Inspired by Jonny Kime’s blog, we are pleased to unveil Bourbon and Ginger, the cartoon strip. Bourbon and Ginger have long been a mysterious couple; so different from each other, yet so complementary. 6 more of these and we have ourselves a wall calendar! Place your order now!
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In a controversial announcement overnight, John Edwards was voted Husband of the Year in Etisoppo, an alternate universe that lies between the 4th dimension and the Blue Crab Nebula. A spokesman for the Etisoppian civilization, Carl Fleming, made comments to the press before unveiling a bronze likeness of Mr. Edwards on the hallowed grounds of the Dickwad Sculpture Garden. Fleming noted, “John Edwards was an obvious choice for this award. As if being a slimy combination of lawyer and politician weren’t enough, he also committed the most egregious and shocking kind of adultery in recent memory, conceiving a baby with his skank mistress immediately following the news that his wife has inoperable breast cancer. We applaud his ingenuity, vision, and appalling selfishness.” The spokesperson then presented the statue and proceeded to slither underneath a large rock to the immediate left of the podium.
I wouldn’t have been the first person to go mad in a New Jersey traffic jam. To me, Jersey people were more apt to part with their sanity than their toll change and, with every Turkpike merge, I expected someone to leap from their car and bludgeon me with their car jack.
But on that day I wanted it. I would have welcomed any roadside abuse, any punishment would have been an improvement to my day, to my life. And I was just as ready to deliver the pain. With foot hovering over the gas pedal, I was ready to demolish the first car that honked in my direction. Sometimes the tense, dead calm of urban traffic can spur these private eruptions and they are largely hard to justify. The reason for my own private misery was pathetic at best.
I was under attack by critters.
They were not in my car, mind you, but their recent invasion never left me. My tiny suburban bathroom was overrun by a bionic breed of ant. Was an ant problem big enough to force me from my car onto the New Jersey Turnpike to scream like a wet baby? At that point I believed it was.
I’d been living and working in the New Jersey suburbs for nearly two years and the pace and attitude of the urban northeast had worn me down, left me cold, and made me homesick for the South more than I realized. As a novice documentary film editor, I was up there with the intention of breaking into the entertainment industry while lazing in the comfort of creative and fulfilling work. The longer I labored on the project—when the 3-month gig became a multi-year sentence—I became less fulfilled and felt certain that our little film would never grow up to be “entertainment.” The job was dull and interminable and North Carolina seemed like an uncharted island on an undiscovered planet.
One would think that the appearance of some ants would’ve provided something constructive to focus on besides the gloomy string of future workdays; instead, their arrival felt like an apocalyptic sign. This particular breed was fast. It multiplied at will. It was nearly indestructible. I couldn’t sit on the toilet without having to ceremoniously dispatch a dozen ants that were marching across my face soap and through the bristles of my toothbrush. And why is it never just one ant? It’s always multitudes, straight lines or platoons of them invading and exploring. Ants will file up your neck and crawl into your dreams if you let them. Every dark speck I saw began to move and my head was constantly darting from side to side, always hunting ants, with my index finger shooting up like E.T.’s, ready to squish squish squish.
But it wasn’t just the ants. While they seemed content in taking over the tiny bathroom and my subconscious, the kitchen was the habitat of the mouse. I saw him for the first time when I was on the telephone cooing into the receiver to an old girlfriend back home. Dinner had been finished for a few hours, the dishes cleared and pots soaking, the kitchen aromatic and quiet. He must have felt comfortable enough to make an appearance. I saw movement under one of the front eyes of the stove and thought it was just a shadow—then I saw his head, hunched shoulders and dumpy little mouse body. I stood up, dumbfounded by his indifference to my presence, and approached. He scurried back down into the depths of the oven, probably crapping as he ran, leaving a trail of turds unreachable by hand and unseeable in the poor light with undetectable diseased vapors to taint every future meal.
I’d had a mouse before, back when I lived in the wooded boonies of South Carolina. But at the time I was living alone in a barn apartment so mice seemed like part of the deal. Once in awhile I’d find droppings by the split baseboard in the bedroom or hear faint scampering when I’d come home late. But I never physically saw the mouse so I wasn’t bothered by our cohabitation. I could even enjoy the idea of a mouse nearby. It was like a quiet, secretive roommate who kept to itself and reminded me every so often that I was not alone out there in the woods. When I finally left that apartment, on the last day of the move actually, there was one corner of the bedroom with a few rows of boxes and some bags of trash still left to be taken out. As I removed the final bag, I noticed the mouse sitting in the corner blinking up at me. He didn’t scurry away fearfully or make a rabid lunge at my shin—he just sat there, calm and confident, and watched me take out the last load, leaving him the apartment once and for all.
For some reason I’d never expected anything like mice or ants in New Jersey. Believing the “Garden State”-designation was some leftover moniker from the American Revolution, I thought Jersey would be paved and industrialized and that nothing except rude people and cockroaches could survive there. So the appearance of the new mouse, all those years later, was somehow more unsettling. I had been burglarized a few months earlier and it felt like another home invasion when that mouse showed up. But this time it wasn’t cash and security that were taken; it was the feeling of peace. My simple apartment was almost all I had and even it was a vulnerable disappointment. The mouse became the ultimate symbol of my displacement. He didn’t sneak around and try to stay in hiding and didn’t leave clues for me to discover. He simply walked out of my oven, looked at me from across the kitchen and on cue sent out the telepathic, “how YOU doin’?” like a typecast goombah in a Sopranos cartoon.
Calling the landlord and complaining about pest control was sure to be a waste of time. I discovered early on that the tenant-landlord relationship has a different dynamic in the densely populated northeast. When I first moved in, he’d informed me that parking in the driveway was off limits unless I did all of the landscaping for the property. Tenants were also responsible for upkeep of the heating system—a belching relic of a boiler that would frequently break down and leave everyone in the house garbed like high-altitude mountaineers and tinkering with useless thermostats. Even when I was robbed he never came by and even told me “not to go crazy” with improved security. Knowing his assistance would be minimal at best and figuring there would be a full infestation before he ever sprung to action, I sought other solutions.
I went to the bathroom, sat down, crushed some ants and made a plan. The next day during my lunch break I went to a local hardware store and purchased a couple of wooden mousetraps and cheap ant poison that must’ve been quite funny to the hordes of ants inhabiting the bathroom. It was so irresistible to them that—according to the label—they were supposed to break the waxy glob into pieces, take the chunks back to their nest, throw a poison food party and decimate the entire ant population. From what I could tell the poison made them faster and more plentiful. But at least with the ants, periodic squishing trips in the bathroom felt like progress. With the mouse I had to rely on this simple invention to trap and kill him. I knew hovering over the stove with a rolling made as much sense as waiting for the landlord to come over and make everything right.
Once the mousetraps were opened, I had to reacquaint myself with the operating procedure. I’ve never been much for surprises or sudden noises. Afraid to unite fuse and flame, I was one of those shaky, timid little boys who could barely light a firecracker without wasting all the fuel in a lighter and angering the expectant crowd. So the hair-trigger death bar on the mousetrap filled me with fear and awe. I decided on peanut butter for bait—it was right there in the pantry, after all—and setting the trap led to several humiliating moments where I tripped the mechanism early and the bar slammed down and I’d eat a spoonful of JIF to calm my nerves. But I knew I was a grown man and if other grown men could shoot guns and fix their carburetors, then I could catch a frigging mouse. With held breath and a skilled surgeon’s touch, I armed the mousetrap and set it down behind the oven.
Nothing happened on the first night. I woke up the next morning and peeked around the range but only saw the baited trap. There were fresh droppings on the kitchen counter between the coffeepot and the toaster so I knew he was still around and getting even bolder. I brushed the little pellets up with a moist paper towel while the coffee was percolating and imagined the mouse gaping at me from some invisible vantage point, bored and waiting for me to go to work so he could casually pop sugar grains into his mouth and shit on the silverware.
The following evening I went up to the neighborhood tavern to have beers and listen to the local drunks yell towards the Yankee’s game on the television. Once in a while I felt at home in New Jersey, when a conversation with a stranger or a stiff drink would transport me to another place, a nameless oasis untouched by expectation or stereotype. That night was particularly pleasant since Clemmons was on the mound and Sly-The-Reptile-Guy had brought his baby python to the bar and was buying Absolut shots for anyone who’d hold it. So my mood was cheerful when I cashed out, wandered home, strolled into the kitchen and nonchalantly glanced behind the oven.
I’d caught the mouse.
While I was thrilled that the plan had worked, I was floored by the gory spectacle of the miniature crime scene. There were tiny bright puddles of blood leading to the trap that was now wedged almost entirely underneath the stove, all signs of a grim struggle. When I bought the trap I assumed that death for the hapless mouse would be quick and painless. I even imagined that he would die happy with the free offering of peanut butter laid out for him alone. Like he’d quietly stumbled upon his own sweet smorgasbord and maybe even had a little taste before the bar dropped and the lights went out. But this was obviously no expedient demise. Once the device was tripped, the bar came down and hit the mouse in the middle of his snout. Given the speed of the bar’s release and the small surface area of the point of impact, I figured his nose would’ve been sheared completely off his face. But the bar held fast and the poor thing must’ve gone mad with pain and confusion trying to shake it loose.
I held the small picture of death up to my face. I felt sick and guilty and my nose itched the more I thought about its last dying moments. Using the end of a pen, I pried the bar off of his snout and nudged the body into the trashcan.
That night I set a second trap under the pantry that never caught anything. For several weeks I’d bend down to investigate the trap, expecting blood and a fresh body, but I never saw anything except a hardening glob of peanut butter. The droppings failed to reappear. My unlucky victim must’ve been a solitary mouse trying to keep warm during the last bitter month of a prolonged winter. I couldn’t help feeling like I killed a drifter, a wily opportunist just trying to get by in that hard, unforgiving place.
Meanwhile, the ants persisted and had to be professionally wiped out. The exterminator suspected they were thriving in some standing water behind the tiles of the bathtub. When the hot water faucet was disconnected from the wall, hundreds of angry ants swarmed from their disturbed nest and were quickly drowned in a monsoon of Raid. The hole of the nest was sprayed repeatedly and the faucet was replaced and recaulked, leaving the few insect survivors buried alive.
The new tenants of the house probably think nothing of what lurks behind the shower’s hot water handle as they step naked into the dingy stall. Checking the rump roast, it’s doubtful they consider the hidden network of pipes leading into the oven. Babes in the Jersey woods, I guess, with bad people looking through their windows at night, browsing for things to steal.
I am now back in the South, flirting with adulthood in a town that is the Fountain of Youth for guys like me. Guys who know bars, with the sweet skin of college life still clinging to them like outdated fashions. The film is done and is just another project on another shelf waiting for an audience to glance away from the explosions of the multiplex long enough to notice it.
I have unloaded my belongings into a new rental nest and settled into a new life, complete with a good girl and wiser ambitions. And on those melancholy nights when I’m home alone, when the kitchen is serene and twilight is at hand, I’ll give my oven door a little kick and listen for the quiet, hopeful stir of footsteps.
If your family is anything like mine, tonight will be less about getting drunk and more about staying up long enough to watch Dick Clark mugging uncomfortably for the camera. Witnessing his sad deterioration is like watching the ball drop in annual snapshots and honestly, it’s a weird way to celebrate. Since his stroke in 2004, ABC has called on him to reflect on the passing of another year, provide a snapshot of his health, and report on the crowd, weather, and mood in Times Square. With each year, that screen time is getting shorter and shorter—this year we may merely catch a glimpse of Clark during the end credits underneath a pile of confetti. I applaud the decision to keep him busy and the illustration that elderly stroke victims can lead meaningful and productive lives, but if they are going to have his involvement, why not keep him on the whole time? Don’t cart him to the set at 12:15 am. He’s tired by then. Let him start the show and leave the closing to the young bucks. It’s almost like they are hiding him from public scrutiny yet are contractually obligated to reveal him—maybe it’s a stipulation for using the phrase “New Years Rockin’ Eve” in the program title.
It’s odd when our entertainment hosts become the entertainment. How do these people achieve such fame and popularity? Clearly, hosts are expected to last and I fear that we will be stuck watching Ryan Seacrest age for the rest of his life. My own kids will one day gaze upon Seacrest and marvel at old he has become while simultaneously witnessing the ascension of his on-air replacement.
I guess this is merely a byproduct of being among an aging television demographic. Not only are we watching programs and commercials, but we are witnessing a glacial changing of the guard and how that overly enthusiastic host represents his or her generation. And the realization that we are getting older is only heightened by the parade of lame musical acts that come between awkward hosting bits and the street interviews with morons wearing oversized 2010 sunglasses and kissing their drunken french kisses. Enjoy it while you can, revelers! Soon enough you will be on the couch critiquing the spectacle and fighting to stay awake until midnight.
Enjoy the show and Happy New Years! Cheers~
During our first Christmas together as a couple, Carrie introduced me to a movie and unwittingly started a family tradition. Even though it involved the creative genius of Jim Henson and his crew, somehow I missed Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas as a kid. The television special came out in 1977 on HBO–I was 6 years old and programmed to plop down on shag carpets and watch singing muppets. So watching it as an adult for the first time was a unique experience. I was amazed by the craftsmanship and touched by the characters but there was no meddling nostalgic force painting my perceptions. It was just pure, childlike enjoyment. We watch it every Christmas now and I’m always excited to dig it out of the bottom of the entertainment center each December.
Emmet and Ma Otter live in Frogtown Hollow and they survive by performing odd jobs in the community. There is a bleak back story here but Emmet and his mother are die-hard optimists and their singing and compassion outweigh the negativity that surrounds them. There are sweet, musical interludes that need to be heard and seen to fully appreciate and no blog musings will do them justice. Written by the brilliant Paul Williams, the songs are both touching and whimsical, deep yet accessible, and catchy enough to surface in your mind at odd times between Christmas seasons. And matching the achievement of the music are the wonderfully designed creatures, the magnificently detailed miniature sets, the clever and funny writing, and the timeless theme of giving when there’s barely anything to give. As a bonus feature there are outtakes, and let me tell you: muppet bloopers are hilarious.
This DVD would be a nice stocking stuffer for just about anyone. I can’t wait for my son to get old enough to learn this story and sing these songs and be as moved as I have been. Below is a link to Emmet and some of his pals rehearsing for Frogtown Hollow’s Talent Show. Happy Holidays!
How did you come to be? To be honest, I never paid much attention to you or your colleagues until recently. Of all the random parts of my body that I’ve studied and measured over the years, the eyelashes have been ignored. Like a leaf upon the breeze, one of your kind would break loose and drift down to my cheek, but I’d brush it off with no regard for why it uprooted or when another would take its place.
But then you came along. Like every other important thing, my wife noticed you first. She looked at me with deep interest, moving in close, a smile spread on her face. I thought she was coming on to me because I am a fool.
“Honey, what’s up with your eyelash?” She said, keeping her pants on.
“What do you mean?”
“You have one eyelash that is freaky long.”
And it is true. You are a monster. An abomination. She’s trimmed you down to normal size a few times but you keep coming back, bigger and stronger with each cut. Soon you will be a coat hook.
Eyelashes are there to protect the eyeball from injury and foreign particles. Well dude, you take your job very seriously. You’ve pumped yourself up and gotten huge. Now you stick out like a greased-up bouncer on the Jersey Shore. Did you ever see the movie, My Bodyguard? (Of course you did, you are my eyelash.) You are like the big bodyguard guy, the oaf in the army jacket. You stand beside my wimpy helpless eyeball like a mute brute, ready to pummel anything that comes too close.
Well listen: at ease soldier. Next time we cut you back, fall in line with the others. Your work is done. I have other random hairs to mow.
The following was written during the winter of 2000 as an “According to Mike” article. Good thing I’ve already done this; my cardiologist would never go for it.
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I only had three full days to get mentally prepared for my first skydive, the ultimate test of bravery/sanity. I assumed it would fall through over the weekend. Either the weather would be nasty, I would have to work or would chicken-out. But once Sunday evening came around and the morrow’s skydiving plan was still afloat, anxiety hit hard. Sleep was evasive. Sitting wide-eyed in bed, I decided to read some Hemingway to either get sleepy or find some 11th hour injection of manly nerve and bravado. The ironic fact that Papa Hemingway was an eventual suicide wasn’t lost on me.
On the day of reckoning I was up early to rendezvous at The Waffle House with my follow jumpers. So I sat in the parking lot and penned a brief will. Being a natural worrier, this seemed to be the right thing to do. Details on who was to get what—it’s difficult to sincerely divide a goose egg—aren’t important, but here’s a snippet: if for some reason my chute fails to open and I go splat sometime later in the day, know that I love you all.
As it turned out, only six out of a rough list of 40-something potentials showed up. We had our coffee and smoked our cigarettes and broke the yolks of our eggs while exchanging nervous laughter. We were really going to do it. While most people were or on their way to work or mulling over their vote in what was to become quite the newsworthy election [2000], we were preparing to leap from a mechanically sound airplane somewhere over St. George, S.C., wherever that was.
On the convoy out to the jumpsite, I pondered the gray band of sky and pictured myself tumbling rocklike through its expanse. Adventure on land and water can seem unsettling and foreign, but to taunt gravity and trust sheer fabric and rope with your very life seemed pretty dumb, the more I thought about it.
We arrived at Blue Sky Adventures in St. George late in the morning. The business, which is four years in operation and hosts thousands of jumpers annually, was basically a small private airport with a cozy office sitting just off the tarmac and a nearby hangar holding all of the jump gear. Owners Wally and Melissa West were extremely friendly and accommodating, but the undercurrent of danger was obvious. The doom factor, which we were trying to forget about, started with the reams of release forms alerting us that the recreational activity we were about to participate in could leave us, “seriously and permanently injured or even killed.”
But while we were literally signing our lives away, skydiving videos were running on the television and confident, steely-eyed jump studs were there to assure us that everything would be okay. They were also playing guitar-rock anthems to get you pumped. The nervousness settled into a spirited team camaraderie as we ventured out to the hangar to meet our jumpmasters and learn the basics.
What shocked me most was the brief nature of the instructional speech. Since we were jumping tandem, there really wasn’t much to explain. Roughly, here’s the orientation: meet your jumpmaster (the complete stranger that you will be hooked to provocatively and who holds your life in his hands), squirm into some sleek pastel flight-pajamas, stuff your body into the torture device of a harness, decide how you want to exit the plane, get on plane. Very simple, very efficient. It happens so quickly that you can’t dissuade yourself from following through with it. I’m not implying it was unprofessional or that our physical safety was compromised, but it is wise planning on their part to expedite the fundamentals and get you off the ground and up in the air.
And up in the air you are with a target jump elevation at over 13,000 feet. So the gutted two-prop plane carries the wad of brightly-colored bodies to elevation, with Aerosmith blaring from the boom box seat-belted into the rear of the plane, and your jumpmaster reiterates the gameplan and makes sure you’re not completely freaked out with fear or vertigo. Together, you check the altimeter, secure yourselves together, discuss again your proper body position for the 45-second freefall, then wait your turn at the hatch. My jumpmaster was “Robbo” Dunn and you can’t imagine a more laid-back, pleasant person. But beyond another’s personality, you really can’t imagine the instantaneous bond that is established between two people as they tumble backwards out of a plane together.
And that’s how it happens. No matter if you exit forwards or backwards, there is an immeasurable length of time that is the pinnacle of chaos. You don’t know up from down, the wind is deafening, you’re laughing and screaming at the same time but nothing is really coming out because your mouth is eating air at 100+mph, your jumpmaster is moving your limbs around like an action-figure to achieve perfect form, and you’re simply falling out of the sky.
But when he pulls the cord and the chute opens, it’s like you’re completely frozen in space, then all is serene. Your heart-rate is still off the charts and you’re still tearing up, but the chute has opened and no matter how clumsy your eventual landing will be, you will survive.
You were expecting a rush but the actual rush exceeds all your expectations a thousand times over. And that rush comes with firm ground, high-fives, draft beer, better friends, indelible memories and a crazed staring contest with your own mortality. I can think of no better present to give someone than the gift of a first skydive. Keep that in mind when you’re shuffling through the malls over the next few weeks and every store, every yuletide sentiment, is the same as every other year.
(Above: Tiger, with unknown admirer) Close inspections of archive photography reveal that Tiger Woods acted inappropriately at USGA sponsored tournaments.
Take a stroll down Any Street, USA and you’ll see that people spend a lot of time and money beautifying their yards. Who can blame them? Real estate is a huge investment and a yard can reveal a lot about a homeowner. But what’s revealed is not always a good thing. Here is photographic proof from my own neighborhood…
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Similar to Roman ruins, these miniature turquoise columns suggest a race of homosexual dwarfs once lived here. What kind of fabulous architecture did they once support? In other areas of the yard there are rock faces and flower bed borders painted this same color, lending the entire property an air of pastel squalor.
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OK, it’s hard to get a sense of the enormity of the freakish flora from this picture, but these bushes are huge. If you lived in this house and gazed out of any window or doorway towards your front yard, all you would see is branches. A hundred thousand branches to haunt your dreams. A landscaper could spend his entire career pruning just these two monsters.
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What we see here is perhaps a 6-foot length of shin-high wire fencing. It is neither decorative nor functional and is slowly being overrun by the encroaching weeds. This fence wouldn’t keep out a blind and crippled rabbit. Why someone hasn’t yanked it from the ground and slung it in the street is beyond me.
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Spray-painted pink yard chairs may not seem like such a decorative affront, but the people who live here are bikers. You know, real bikers—burly, heavy, middle-agers with glistening Harleys in the driveway and pink chairs in the yard. It just doesn’t go together. I would have taken a picture of the whole oxymoronic panorama but, fearing a beat down, didn’t want to stand in their yard with my camera any longer than necessary.
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Someone spent a lot of energy hauling these unwieldy concrete blocks across the yard and stacking them into this wavy, waist-high defensive wall. Its construction is as puzzling as that of the Great Pyramids of Giza. It doesn’t keep anything in or out and would be a considerable obstacle when mowing and weed eating. Why bother? Unless you were starting a neighborhood paintball course or needed something to high jump.
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This pitiful looking cow must have strayed from its herd. It now stands alone in this yard and has obviously grazed most of the grass within its reach. Perhaps it was staked there to hide the flimsy sapling or the snake pit of neon cables behind it. I must say that its beautiful eyelashes take focus from the hump-goiter that plagues its hide quarters.
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There are “race fans” all over the south, so I wasn’t surprised to find Jeff Gordon’s #24 sticking out of this flower bed. What is odd is the haphazard, careless placement of the numerals and the way they seem to have drunkenly collapsed against the shrubs. Any passing Jeff Gordon enthusiast would look upon this display as an outrage—the resident needs to stick them in the center of his yard within a weather-proof plastic dome with dramatic lighting and an eternal flame.
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Clearly the owners of this goal think no one will notice the 8 sandbags that lay beneath the flapping, split trash bag that is supposed to mask the half-ass repair, a fix they hope will keep the goal from falling down again onto one of their vehicles. The object has lost all of its sports cred and has become something that resembles a futuristic pack animal. (I am no yard snob. This is our own embarrassing basketball goal.)
