”

You know how these types of conversations go on and on . . .

At first, Anna complained about the pain.  We gave her the pills, the special pills, but I told her that painkillers are quite addictive, so she stopped.

Then the pain went away.  One nice thing about this surgery is that beyond removing the chunk o’ bone, nothing else happened in her arm; there are no tendons, muscles, etc. that need to recover.  So it’s going quickly.   Anna thought that she should go to practice on Thursday, two days after her surgery, but her mother disagreed.  Anna then thought that should go on Friday, but her mother still disagreed.  I took her anyway, and told her to skip the uneven bars part of her practice.  She was back to playing piano by Sunday, 5 days after it was over.

So she’s fine.  If you’ve been praying or worrying or any of that at all, you can stop now.  But I have unpleasant news: Abigail must have surgery.  She’s having her leg removed next week.

Please send gifts.

Back in late February, it was determined by medical professionals that my daughter Annaleise has a pebble sized chunk of bone floating about in her elbow.  She was to stop all gymnastical activities involving her arm, and she was scheduled for surgery to remove the bone-pebble.

Tuesday Morning, March 21, 5:30 AM:  We arrive at the hospital.  Annaleise checks in, and the check-in-lady gives me a paper with lots of numbers on it.  The one that I notice the most is $16,912.63.  We will not be paying this amount, of course, because we have insurance.  We will be paying another random amount.  There are 17 other numbers on the paper.  I have no idea which of these other numbers, if any, we will be paying.  I suspect some of the numbers are not prices at all—one of these numbers is 3620, which vaguely feels like it might relate to our address.  Another number on the paper is 770060775986, which is over ¾ of a trillion, so if they charge me that amount, I will refuse to pay.  One number is 20%, and the funny little design after the 2 and the 0 makes me confused.  But there are a lot–eight or so—of numbers on the paper that come with a dollar sign, and I don’t know how to interpret any of it.  While I stare in confusion at the piece of paper, other people do these measurements and such to my daughter.  They make her wear a gown that is designed to encourage accidental mooning.  She hasn’t put anything in her stomach in about eight hours, but they ask for a urine sample.  Can’t move forward without that.  Why, we ask?  Check for pregnancy.  My wife gets a horrified look on her face, and Anna gets a horrified look on her face, and I get the most horrified look on my face.  “She’s thirteen,” says the nurse.  “Got to do it.”  But there’s not much action in the peeing way.

6:30 AM:  The needle specialist comes in to do the IV.  Ashlei turns away.  I tell Anna to look.  “It’s easier if you watch.”  She looks.  She does not flinch.  The needle specialist compliments her.  They start squirting the clear plastic bag of liquid into her, in hope that she will pee for the pregnancy test.  There’s a schedule here; Anna is first, and she can’t go back for surgery until we get this whole pregnancy mystery cleared up.  Still no action in the peeing way.

7:00 AM:  Giving up on the urine method of pregnancy tests, the needle specialist comes back for a blood sample.  Anna watches again.  No flinch.  More compliments.

7:30 AM:  The anesthesiologist steps in and explains his job (I’ll be holding your little daughter one inch from death whilst the doctor slashes away at her arm), and then the doctor steps in and explains his job (I’ll be slashing away at your daughter’s arm, looking for the bone-pebble, whilst the anesthesiologist holds her one inch from death).  This is supposed to make us feel better.  It does not make Ashlei feel better.  After the doctors leave, Anna says, “I don’t want surgery anymore.”  I tell her that I can slash away at her arm without the one-inch-from-death part myself and get the bone-pebble out, but there is a possibility that I’ll do ancillary damage.  “Up to you, sweetie.”  Ashlei looks at me in dismay.  She isn’t aware of the possibility of being charged ¾ of a trillion dollars; I haven’t shown her the paper.

Anna says, “Is there possibility of ancillary damage if we let the doctors do it?”

“Oh, yes.  Always possibility of health complications.  For example, some people never wake up.  They just die.  Other people get surgery done on the wrong body part.  But I have to be honest; There’ll probably be fewer complications if you do it here.”

Ashlei says, “You’re not doing it!”

“Why not?  I’m quite dexterous with my hands.”

“You’ll give her some horrible infection!”

“Nonsense.  We’ll buy a bottle of cheap whiskey on the way home.  We can let her drink some before the surgery, to help numb the pain, and then we can pour some into the cut after I’ve removed the bone-pebble.  That’s how they sanitize cuts in movies.  And I’ll use my smallest and sharpest knife to lower the chance that I accidently cut some other important things in there.”

“You’re not giving my 13-year-old daughter cheap whiskey!”

“Fine.  We’ll buy high quality whiskey.  Even with that unnecessary splurge, I feel confident that we can do it for less than these vultures here at the hospital.  Have I shown you the numbers on this page?”  I take out the paper and wave it about in her face.

Ashlei assumes her patient face.  I have seen this face many times.  “Sam, how much experience do you have doing surgery?”

“I dig foreign objects out of my own flesh all the time.”   This is not technically true.  I do it semi-rarely.  But last summer I got a very bad splinter, and I dug it out with a knife and some tweezers.  Personally, I feel that this qualifies me.  I don’t tell Ashlei that I have just exaggerated my prowess at surgicalities.

But she seems to suspect.  “What are you talking about?!?”

“Well, I don’t tell you about it.  You’d want me to go to the hospital, where then can charge me ¾ of a trillion dollars!”  I also had a piece of pencil lead stuck deep in my wrist back when I was in high school.  As I recall, I got it out with a needle and a vacuum.  My confidence is growing by the moment.

“They’re not going to charge us a trillion dollars!”

“Did I say they were going to charge us a trillion dollars?  I did NOT.  I said ¾ of a trillion.”  I take a quick glance at the paper.  “Specifically, in this case, it’s 220 billion less than a trillion . . . don’t exaggerate, Ashlei.  It’s just admitting that your argument is weak.  Also, consider that there’s no need for a pregnancy test, if I do it.”  I nod significantly.

One thing I’ve learned in nearly 20 years of marriage is that one should never underestimate the ability of one’s spouse to ignore one’s good points during an argument.  Ashlei says, “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard! You’re not doing it!”

“See here, this is just you succumbing to a cultural paradigm that attaches an entirely unhealthy authority to the medical establishment.  It’s a vast, complex, unnecessarily byzantine mess of red tape, bureaucracy, governmental intrusion on our personal lives, and lawsuits!”  I wave the paper about some more.  “I feel a moral obligation to do it myself!”

While we are having this rousing conversation, they come and take Annaleise away.  When I turn around to see whether she’d like to just come home and have me dig the bone-pebble out, like any ol’ splinter, she’s gone.  “Ah,” I say.  “Well, never mind.”

Ashlei says, “Where’d she go??”

I shrug.  “Away.”

Ashlei glares at me.  Now that Anna is gone, I have nothing to do, so I take out the paper and look at it some more.

Coming next week: recovery.

My toilet was leaking.  Out the back, under the base, all the time.  Left unattended, it would have rotted out the innards of the entire house until a strong wind came and blew it down.  And my wife was complaining about it.

Wanting to be a proactive homeowner, I immediately contacted my former friend “Steve” (his real name) and asked him to rescue my house.  Steve does lots of plumbing at his job.  He does more plumbing in a single morning than I had done in my entire life.  Steve could have fixed my toilet in 10 minutes.

“Oooh, tough luck.  I’m so busy right now.  My cat is retching up something on the front porch.  Just replace the wax ring.  It’s easy.”

So, I’m on my own.  Ashlei scampers off downstairs, turns on the TV, gets out her computer, and starts “Grading.”

Off to the store.  On Black Friday.  I buy a wax ring.  This takes two hours.  A wax ring is a chunk of heavy wax, about the shape and size and consistency and flavor of a fruitcake.  You are supposed to take it and sort of smash it onto the bottom of the toilet and then push the toilet onto the floor of your bathroom.  This takes about 2 minutes and 25 seconds, according to the YouTube video that showed me how to do it.  I watched the video twice.  On the video, everything seemed nicely clean and sanitary.

I disassembled my toilet.  As it came apart, it poured perhaps 50 gallons of water upon my person and my bathroom floor.  I called Steve in a panic.

“Oooh, so sorry.  I’m playing Chutes and Ladders with my daughter.  Can’t abandon daddy-daughter-date.  Your best bet is to soak up the excess water with paper towels.”

So I waded back into the fray.  Once I got the base of the toilet up, I saw that the YouTube video had been a lie.  It was not clean and sanitary under there at all.

Well, I did my best.  I scraped up the old wax ring, which had turned into a thick odiferous sludge from the black lagoon.  I threw it away.  I smashed the new wax ring onto the bottom of the toilet and put it all back together.  I could feel my skin burning from all of the strange and toxic muck.

When I had it all together, I turned the water back on.

It still leaked.  I called Steve.

“Oooh, bad timing.  My wife is in surgery.  I’ll have to stay at the hospital.  Check the wax ring.  Sometimes it doesn’t seal right.”

So I stepped back up to the plate.  I redissasembled the toilet.  I soaked up another 50 gallons of water with paper towels.  I sort of pushed the wax ring around a bit, trying to make sure that it shaped nicely to the water hole.  I reassembled the toilet again.  I turned on the water again.

It still leaked.  I called Steve.

“Oooh, terrible news.  My grandmother just died.  I’m off to her wed . . . I mean funeral.  Try checking the connection between the tank and the base.  Be careful.  Don’t want to break the porcelain.”

So I charged back onto the front lines.  Now it seems to me that toilets are not intelligently designed.  At the bottom of the tank, where water is stored?  You find a couple of gaping holes.  These holes are where you bolt the toilet to the base.  But you have to bolt gently, because toilets are made of porcelain, which is a fragile substance that shatters like expensive china if you throw it out a second story window.  Or if you bolt anything too tightly to anything.

I rearranged my rubber washers and screwed it back on, wondering all along how tightly was too tight.  “I’ve never worked with porcelain!” I shouted.  “I don’t know how tight is too tight!”  Put it all back together, turned it on.

It still leaked.  I called Steve.

“Oooh, deepest sympathies.  But my house is on fire; I have to call 911.  Try going to Walmart and buying new washers.”  I could clearly hear the football game in the background, but I didn’t mention this to Steve.  When I kill him, I want it to be a surprise.

So I went to Walmart.  On Black Friday.  By this point, it was about 9:00 at night, so some of the rush had passed.  But there were still too many people for my taste.  To be honest, if there’s one other person in the entire store, it feels a bit crowded to me . . . but still.  And guess what?  They didn’t have any rubber washers.  The employee, a helpful guy who knew nothing about plumbing nightmares, I could see it in his eyes, he was so innocent, and he just said, “Nope.  We’re fresh out of rubber washers.  Sorry, man.  It’s Black Friday.  Biggest shopping day of the year.  We run out of stuff.”  I stared at him, and decided to store his body with Steve’s.

Home again, dejected, sad, beaten . . . by a toilet.  And I had an idea.  I’ve never had a plumbing idea before, so it surprised me.  Put some of the thin white tapey stuff on the threads of the bolt.

Sure.  Sounds good.  Truthfully, I had little hope.  But I did have the thin white tapey stuff.  Take toilet apart.  50 gallons of clean-up.  Take out bolts.  Wrap in thin white tapey stuff.  Put it back together.  Turn it on.

No leak.  I waited for several minutes.  No leak.  I went into the other room and took several deep breaths and came back.  No leak.  I called Steve, who didn’t even wait to hear what I had to say; “Sam, I’d love to come over and help, but I’ve got company—friends from Botswana that I haven’t seen in 30 years.”

“Ha!  I don’t need your help, you excuse-making old prune-skin vulture!  I fixed it ALL BY MYSELF!”

Shocked silence.  I savored that silence, and then I slammed the phone down—metaphorically, since we don’t actually hang up our phones anymore—and headed off to start another important home improvement/repair project.

Final stats:

Money spent: $7.42

Hours labored: 10

Curse words muttered: 0

People I wanted to kill:  2

Non-leaking toilets in my bathroom: 1

A conversation in our house that happens regularly:

Ashlei says, “You always mock me in your blog.  I am afraid to show my face in public.”

I say, “I don’t mock you.  I just tell the truth.”

“You mock me.  My friends think I’m a mentally handicapped buffoon!”

“Oh, Ashlei, if anything, I use subtle artistic license to make you look like less of a buffoon.”

“You don’t care about me!  Just look at what you did to me last week!  My friends all asked me about it!”

“Honey, in that blog you scared off a wild feline threat.  You protected the children!  I probably owe you my life.”

“Well, what about when you said that I obsess about my job?”

“I said you’re good at your job.”

“My friends all—”

“Why do you keep on about these ‘friends?’  How come I’ve never met any of these people?”

“Oh!  You don’t even try to understand!  They don’t like you, you know.  Jana says that I should hit you more often.”

“Ashlei, we don’t know anybody named Jana.”

“Well, she hates you!  And you should hear the things Kelly and Donna say.”

“Who?!?”

“Paula asked if you have much life insurance.  She showed me her butcher knife collection.”

And so on.  Variations on this conversation happen a few times a week, and often end up with her saying, “Why don’t you ever writing anything where you’re an idiot?”  I thought I did that all the time, but according to her . . . no.  So, I started to think back to if I could come up with any instances where I was an absolute idiot.  It took several hours, but I finally came up with a story.

This is it.

In the fall of 1997, I was a band director at a very small high school in northwest Arkansas.  The school was called Bruno-Pyatt.  The school sat in the middle of absolutely nowhere, sort of between two tiny little towns named Bruno and Pyatt.  I could look out my classroom window and see fields with cows.  It was as rural as it could possibly be.  The school, K-12, met in one building, and had less than 300 students.

I taught high school band, junior high band, beginning band, choir, beginning music, elementary PE, and math.  In my first year, my high school band was not very good.  Also, my choir was not very good.  The junior high band was not good.  I am afraid that this was partly my fault.  I was a brand new teacher, I didn’t really know how to teach, and my students didn’t know much what to think of me.  With the band, at least I sort of knew what I was doing, since I played an instrument and had been in bands since I was 10.  With the choir, I didn’t know anything at all.  I have never been in a choir.  I cannot sing.  I have never been able to sing.  It hurts when I sing—both me and also other people who might be nearby.  In college, I studied trumpet performance, and my music theory teacher, who also did voice lessons, told me that he could teach anybody to sing.  I signed up.  At the end of the semester, he said, “Well, we tried.”  And that was the end of that.

Anyway, there I am at Bruno-Pyatt high school, and I have been stumbling blindly through the semester, trying desperately to not ruin these innocent children’s’ musical psyches, and mostly failing.  December comes, and with it our Christmas concert.  I have combined the junior high and the high school band, and altogether we have 2 flutes, a clarinet, a bass clarinet, an alto sax, a French horn, an asthmatic tenor sax player who cannot actually make any sounds come out of her instrument, a baritone player, and a drummer who can’t read music but who CAN play very loudly.  That’s it.  Nine students total, eight that make noises with their instruments.  I also have a couple of guitar players, but they smoke a lot of pot and often don’t come to class.  They only sort of count in my mind.

There is not a wealth of published high school band literature for this specific instrumentation.  So I write their music.  For this concert, I’ve arranged O Holy Night, along with a couple of other pieces.  The good thing is that I can write very simple lines for the junior high students and more difficult stuff for the older ones.

Meanwhile, I have found four holiday songs in the extensive Bruno-Pyatt choral music library.  One of them is a truly execrable rap song about shopping for Christmas presents, and we are going to perform this piece because one of the other pieces is even worse.  But at least we’ve sort of gotten into the music.  The choir is made up mostly of 9^th grade girls, and they have come up with lots of motions and such for the Christmas rap song.  And then there’s beginning band.  They’ve had their instruments for about 10 weeks now, and tonight they will play three songs.  Each song is one line of music.  They will play Jingle Bells and (why not?) Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Mary Had a Little Lamb.

We’ve been practicing for this concert since mid October.  At this point, I am sick to death of the music.  Five days a week, 3 hours a day, for over 2 months, of the same songs?  It’s a wonder I’m still coming to work every day.

So, the night of the concert comes.  I’ve got beginning band, with their 3 lines.  I’ve got 3 band pieces and 3 choir pieces.  I write up a concert program, and make 100 copies.  I keep one to remind me of the order of the concert and set the rest on a table by the entrance to the school’s little theater.

The students have come through the band room and gotten their instruments.  They all are dressed up and nervous and excited.  Now, they are in the auditorium.  The guitar players do not show up.  That’s okay, really.  The parts I wrote for them are not that important.  I thought they might not remember.

7:00 nears.  The beginning band is going first.    They’re up there on the stage.  The auditorium is full—well, no, the auditorium has perhaps 50 people.  I made too many programs.  100% of the crowd is made up of parents of people who will be on stage, and this is when I develop what I now call “The Woelk law of audiences.”  This law states that there is a direct inverse relationship between the quality of the performance and the percentage of the audience that is related to the performers.  This law holds true in any public performance or event.  Consider: peewee football?  The crowd will be 100% parents and other various relations to the participants.  The football will be awful.  Dallas Cowboys versus Kansas City Chiefs?  Much less than 1% of the crowd will be related to the players, who will exhibit a proportionately higher quality of football.

Standing in the hall, looking in at the audience, I know, deep in my gut that this is going to be bad.

It is 6:57.  I have three minutes before I have to walk into the auditorium.  In addition to the kids’ parents, my wife is also in there.  And my parents.  They drove 250 miles for this.  I told them not to.  All 3 of them are here.  Fools.

I am wearing a tie.  A strange thought enters my head.  If I just walk down the hall, out the door, get in my car, and drive away, it would be better.  No concert is better than a bad concert.  I am deeply, sorely, tempted.  I’ll be fired, but that sounds okay.  Fast food restaurants are always hiring.

6:58.  Why am I nervous?  I haven’t been nervous for performances in quite some time . . . then it hits me.  I don’t have an instrument in my hands.  Before, I was always a part of the music.  Now, I will wave my hands about, and other people will produce the music.  I will get blamed if it’s bad, even though they are the ones who messed up . . . which they will . . . but I can’t do anything to make it better. I can just wave more frantically if the music starts to fall apart.  I have no control once I walk out there.

6:59.  The little kids are already on the stage, waiting for me.  It occurs to me that I don’t really like them.  Then I think about the choir, which will perform after the beginning band.  I don’t like them either.  And the high school/junior high band . . . I don’t like them.  I consider all of this dislike, and decide that I probably don’t like the choir the most.  I should probably go and get in my car and leave.  Perhaps I should ram my car into other people’s vehicles on the way out of the parking lot, to let them know what I think of them.

7:00.  What am I doing?  I’m walking into the room.  Well, I guess plan A is out.  I would look stupid if I reversed direction and went right back out that door.  I’ll have to go with plan B, which involves the concert.  A much less better plan.

The crowd, being mostly rural types, does not know to clap when the conductor appears.  But that seems appropriate to me.  I have done nothing to earn applause.  I don’t think anything worthy of applause is in the works for this evening anyway.

I am standing in front of the 6^th graders.  The hush falls.  The beginning band method book is open on my stand, although I don’t know why.  It’s three songs, a line each.  I don’t need a score.  I count off loudly, and we’re off.

It’s horrible, but at least it’s short.  We butcher Mary and her dumb little Sheep.  The little star does not twinkle.  Jingle Bells is about the same.

Then the choir sings.  The little girls get all bug eyed and fearful, and they forget to do their hand motions, so what we have is 15 little 13-year-old white children mumbling through a rap song about Christmas shopping.  All of my musical sensibilities are crying out in pain.  Do you hear what I hear is less bad.

Then, high school band.  We play our first two pieces, and then we’re ready for O Holy Night, the grand finale.   We start, just the flute and clarinet, moving up and down in arpeggios.  French horn comes in with the melody.  Halfway through, I realize suddenly . . . it’s not bad.  They’re together.  They’re in tune.  It’s even musical.

This isn’t so bad.  Oh, my.  It’s not bad at all.  It’s almost good.  I start to think good thoughts.

And that’s when it strikes me.

See, I’m standing there, facing the band, and the audience is all behind me.  I’ve never been in this position before.  They’re all watching the stage.  Their kids are up here, and I’m up here . . . except my backside is all they can see.  I realize, sure as shooting, that they’re all staring at my booty.

The problem is, I don’t have a booty.  My particular body goes straight down, from my shoulders to my feet.  No buttocks at all.  None whatsoever.  No heinie.  No tush.  And that’s what they’re all staring at.  My complete lack of Gluteus Maximus.  They’re probably wondering if it’s some sort of physical deformity.  They’re probably wondering if I’ve had butt cancer and had the whole thing removed.

So, I’m directing this group of kids who are playing pretty good, and the whole time, I’m obsessing about them watching my booty.  And, of course, when you think about a certain part of your body, it starts to itch.  Now, I want to reach back there and scratch.  But I can’t do that.  The itch grows, and the music goes, and they sit out there in the crowd, and the music’s loud, and they’re watching me from behind, and by now I’m pretty sure that I’m twitching from the itching.  It occurs to me that I wouldn’t mind all of this staring if I had a nicely rounded and aesthetically pleasing rear end.  Then, I’d be like, stare all you want, people.  Lookin’ good!  I’d flex it for them a few times.  But no.  No such luck.

So we finish O Holy Night strong, I hold my hands out and lift them, and the students stand, and I turn around.  I glance at the clock.  It is 7:23.  We’ve just had a 23 minute concert.  I wonder if this is appropriate.  Who cares?  It’s over.  Their parents are clapping politely, sort of surprised.  They’re also wondering if a 23 minute concert is appropriate.  I suppose that they’re thinking one of three thoughts:

1. We have got to get this guy fired.
2. Hey, that was quick! I like short concerts.
3. Where did his butt go?

But I don’t get fired.  For the next 3 ½ years, I teach music to these peoples’ poor children.  And every single concert that we have, I think about my mostly nonexistent rear end, facing out at them.

And that’s why I no longer teach music.  I hope you’re happy, Ashlei.

It is 1:00 AM.  I am asleep.  Ashlei is asleep.  Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.

Well, that’s not true.  See, we have an insane cat that lives in our neighborhood.  This cat is named Mittens, and is (sort of) owned by our neighbors, about 5 houses down.

Mittens, according to these people, did not get loved enough as a kitten.  I am not making that up.  As a result, Mittens has several severe psychological complexes.  Here is a partial list:  Mittens suffers from rage issues.  Mittens occasionally hears voices.  Mittens cannot form healthy bonds with others.  Mittens does not understand the concept of “other peoples’ houses.”  Mittens probably has other issues as well, but these are the ones that have, so far, been properly diagnosed by therapists who specialize in feline psychoses.

So.  We’re all asleep.  Emma our cat is asleep on the bed as well.

Ashlei used to shut our cat door before bed, because Mittens would come into our house and eat Emma’s food at night.  But Emma also has a mental issue.  If Emma is trapped in the house at night, she will go downstairs and pee all over things that she should not pee all over.  This complex, according to therapists who specialize in feline psychoses, is called “feline bipolar urinary delusional schizophrenia,” where the delusion is that the entire basement is her litter box.  Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which usually involves medication and long talk sessions with experts, sounds expensive.  Ashlei was all for paying for cat behavior modification therapy and cat drugs.  I said that we’d just start leaving her door open at night, so she’d stop feeling anxious or whatever, and start peeing outside again.

So.  We’re all asleep.  The cat door is open.  Mittens comes through the door, and is creeping down the hall.  Because Mittens is crazy, there is no explaining her actions at all.  But for some reason, she has decided that she won’t just steal some food, tonight.  She’ll come pay us a visit.

Remember, Mittens is insane.  Emma has serious issues of her own.  In fact, I’d be willing to say that pretty much all cats could be diagnosed with one or more of several feline psychoses.

So.  We’re all asleep.  Two crazy cats are about to meet.  Also, I’d like to interject here that my own wife, while not having been officially diagnosed by licensed personnel, could also be well benefited by some expensive therapy and drugs.

So.  We’re all asleep.  Mittens comes into the bedroom, leaps onto our bed, and without preamble, attacks Emma.  Emma goes directly from sleeping mode to destroy mode in about 1/3 of a second.

Two cats hissing and scratching and clawing and whatsoever does not actually make much noise.  So I sleep on.

Ashlei, who (you will recall is suspect of being crazy herself) immediately wakes up to find a pair of insane cats fighting at full tilt, pretty much on her lap.

Her response?  This woman, who has a master’s degree?  This woman who has (so far) successfully raised two children?  This woman who has never been fired from a job?

Ashlei screams as loud as she possibly can.

My body is immediately ready to face the aliens or Russians or whoever has attacked.  When I do awaken, it is to discover that I am already moving.  But I haven’t rolled over, or sat up, no sir.  I have leaped into action, about 3 feet straight up and over, turning my body to land on my feet, next to the bed, my arms prepared to defend and attack, and I have gotten mixed up in the covers, and so my legs are currently all tangled up in a blanket, and I am five feet up from the floor, and the bed is not beneath me at all, and I am falling.   And Ashlei is screaming, and underneath the sound of the screaming and the air whooshing past my ears, I hear the sound of two cats having a vigorous fight.

Ashlei’s screams do not affect the cats in the least.  But when I hit the floor, it shakes the whole house, and the impact shakes the cats loose from each other.  Luckily, years of martial arts training have turned my body into a lethal machine of precision and grace, and so I turn in the air and fall very flat on my back, banging the ground with both arms and both legs, spreading the impact and protecting myself from injury.  Ashlei screams again, no doubt now convinced that we are being bombed.

Mittens zips out of the room, down the hall, and we hear the cat door about 2 seconds after my body impacts the floor.

Ashlei stops screaming.  I lay on the carpet, my head ringing, probably from a combination of the sounds she was making and a low level concussion.

Anna comes running into the room.  “What happened?” she asks.

“Nothing happened,” Ashlei says hoarsely.  “Go back to bed.”

“Nothing?” I think.  But I am disoriented, and so I don’t contradict her.

Anna stares at us for a few seconds.  We make a lovely sight.  The moonlight glows gently through the windows and illuminates:

1. Ashlei, standing in the middle of the room, her arms held out wide, panting, her hair wild.
2. Emma, standing on the bed, her tail straight up, her fur standing straight out, a curious yowling growling sound coming from the back of her throat.
3. And me, lying next to the bed, staring up at the ceiling, wrapped up in the blankets, which are slowly sliding the rest of the way off of the bed to fall directly on my face.

“Okay,” Anna says and pads off to bed.

Abbey does not awake for any of this exciting event.

I manage to stand up and put the blankets back on the bed and get back in.  Ashlei lies down and pets Emma until she stops growling.

After a couple of minutes, my heart has slowed to perhaps 120 beats a minute, and Ashlei said, “I was screaming words, wasn’t I?”

I say, “No.  No words at all.”

“In my head, I was screaming, ‘get out, get out!’”

“No.  No words at all.”

“Hmm.  I thought I was screaming words.”

I don’t answer.  I don’t know what to say.

So, my parents went and got old while I wasn’t looking and decided to downsize.  In my mind, I’m still about 25, and they’re just getting ready to turn 50.  This has been true in my mind for as long as I’ve been an adult, which is decades.  But in reality, they’ve blown right past 50.  They’re like 80 or something, now; I really don’t have any idea what the exact numbers might be.  For the past many years, they’ve lived in a rambling sort of house, one of those big tall 100 year old houses, with an unfinished basement full of ducts and pipes and spiders and strange sounds.  It also has an upstairs, and my father views stairs as a personal insult to his knees and hips.  As time passed, they filled this house, in the way that old people often do, with knickknacks, paddywhacks, cartons and crates full of stuff, stuff, stuff.

They decided to have a yard sale, because if they took all of their stuff to the new home, there would be no room for them.  “Everything must go!” was their slogan.  In preparation for this gala occasion, they asked my sister, Christian, to help.  She is well qualified.  My sister has planned events for the President of The United States.  (That is not an exaggeration)   Helping with a yard sale should not be too very overwhelming, not for somebody with that on her resume.  Christian flew in from San Diego to help.  How often do you think that a yard sale is organized by a person who flies in from across the country and has experience planning presidential events?  You’d expect it to go like clockwork, no?

They also came to me for help because I have muscles and can lift heavy things.  They promised to give me a few items for my help.  So, I asked to borrow a truck from my former friend Charles.  Short Aside.  My former friend Charles is a wheeler and a dealer and a collector of note.  He lives in one of those places outside of town, with lots of room.  Charles has 5 tractors.  He has a dump truck.  He has a backhoe.  He has 2 hot tubs.  One is broken.  He has a boom truck, one of those trucks that city utility workers use to get up close to the electric wires in the sky.  He has about 4 trailers for hauling stuff about.  He has various assorted random farm implements, although he does not farm.  He has an airplane, a spare airplane, a couple of boats, a BMW roadster, a motorcycle, a Dodge SUV, a pickup truck, another pickup truck, and a spare pickup truck.  He used to have an assortment of motorcycles, but then he wrecked a motorcycle and now his leg looks like fresh meat lovers pizza, so he has fewer motorcycles.  None of these items is newer than 10 years old.  Some of them look 30 years old.

Charles is unaware that he’s my former friend, and so he said that, sure, I could use one of his trucks.  “Take the Mazda,” he said.  “It runs real good.”  He was busy getting married, so I went and got the Mazda.

The Mazda is a 1984 B2000 pickup truck.  It’s tiny, so tiny that if you stood near it and sneezed, it would rock in the wind.  It has no air conditioner.  You don’t actually need the speedometer, because it gets louder and louder to tell you your speed.  At 65 miles an hour, conversation is impossible.  At 70, my ears start to bleed.  At 75, the sound waves cause internal organ damage, rather like the Space Shuttle launches used to do.  I choose 65, which is what the truck itself prefers, because it has a 4 banger that is not designed to accelerate or go fast.

Anna comes with me and we set off to help my parents move.  I watch the sunrise as we drive east, and I think deep thoughts.

When we arrive at Cape Girardeau, we find things in an uproar.  We get there at about 11:00 Friday morning, and the yard sale is in full swing.  There are about 12 tables, all covered with stuff, and there is a bevy of mostly old ladies, all rummaging through the old stuff.  The tables are overflowing.  My parents have accumulated a LOT of stuff.  Christian, the presidential event organizer, looks at me with a most desperate gleam in her eye.

“How’s it going?”  I ask as I step out of the truck.  I get three immediate responses.  My Mother says, “Hi Sam!”  She looks bright and happy.  My Father says, “I didn’t know YOU were coming!”  He looks bright and happy.  Christian, the presidential event organizer, says nothing, but I can see the muscles around her jaw clenching and clenching.

Why is she not stress free?  Well, I’ll tell you.

My parents are not strong negotiators.  At one point, a lady says to my mom, “Do you have any crock pots?”  My mother says yes, she has one.  But it’s not for sale.  “Oh, that’s too bad,” the old lady says.  “I’ve been looking for one.  Mine broke.”  Then the lady regales us with some strange and boring story about her grandchildren that involves crock pots getting ruined, and by the end of the story, my mother has gone scampering into the house.  She brings out the crock pot that’s not for sale and gives . . . GIVES . . . it to this lady.  “No, take it!” she says.  “I want you to have it!”  She gives away many more things as the day passes.  “I want you to have that!” is her refrain for the day.  Every time she says this, I see Christian (the presidential event organizer) have a little body tremor.  It occurs to me that a presidential fundraiser is the sort of affair where wealthy people play $5000 a plate to have dinner in a large room, perhaps a hotel convention hall.  The drawing point is that the president will be having dinner also, in the same room.  Rich people scrabble wildly to have an opportunity to pay this money and eat dinner with the president.  That way, they get to say, in passing, “Well, the other day I was having lunch with the president, and he said . . .”  They will say use this line regularly for the next 60 years, or until they are dead, whichever comes first.  A presidential fundraiser can produce several hundred thousand dollars, all in two or three hours.  My sister actually got so good at doing these things that George W. Bush (who was president at the time) actually called her on the actual phone one morning to tell her to do more of them.  Christian is not used to being involved with events that do not produce vast overflowing buckets of cash.  And that is what this current event is doing.  Not producing vast buckets of cash.

No, because my mother prefers to give everything away.

And my father is not much better.  Some guy comes up with several items, and my father says, “That’s a lot of stuff!  Make me an offer!”

The man says, “Both puzzles, the weed eater, the electrical tape, and the rare book from 14^th century Italy, all for five bucks!”

I look at my father.  He’s thinking about it.  “Ten bucks,” he replies.

“Five bucks, and throw in this plastic crate to carry it all,” the man says.

“Deal, but you have to take an antique LP!”

Christian, the presidential event organizer, hisses at her father, “Dad!  That book was marked $1,900, and it was a steal at that price!”

He says, “Yeah, but I don’t think we would have gotten it.”

“Dad, that was an original copy of Dante’s Inferno!”

“Nobody reads that sort of stuff anymore.”

“Dad, it was signed by the author!”

“But it was in some other language, like Dutch.  Nobody here in Southeast Missouri reads Dutch!”

I chip in.  “The weed eater was brand new.”

“Yeah, but there’s no way to prove that.”

“It was sealed in the original packaging.”

“Ah, whatever.  We don’t have much negotiating power, you know?”  He waves his hands in a way that tells us that the conversation is over.

We sit there out in the shade on a Friday afternoon, and, barring the part where I’m watching my parents fritter away my inheritance, it’s quite pleasant.  There is a breeze.  It’s 75 degrees.  Christian has a system whereby she takes peoples’ money and gives them plastic bags if they have a lot of little stuff.  She writes down all purchases in a ledger, and cross-notates this information with a separate ledger.  She offers each customer a receipt.  They are surprised.  She has a computer for inventory.  She has kept a record of all man hours worked, so that she can do mathy things and determine productivity ratios.  The ratios are not good.

Some people pull up and sort of wander about, looking at the stuff, and then they leave.  I find this offensive.  The first time it happens, I get angry.  “What, our crap’s not good enough for you?  What’s wrong with it?  You stuck up wretch!  You worthless nincompoop!   Come back and look again!” I shout more in this vein as the lady starts back to her car.  She walks faster, her eyes wide, and Christian admonishes me with a prim voice, “The customer is always right, Sam.”  I scoff at this stupid aphorism.  “Well, she ain’t no customer!  She didn’t buy nothin’!”  Christian can’t answer this irrefutable logic, but I agree to stop abusing potential customers with insults.  I do, however, find it strangely disturbing that people would drive all the way here and not get anything.  It offends my parents’ . . . dignity, or something . . . and so even though I stop shouting at people, I do mutter at them.

It’s a special kind of person who shops at garage sales.

One old fat dude buys a big thick drinking glass.  He tells us it’s perfect for cold beer.  He also buys a little cooler.  It’s perfect for holding beer when he goes outside.  Everything this old fat dude says involves beer.  I am sad for him.  He has one of those faces with thick meaty wrinkles, and his skin is blotchy.

Three women pull up in an old Cadillac.  One is perhaps 60, one perhaps 40, one perhaps 20.  They walk close together, speaking quietly with each other.  They all three look so alike.

Perhaps the most bizarre part is the little old ladies.  They come and slowly peruse the tables.  As far as yard sales go, this one has a lot of good stuff.  My parents are not just getting rid of trash.  A lot of it’s stuff that they’ve used for years.  So there are a lot of good books, tools, kitchen stuff, several machines and such, all in good shape.  So a little old lady will look at all of this, slowly, slowly, and then she’ll pick out a random doodad, something entirely useless, and also aesthetically bankrupt, like a little porcelain cat, and that’s what she’ll buy.  For 10 cents, if my mother doesn’t manage to give it to her.  This happens multiple times, and I watch them all slowly walking back to her car with their little worthless doodad.

While we’re partaking in our semi-capitalistic enterprise, Anna helps with the younger cousins, Jack and Maddy and Leah and Micah.   They play with Anna, and she gets $20.00 for babysitting.

On the second day, after the crowd has started to thin, my father decides to spice things up.  He takes me downstairs into the basement.  There is still lots and lots of crap, so we replenish the tables.  We replenish the tables several times.  In fact, if a customer came at 7:00 AM, 10:00 AM, and 1:00 PM, he would find new and exciting merchandise, all three times.

But, regrettably, customers do not return.  They don’t know that we’re replenishing.  So at about 3:00 on Saturday, after business has died down, we start loading the merchancrap into the truck, and we haul it away to foist upon charitable thrift-shops.  In an hour, we get rid of more stuff than we sold in two days.

Walking through the house after 2 days of selling and giving away, I say, “I can’t even tell that you guys had a yard sale.”  This was not a good thing to say.  My mother immediately starts crying and then begins to plan a second round in November.

I walk through the house, slowly.  They’ve lived in it for 16 years, and I know that I will likely never be in this house again.  Lots of memories.  Times pass, and we let go.  The past cannot be gripped.  It flows away from us.

Anna and I come home with some furniture packed into the back of the 84 Mazda.  I come with a renewed resolve to never have a yard sale.  I’d rather just throw my stuff into the trash.