In the Way

It is a small thing but I refuse to move out of your way.

You and me on the sidewalk, you walking east, me walking west. By your body language, you telegraph your refusal to move aside. I can detect no flinch of deference or courtesy in your stride. You intend to barrel through as if I am not there, afraid or unwilling to walk in single file for that attosecond when you would not be able to walk side by side.

This disruption is entirely too onerous of me to ask of you. Instead, you expect me to walk through gutter grime as if I am less.

Well, no more. I will strut down that street and you can walk single file for me. I will not budge for you, not in this or anything.

Mendoza Line of Ideas

The idea that we should arm teachers to prevent mass school shootings is so dumb that if there were a Mendoza Line of Ideas, this idea would be below it.

The public expects a lot from teachers already. They have to be educators, comforters, protectors and God knows what else for kids. Do teachers also now have to be John McClane? Should they really take some sort of class to ensure they’re able to shoot to kill someone with a gun (who may be a current or former student)? Why the hell should they face the physical and psychic burden of being sharpshooters? As we’ve seen, teachers would take a bullet for their kids, but it should be up to the rest of us to find a way that they don’t have to.

Christ, don’t these people do enough for little pay? In some classrooms, teachers have to pay for art supplies and such out of their own pockets. I guess now they also have to buy guns? Is the Department of Education going to suddenly find the budget to arm all our teachers while claiming not to be able to afford things like books? Who’s going to train this new army? Plus, a student could get the teacher’s gun, the teacher could accidentally shoot a kid, etc.

Can we not do this?

I don’t buy the idea that arming everyone will prevent a mass shooting. It’s a very, very stupid idea that doesn’t stand up to any critical thinking. One of the police officers in Florida, even with training, froze during the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting and couldn’t go in, so even good guys with guns can falter. In Las Vegas, that guy shot at the crowd from many stories above their heads. Asking people in the crowd to shoot up at a hotel in the dark is asking for a lot of wounds from friendly fire. In that case, the only “good guys with a gun” who stopped the shooter were the police, who are authorized and trained. It’s the same with the movie theater shooting: Can you imagine the chaos of a bunch of people shooting into a darkened theater when they have seconds to react and aren’t sure what’s going on? When President Reagan got shot, he was surrounded by heavily-armed Secret Service agents and even they couldn’t react quick enough to prevent the attack. Whenever I hear “arm the populace,” I think of the drunken posse on The Simpsons; for as many trained citizens who have guns, there are going to be a ton of incompetent yahoos, and I don’t know what amount of training would fix that.

I read that New York City police officers shoot their targets accurately at an average of like 18 percent. Do you think Stable Mabel is going to do any better trying to shoot someone during math class than a trained professional would? Real life is not a Die Hard movie.

It’s been astounding to see these young people from Florida who, even in their grief, have been so incisive and fearless in taking on the issue of gun control. It’s humbling to see because they’re right: So many adults have failed to keep them safe from this dystopic environment in which school shootings are common enough that they have drills for them.

It’s humbling because what I am I doing while these young adults are marching? Sitting and writing some blog while I should be working? I need to get up and do more.  

Temporarily Embarrassed Ectomorph

Like someone on assistance voting Republican in the belief that he is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, and the tax policies will someday come around and make him a billionaire, I hang onto size 34 and 36 pants, a temporarily embarrassed ectomorph convinced that someday, like a political wave sweeping the opposition back into power, he will be thin again.

I squeeze in somehow, every morning wondering if around the office they can see thighs strain through the disgraceful death grip of Target’s finest around overindulged ass. I give in and wonder who will notice the 38 on the back of my new jeans.

Some thin Goodwill shopper could no doubt get use out of my outgrown pants

but I hang onto them, taking up space in my closet, a monument to pride

and the perhaps foolish belief that I will be back to fighting form anytime soon.

At Least It's Not Snow

A Very Short Play

A Category 5 hurricane is ravaging the entire Delaware Valley. A family is huddling together in their living room, trying to save their belongings as the floodwaters reach to their waists.

Mom: This is pretty bad but at least it’s not snow.

Part of the roof collapses. Water pours in.

Dad (lets out a world-weary groan from the bottom of his soul): Thank God for that. Can you imagine?

Winds of over 175 mph shatter the bay window.

Son (moaning in horror): Ugh. Don’t even say that dirty “S” word to me.  

Everyone drowns.

The End

Lady Doritos

As I am not a woman, I cannot claim to speak for half the population. So can any of the women out there enlighten me and PepsiCo to an important question of our time:

What are your specific female snacking needs and how can we fulfill them?

PepsiCo was trying, designing a special brand of Lady Doritos. CEO Indra Nooyi seems to have her finger on that XX chromosome pulse. As she pointed out, when us dudes (well, not me, since I don’t like Doritos) strap on a pouch of Doritos like a feedbag and go to town, they lick that petroleum-based Cheez™ dust off their fingers. When they get to the end of the bag, they just turn the bag up and dump the little broken pieces of Cool Ranch in their grateful mouths.

Meanwhile, the fairer sex is a little more—how do you say?—genteel when shoving in some chips. As Nooyi says: “Women would love to do the same, but they don’t. They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavour into their mouth.”

I definitely agree with this assessment. I’ve seen so many women I know whose faces flush with shame, not just rouge, when someone catches them at one of our parties crunching a little too loud. They must want to disappear into their whalebone corsets. I’m mortified on their behalf. The only thing that brings me more secondhand embarrassment is when our piano shows a little too much leg and I have to cover the legs.

Also, how can you put a bag of Doritos in your purse, Nooyi asks? Because if there’s one thing you ladyfolk love, it’s buying all your expensive Birkin bags and such and shoving chips in them, so you need the Doritos bags to be small enough to fit.

It looks like PepsiCo isn’t making these estrogen-injected Doritos after all, but it was still fun to speculate, wasn’t it? Of course, if the company did make them, the chips would be in pink bags, cost more than regular Doritos, and come with 70 percent of the chips men get, which is commensurate with how we treat women overall.

How 'bout them Iggles?

That Super Bowl, and that Eagles season, were both much weirder and wilder than I expected.

We saw the team go to 10–1 and rising superstar Carson Wentz get hurt. Then there were all the questions about how Nick Foles would perform in the clutch. Then the Eagles were underdogs as the number one seed. Then they squeaked by the Falcons. Then the team and Foles had that insane performance against Minnesota. Last night they had an even more insane performance on the biggest stage in football.

A defibrillator would have been a good investment for last night. I was sort of cheering and pacing most of the game. The Eagles looked good, really good, but I was nervous when they fell behind just a little. I flipped out with that strip sack near the end, and was confident we’d win, but I still felt a little like, “Anything can happen. Something weird will happen.”

But it didn’t, and the Eagles are world champions. I certainly didn’t expect a barn burner with 74 combined points and some insane amount of yardage. I really didn’t expect that play (don’t know what it’s called) when Foles caught his own touchdown pass, on fourth down no less.

What a beautiful sight, the Eagles hosting the Lombardi trophy with a blizzard of green and white confetti. What a beautiful sight, the joy of everyone who waited a lifetime for this, waiting through all the close calls and lost seasons.

It’s a little bittersweet to think of my Dad, who would have loved last night, having waited since 1960 to see the Eagles win a championship. How many Sundays did we and Mom sit and watch the Eagles, with my brother somewhere in the crowd on TV? Dad never got to see his team win the Super Bowl, but it makes me happy to think that he, and all those other dads and family who went before all of us, had a great seat up there for the game last night.

Back(sp)lash

So many times on HGTV, home renovators will spend an inordinate amount of time deciding on and bickering about which kind of backsplash or countertops will go in their New Dream Kitchen. Should they get the interlocking mesh-mounted mosaic wall tile interlaid with diamonds, or the white quarry splitface interred with the preserved blood of Louis XIV? I have a lot of thoughts when I see people agonizing over this stuff. I wonder what kind of unfashionable barbarians these people would think we are with our Formica countertops and gym-shower-stall backsplash. I think, that ‘80s backsplash they’re vomiting at in disdain on TV looks dated now, but it was the future when the previous owners put it in. Your trendy polished-glass subway tile will someday go the way of popcorn ceilings, just like that old backsplash you’re disdaining. I want to tell these people on TV that we are overdue for an economic correction and it may again involve the housing market and when these people get laid off or go into bankruptcy or foreclosure, they’re going to wonder why they cared so much about backsplash or countertops. I think, why do we put so much consideration into a wall surface that we’re just going to be cleaning splattered tomato sauce off? It spatters just the same on quartz as on slate or travertine. I think, the sun has held the Earth in its embrace for billions of years and will do so for billions more. And despite all that humanity has achieved in that time, we are a blip, a stray eyelash on a cheek that the anthropomorphized universe wipes away without a second thought. And when I see a couple agonizing what backsplash to put in a kitchen that will see mostly pizza boxes, I feel just how small we are.