Don’t call your mother and say you feel like you are dying because she won’t appreciate it anymore than your 14 year-old son will appreciate seeing/hearing certain lines in movies, even if they are names.
I still remember his not being sure how to respond to a character named Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. I didn’t react in large part because I had seen the movie a dozen times before we watched it together so there were no surprises to be had.
Until I realized he was a little uncomfortable with her name. I guessed it had more to do with me being there and that if I wasn’t he wouldn’t have cared.
Might have giggled if it had been peers, might not have.
So I stopped the movie and asked if all was fine. He assured me it was but I made like the good dad and asked if the naked woman covered in gold bothered him.
“Nope.”
“You know it couldn’t be a silver man.”
He said he assumed I was messing with him and I asked him if he remembered his grandmother’s maiden name was Silver and that I had been told it might have been Silverman at one time.
“That could have been interesting. It could have been a Silver man and we could have had Silverman relatives, would almost be like we were in the movie.”
“Dad, that is ridiculous, I am not 8 anymore.”
“Yeah, it is ridiculous but I spend way too much time being serious so…”
He glared at me and I smiled back.
Told mom I got the email I expected to receive and that I wasn’t going to flinch cuz her baby boy has pulled more than one rabbit out of his hat.
She told me she had to go, to feel better and that we’d speak tomorrow.
I said ok and then sneezed so hard my eyeballs shot clear across the room and my head attempted to rip itself from my neck.
It felt about as good as you might imagine and I tried to figure out why my body has chosen to engage in a violent sneeze.
Didn’t get an answer so I had the brain type a memo, make carbon copies and affix them to all points of information throughout the body.
In response to a reminder of an open door policy and a request for better communication my right foot tried to kick me in the ass and my left hand attempted to sucker punch me in the face.
Tomorrow our delusional president will try to prove how tough he is by standing close to military men and weaponry but I laugh at that.
Because the fact that I prevented my head from being severed and put down this mutiny means I am the baddest motherfucker in the valley.
Probably the sorest too, pass the Advil.
I really ought to be lying down trying to sleep, but this nonsense didn’t just make me sore, it pissed me off.
And as mommy will tell you as a very young child I had a bad and stupid habit of slamming my head against the floor when I got angry or hurt.
Yeah, I know it is not smart and not my finest characteristic, but I have a high threshold for pain and am tough.
Thought about trying to monetize that by becoming a boxer or MMA fighter but I dislike getting hit and potentially seriously hurt more than I like the idea of trying to see if I use this nonsense to make a buck.
How clever must a man be to earn a living?
How clever must he be to write as he used to when there are so many interesting folks following him.
The answer ain’t blowing in the wind and it probably isn’t here either because I knocked all the sense out of me long ago.
Forgot there was frozen matza ball soup here, left over from the kid’s wisdom teeth surgery so I brought in wonton from a place I hadn’t tried before.
It was good, but I could have used the matza ball soup.
Told this cold that I will kick its ass by tomorrow…I hope.
Harder to figure out how to pull that rabbit out of the hat when your fighting a mutiny, but still not impossible.
There Is Truth
There is more truth in that quote than I sometimes care to acknowledge.
I listen to Howard Stern on about a daily basis and have become a big fan of his. It is not because of who he used to be and his old shock jock ways.
Some of that was kind of funny and I used to appreciate it. I still laugh at some of the ridiculous bits, but what I pay most attention to are his interviews and some of his comments about his approach to his craft.
His interviews are outstanding. He is well prepared and he asks good questions but what really makes these sing are the answers he gets.
Howard has become a master at getting people to open up and share things they wouldn’t say elsewhere or so it seems to me.
He gets them to speak with an honesty that I find to be refreshing and interesting. He gets them to tell a story and storytelling moves me.
Howard often speaks about how he figured out the way to build a deeper relationship with the audience was to be be more honest.
I think about that sometimes here and how many lines I cross versus how many I don’t.
Howard is correct.
If I wrote more openly about some things and shared more I could build a bigger readership and probably deeper relationships with the readers.
But I am not sure I want to cross some of those lines because some stories aren’t mine alone. So while I could tie a hell of a story to that Anna Karenina quote I am not sure I ought to.
Truthfully I am skilled enough at this business to find a way to tell it, but I am still not sure I want to do that.
It might still be interesting for you, but I don’t know how interesting it would be for me. It is much harder to keep readers happy if you are bored.
So maybe we’ll save that for a different time or a different world.
