An Ode To My Christmas Gift

‘Twas Five days before Christmas,
In the evening quite late,
And upon my poor shoulders,
Was a terrible weight.

The gifts were all purchased,
My accounts were all bare,
My job hung o’er a cliff,
By a fast-fraying hair.

The stock market was mauled,
By corporate hordes,
And my 401k,
Couldn’t buy three cans of Coors.

From an employment view,
I felt dreadfully cursed,
And just could not see how,
Things could get that much worse.

Then my wife had approached me,
‘cross the living room floor,
Then quietly told me,
She got knocked up once more.

My sphincter then puckered,
My ass felt so torn,
While my rear compressed diamonds,
From half-digested corn.

My head started reeling,
My stomach fell ill,
How could this have happened,
While she’s on the pill?

I glanced down at my winkie,
While my soul filled with dread,
Then pointed and shouted,
“NOW OFF WITH YOUR HEAD!”

Now I fear how I’ll clothe it,
Or school it or feed it,
But all things considered,
I still can’t wait to meet it.

So, anyone want to say good-bye to my nuts before I stick them in the microwave?

Another Close Call...

If Southeastern Michigan had any form of transportation at all, today would be the day that I give up driving. I was going southbound on I-75 this morning when I looked up to see the tractor-trailer wobbling violently beside me. To me, it appeared that his load had shifted and it looked as if the damn thing was on the verge of flipping over on top of me. Without thinking I yanked on my steering wheel and pulled hard to the left, cutting off the guy just barely behind me in the left lane, sending him hurtling into the lane where I just was trying to avoid me. As soon as he cleared out from behind, I spotted an SUV twirling around behind the both of us until it smashed into the median guardrail and was sent ricocheting back into the middle of the expressway.

My heart sank as I pulled hard back to the right shoulder. I looked back at the semi, which now looked about as stable as it could be while stopped on the shoulder, and my initial thought was that I had experienced some weird hallucination that had lead me to cause a very serious accident. The guy I cut off thought the same thing and as we both crawled out of cars, he was telling me so in no uncertain terms. Upset that he would not let me explain my side of the story, I began getting belligerent back and we spent the next ten seconds or so screaming at each other on the side of the road. Then something must have caught our attention because we both back looked behind us and went dead silent.

I was almost relieved that I was not imagining things. The truck beside me was wobbling. It had been struck from behind by several vehicles forced into it by an out-of-control tractor-trailer that had plowed into them. My adversary and I ended our argument on the spot and without saying a word sprinted back towards all of the broken cars and trucks behind us. The wobbly truck looked fine from the front so we bypassed him and went to a Ford Ranger pickup that was perched precariously atop the right guardrail on its side. All the airbags had deployed and the driver was trying to climb up out of the window while holding a cloth to his bleeding face at the same time. We jumped up on top of the car to try to help but the effort was an exercise in futility. Seeing this, my partner kicked out the glass on the ground side and managed to squeeze him out through there. Aside from some superficial cuts, he appeared OK. Then he took a couple of steps and collapsed. My partner caught him and got him to the ground. Apparently he had suffered a significant concussion.

As my uninjured colleague had the concussion victim, I went on to see if there was anyone else that needed help. Despite the Detroit area’s reputation as a violent place where life is cheap, less than a minute and a half into the accident, the scene was crawling with Samaritans pulling people out of various mangled wreckages. I was able to help the guy out of the SUV I saw twirling around behind me but after that, nearly every other car already had someone helping out. Then I saw a vehicle well off the road back in the woods. It was hard to spot from the road and I was afraid that it might have been missed. I ran up to it find that a nurse already had the driver out of the vehicle and lying in the grass. The only thing I could do there was to grant the nurse’s request to direct the paramedics up there once they arrived.

Seeing that everyone was being attended to, I walked back up front where I ran into my new buddy back by the overturned Ranger. While we were discussing the driver’s condition, we looked back by the truck and simultaneously notice an extra wheel in the pick-up’s wreckage. A closer look revealed extra metal as well and we both realized that, despite having walked past the wreck several times, we had missed a car that had gotten caught between the tractor trailer and the Ranger. Both of us ran to it to see if there was anything we could do but if the outside appearance of the car was not enough to tell us the driver never had a chance, a quick look inside certainly did. I am not going to go into detail about what I saw, but I can definitely say that it is something I will likely blame for a lot of lost sleep for the next couple of weeks.

It was not long after that when the police started showing up. To get out of the way, a dozen of us walked over to the median and waited to be questioned. Until the full first response contingent arrived, my collision partner and I stayed silent unless we were warning civilians to stay away from the crushed car. I think we were there a good half hour before he turned to me and nodded over towards the wreckage, “You know, that could have been either one of us over there.”

He was right. I could not help but wonder what the person in that vehicle was thinking when that truck hit it. Did they even know what had happened? I doubted it, seeing how quickly things had unraveled. I hoped it anyway. After that, we started talking more, mostly trading small talk that was completely unrelated to the accident, trying to get our minds off of what we had just seen. Then some dufus stepped up beside us, nodded towards the wreckage we just came from and said, “Wow. That’s a shame. You think there were any kids in there?”

It was a place that I had not thought of going and really would have liked to have avoided altogether. Mercifully, we were released from the scene before the car was cut open but as news filtered out later, it turned out that there were no kids in the car, unless you count the victim who turned out to be a nineteen-year-old girl.

As for what actually happened, I have no idea. My understanding is that the moving truck was going way too fast for the traffic conditions and started plowing into vehicles when the flow started slowing down for an upcoming construction zone. Various news reports put the number of vehicles involved in the wreck between eight and eleven, which I guess would depend upon whether they were counting the cars of the three of us that didn’t get hit but stopped to help.

Getting home yesterday night was strange as well. Everyone was fine, all of my kids were healthy and happy and busy doing all of the crazy stuff that young kids should be doing to get in trouble. I should have been embracing the moments with them but all I could think about was what that 19-year-old girl’s family was doing at that particular moment. It almost seemed wrong that I took my kids out for ice cream last night knowing the unfathomable grief that someone else was going through on the other side of town. Desperately needing some quiet time, I went to bed at the first opportunity but had no chance of sleeping with the vision of the fatality still swimming in my head. To make matters worse, my memories of what I saw began being falsely enhanced with things that I KNOW I did not see in that car but now stand out as if I had taken a picture.

My apologies for the lack of a punchline to this blog entry but there were no smart-assed comments or anything even remotely amusing about what had happened. In fact, I am not even sure why I am writing this at all seeing as how this event was an hour of my life that I will be doing my best to forget for a long time from now. I don’t know, maybe I think these few paragraphs will be somewhat therapeutic or something, who knows. Either that or I’m just doing what I usually do. I came, I saw, I wrote. Once again, sorry and hopefully I’ll do a better job of writing my next blog entry. It should not be too hard since a few minutes ago, my potty-training 3 year old son just had the toilet seat fall down on his winkie. If I can’t work with that, its time for me to hang up the keyboard.

Sunday Morning

One of my signature barbecue dishes is the Sriacha chicken skewer. Basically, I cut a skinless, boneless chicken breast into long thin strips and threaded onto a bamboo kebob stick. I then pour a marinade over it concocted with a Thai hot sauce (Sriacha), garlic, green onion, black pepper and garlic. Originally intended as an appetizer, this item has a tendency to become the main course despite its palate-searing heat and I have seen people gorge upon this who typically turn their backs on anything spicier than black table pepper. Though easily among the tastiest things I make, my favorite thing about this dish is not the flavor as extraordinary as that is. It is the fact that the only thing adequately capable of putting the oral fire out after taking a bite of one of these bad boys is a mojito cocktail.

Having devoured several Sriacha skewers last Saturday, I was consequently required to down mojitos at a ratio of two drinks per serving of chicken consumed. As my drinking regimen has suffered greatly since I started fathering children, I felt no pain upon getting home Saturday night. I had apparently opted to save it all for Sunday. As far as hangovers go, the one I had Sunday was barely worthy of being rated. It was however, more than enough to keep me from being capable of participating in a meaningful conversation with my seven-year-old daughter about Webkinz and Hannah Montana first thing in the morning while trying to do enough dishes to get the rest of my kids through breakfast. I had no choice but to tune her out and try to listen to the local news on the television while throwing out the requisite phrases like “Really?”, “Are you serious?” and “Cool!” like I do to my wife when she’s trying to talk to me during football season.

I have no idea what she was talking about the time but at some point in the conversation she completely stopped talking, drew in a deep breath and let out scream so loud and long that I dropped a handful of dishes into the sink, nearly breaking them as I looked up to see what in the world was going on. Her screams projected such terror that I almost expected to see one of her zombified brothers walking down the steps gnawing on a limb severed off of the baby or our front door being breached by swarm of tarantulas with an insatiable hunger for man-flesh in their eyes. I grabbed a knife out of the sink and looked nervously around for something to defend ourselves against. The only thing I saw however was the dog running for cover. He had seen me in the throes of my fight instincts before and likely did not want to just stand there and watch me hurt myself again.

After Ranger was gone, there was no other entity in the room besides myself and my daughter. She had gone catatonic however and was oblivious to her knife-wielding father, her mouth agape and her eyes immovably transfixed to the TV which was broadcasting a rather benign story about a concert that had taken place the night before at a local venue. Panicked and perplexed, I had to call out her name twice before she would acknowledge that I was even there. Once I had her attention I asked what was going on. She pointed at the television and said, “The Jonas Brothers, Daddy! The Jonas Brothers are on!”

Stunned, I tore my eyes away from her and looked at the TV myself. The screen was filled with the image of three fresh-faced young teen boys discussing their tour. At first glance I could not find anything particularly threatening or ominous about them. They definitely did not appear to be the type that would be capable of biting the head off of a bat during the interview or anything. “What did they do? Did they get caught sacrificing virgins onstage?”

“No Dad!”

“Then why did you scream like that?”

“Because they’re so CUTE!!!! I just LOVE them!!!”

At that point my heart sank. My daughter is only seven years old. I thought I had a few years before her psyche went incorrigibly bat-shit for a few years. All things considered, I’d have rather dealt with the zombie or the spiders.

Bidding On The Farm (Part 2)

Once the thunder had died down and the sense of shock had worn off, I was able to calm myself enough to take stock of my environment. There was a lot of smoke about, a lot of people milling about on the side of the road, a bunch of slow moving vehicles passing by and somebody near by was playing REM at full volume. Once I realized it was me, I groggily flopped my hand around the dashboard to turn off my radio. When I turned my head back around to the window, someone stuck their head inside so that we were practically nose to nose which scared the hell out of me, causing me to jump and set off the pain in my back again.

Still very disoriented from the impact, I had a hard time making out what the guy in my window was shouting at me but I knew it was something about having gas. This should have come as no surprise to me considering that it would be nothing short of a miracle if I had not left a giant streak mark clear up the back of the driver’s seat to the headrest. Cognizant of the fact that I had not understood a single word he had said, he reached in, grabbed my keys and turned the engine to my car off. “You’re leaking fuel all over the place. We need to get you out of here. Are you OK?”

“I don’t know.” I answered, glad to be able to understand him. “My back hurts. Give me a minute.”

“I’d rather not. I’ll be right back. I’m gonna get somebody over here to help me carry you.”

After he left, I started doing a body check. I wiggled my toes, they were fine. Ditto for my feet. My knees seemed to move OK but when I tried to move my legs at the hips, they did not want to do exactly what I told them to. I chalked them up as a “maybe”. On the bright side, I knew that I was not paralyzed.

When I tried to move my back however, I could tell that I was hurt. The sharp stabbing pain I felt during the accident was gone, but it was replaced by an intense ache that turned absolutely unbearable if I moved wrong. Still, I could live with it. Head, neck, shoulders, arms and chest just felt like I had worked out a little bit too hard but other than this minor discomfort, were just fine. I felt I could walk out of the crash. At least I could have if the door would have opened.

Luckily when the guy who was helping me came back, he brought a couple of friends. The three of them yanked on my door to open it but it just was not going to give. Eventually they took a step back, looked the car over and decided to try to pull the back door open. It took all three of them, but they did it. After that, it only took two to get mine open.

Standing up out of the car was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. Walking was a different matter altogether though. Buoyed by the confidence of being able to get up myself, I took my first step and nearly fell flat on my face in the middle of the interstate as new bolts of pain shot up and down my back. My legs seemed as if they were made of rubber and I had to be helped to the shoulder by one of the guys who helped me get out of the car. Once he got me out of traffic, he took off to attend to the person in the car who hit me and I was left to survey the scene by myself.

It was about this time that the police showed up along with one of the highway courtesy patrols, so what I saw was a vision of total confusion. There was all kinds of twisted metal and plastic debris strewn across the road. There was snarled traffic, honking horns, flashing lights, people talking in loud voices. There was some screaming, a lot of cursing and two police officers running around trying to simultaneously re-direct traffic and try to figure out what had happened. It was a completely new sensation for me. I was not used to being in the center of that level of chaos. Usually, I would be long gone before the cops showed up.

As one of the officers scanned the crowd for witnesses, another crossed the expressway and started looking for something in the median. Eventually, his partner got to me and asked my who I was. “Jep.”

“No, I mean what are you doing here?”

I pointed to my demolished car. “I’m here because that thing doesn’t seem capable of taking me anywhere else at the moment.”

“That’s your car?”

“Yeah.”

“You were driving?”

“Yeah.”

“Was anybody with you?”

“Nope.”

The officer called out to his partner, who was still looking around the expressway for something. “Forget it! I found him! He’s right here!”

I never dawned on me that no one bothered to tell the police that I was OK. Then come to think of it, I never saw the three guys who pulled me out of the car either. True Samaritans, it appeared that they stopped, made sure everyone was safe, pulled me out of my car and then left without giving anyone a chance to thank them. The funny thing was, everyone else was so focused on the woman who hit me (who was in far worse shape) that no one saw me emerge from my vehicle. Other than my back being hurt, I did not have a scratch on me and just sort of blended into the crowd gathering on the shoulder. Once the officer outed me however, the crowd shifted from the woman in the Hyundai to me and a half dozen people started talking to me at once:

“I saw the whole thing!”

“She didn’t even try to hit her brakes!”

“I thought you were a goner dude!”

And my personal favorite, uttered by a little old African-American woman with the deepest of Southern accents, “You need ta go ta duh ‘ospital and get yo seff checked up, young man. Aftuh dat, you make sho you call dat nice Sam Bernstein now ya hear?”

Now, let me take an opportunity here to debunk two racial myths often perpetrated by the media in the Detroit area. Not long after the cops arrived, virtually every white person on the scene disappeared to continue on about their business. That left me as the only Caucasian on the side of the road that was not wearing a uniform of some sort. If I were to subscribe to the stereotypes, everyone there would be circling the wagons around the poor black woman who hit me and refusing to answer questions posed to them by the police. Neither scenario could have been further from the reality.

When the police officer asked me what had happened, all I could do was shrug my shoulders and tell him that I didn’t see a thing. When he asked if anyone else had seen anything, everyone started talking at once, giving him very detailed descriptive accounts of what had transpired, all of which exonerated me and seemed to be aimed at demonizing the woman who nailed me. As I listened to the various accounts, my blood started boiling and I limped my way over to the Hyundai to give the woman, who was still inside, a verbal bludgeoning. Once I actually laid eyes upon her however, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I had a hurt back which, since my system was still overloaded with adrenaline, seemed to me to be more of a major discomfort that would diminish over the hours rather than a debilitating injury. The woman who hit me on the other hand had broken both wrists, one of which was a compound fracture where the bone was protruding from the skin. Though unknown at that moment, she had also busted a femur which she would soon discover was among the most painful types of injuries to endure when the paramedics extracted her from her car. Her face was also busted up and swelling, distorting her features into unnatural dimensions. There was little doubt that I had gotten off easy and there was nothing that I could say that was going to make her feel any worse than she already did so I just walked away.

Once the paramedics arrived, they determined that I had definitely did something to my back and needed to go to the hospital. Afraid that I would soon be immobilized, I was able to borrow a cell phone and call my wife. Since her cell phone number was “2” on my mobile’s speed dial, I did not know her cell number so I had to call the house, where an unfamiliar number came up on the caller ID. This became readily apparent by the conversation that ensued.

“Hello?” my wife answered tentatively, as if she were answering a telemarketer’s call.

“Hi, honey. I got into a real bad car accident.”

“Who is this?”

“Jep.”

“Jep who?”

“Your husband Jep!”

“Well, why aren’t you calling from your phone? Who’s Sharonda?”

“Who?”

“Sharonda. The woman who’s phone you’re calling from?”

At that point I was tempted to tell her she was my mistress but thought that could jeopardize my chances of having her pick me up from the hospital later. “I don’t know, some lady I met on the side of the road!”

“Side of the road?!? What are you doing on the side of the road?”

“I had an accident!”

“A what?”

“An ACCIDENT!”

“Oh my God! Are you OK?”

“NO!” Now I was started to get pissed about having to play 50 questions while trying to get a quick call in before the EMTs took me away. “I’m going to the hospital! The car’s totaled!”

“What hospital are you going to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call me when you find out?”

“I don’t have a phone!”

“Have someone call me on my cell!”

“I don’t have your number.”

“What do you mean you don’t have my number? How can you not have my cell phone number?”

“You’re trying to pick a fight with me now?!?!”

“No, I…”

I pulled out a pen. “The EMTs are coming for me right now. Give me your number.” She did and I wrote it in huge numbers on my forearm as the paramedics motioned for me to put the phone down and follow them. I told her I loved her and hung up.

At this point my back was definitely killing me but the pain was not unbearable. That changed dramatically once I was in the ambulance however. I walked into the bus under my own power, stood there until the EMT cleared me a spot on the bench along the wall and even positioned myself properly on the backboard pretty much by myself. After the paramedic strapped me in however, it was a whole different story. Whatever injury I had along my spine announced itself with a vengeance and I would not be able to move again without excruciating agony for the next eight hours. To make matters worse once I was immobilized, the paramedics left me alone to extract the woman who hit me from her car.

I have never been claustrophobic but being physically restrained in such a confined area coupled with the extreme pain I was in and the uncertainty with what was going to happen to me, I suddenly was flushed with an overwhelming sense of panic. I felt like I was suffocating again and struggled against my restraints to get myself into a position where I could breathe better. Of course, the more I struggled, the less I was able to breathe and unable to move, it was a futile effort to begin with. I knew I had to calm myself down or I would probably kill myself through anxiety alone. I had to put everything out of my mind and look for the silver lining in the whole situation.

The first thing that came to mind was that I was getting a new car. I figured that occupying my mind with what I was going to get and what features I was going to put into it would keep me distracted for a while. I was wrong. No sooner had I realized I was getting a new car then I remembered that I had just mailed the last car payment on my old car three days before. That twisted heap of metal strewn across two lanes of interstate highway was now completely owned by me, free and clear. At that point I started to get pissed and found myself on the verge of hyperventilating.

To get my breathing back under control, I forced myself to think of another silver lining. One would think that at my age I could come up with something better to look forward to than getting my hands on some good drugs but truth be told, I couldn’t and truth be told, it was a thought that actually had a soothing effect on me. I could not think of the last time I was able to spend a week laying on the couch in my underwear while watching cartoons and stuffing my face full of Doritos as I enjoyed being stoned out of my gourd. It is safe to say that I had not been able to pull that off since the mid-1980s anyway.

I did not get to savor the plans I was making for long however as my daydreaming was interrupted by a series of bloodcurdling, tortured screams from the accident’s other victim. The outbursts from her was so sudden and intense that, unable to see what was going on, I was beginning to suspect that the cops might have pulled her from the car and started beating her with their nightsticks for operating a motor vehicle with her head jammed too far up her ass to see out of the windshield. At the time I kind of felt bad because of the pain she was in but that was before I found out she was driving on a suspended license and without insurance. Now I feel bad about it because the paramedics strapped me into the ambulance beforehand and from that vantage point, I couldn’t see what they were doing to her.

Things kind of deteriorated from there. Once the woman who hit me started screaming, she did not stop for the next two hours. I know this because we carpooled to the hospital together and I basically followed her around from x-ray machine to x-ray machine until we were mercifully separated well after dinner time.

(Author’s note: Getting better. I’m off the pain killers now thank God, having discovered that narcotics aren’t nearly as fun when you HAVE to take them. Next installment should put this thing to bed. Have no idea when that might be).

Bidding On The Farm (Part 1)

Last Friday was one of the first truly beautiful days of the year here in Southeastern Michigan. The temperature was in the mid-70s, it was sunny and there was an awesome breeze that made driving with the windows down a true pleasure. Not that I was driving anywhere fast. In fact, at a quarter to five in the late afternoon, I was not moving at all. I was stuck in the right lane of Interstate 75 in Detroit waiting to get onto the westbound lanes of I-94 at a complete stop.

I-75 was completely closed down a couple of exits down from where I was leaving it so the traffic passing me on the left was so sparse it barely existed. The cars in front of me however, were not moving at all and that was going to make me late. Usually, that would irritate me to no end but this time I was actually all right with it. I was on my way to make my brother for a quick beer at The Eagles Aerie in Lincoln Park and after that, we were both going to the funeral of a close family friend. Though I was looking forward to having the beer with my brother, I was not looking forward to the funeral so if I had to spend a few extra minutes soaking up some extra sunshine on the way there, well, that was just fine. There was still a couple of hours before it started so I was in no danger of missing it. At least that is what I thought before the explosion.

There was no warning at all. One second I was looking out at my fellow commuters through my Pontiac Vibe’s windshield, which thanks to the quality of Michigan’s roads was already cracked completely in half despite having just been replaced just over a month before. The next instant, my ears were ringing and my head was laying in the passenger seat, which should have been a physical impossibility considering the fact that I had my seat belt on and there was a console separating where my head and butt were planted. I would have had to have been bent over like a rainbow sideways and let me assure you that because of my attempts to master the positions outlined in the ancient texts of the Kuma Sutra, I am intimately aware of the fact that I am nowhere near that damn limber.

Still, somehow that’s where I was. It was where I watched my glove box open up to vomit out the bag of lemon drops I now use to sooth the occasional nicotine cravings I get while driving. Behind those came a pair of winter gloves, my Tom Tom GPS device, a couple of maps, a few pennies and the Mega Millions lottery slips I used when I go to the liquor store every week to pay my tax on the mathematically challenged. I also watched every piece of trim fall off of the dashboard as the instrument panel disintegrated, fragments of it mixing with the flying lemon drops and pieces of broken glass that now filled the air. At that point it kind of felt like being in a snow globe being shaken by an exceptionally strong six-year-old. Mainly because it would have been happening in complete silence if not for the ringing in my ears.

That silence did not last for long. Inexplicably my radio, which had been turned off, suddenly went on at full volume. Appropriately enough, the song that began blaring out of my speakers was REM’s, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” thanks to the CD I was listening to on the way to work. The music was punctuated by sounds of twisting metal, horns, squealing tires and terrified screaming coming from both inside and outside of my own personal vehicle. It was about then that I realized that I was moving and even though I could not see a thing, I grabbed the steering wheel with my left hand to guide it somewhere safer. I had no idea where in the hell that could possible be but I guessed that anywhere other than where I was would be an improvement over where I was at that particular moment. Eventually, my car came to a stop on its own and I suddenly realized that no matter how hard I tried, I could not breathe. I tried to set myself up in the hope that that would help but was struck by an excruciating bolt of pain in my lower back along with the awareness that I could not move either. That was when I started to panic.

I remember flailing my arms around violently and aimlessly. I think I did that out of instinct more than anything else because there was nothing I was trying accomplish with it as far as I could recall. I tried to scream, but nothing would come out which made me feel even more helpless. It was as if I was drowning and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Eventually though, one of my hands found the steering wheel and I pulled myself back upright. When I did that, the pain in my back shot through the rest of my body as if I had just been impaled. I let another soul wrenching, yet silent, scream as I writhed about the driver’s seat with my eyes clenched shut. After the “scream” subsided, I somehow managed to draw a little air into my lungs. It made my stomach and my ribs hurt, but I got some air into my lungs. My second attempt to breathe hurt worse, but I got a little more air inside. With more air came more pain, but considering how absolutely horrifying the sensation of suffocation is, I would take it.

After I took my first full breath of air, I opened my eyes and immediately regretted it. I had started off at a complete stop in the far-right lane of a four-lane interstate. My car had been thrown two full lanes from there and had turned 180° so that I was now facing oncoming traffic and the first vision to greet me when I tried to take in my surroundings was that of an eighteen wheeled tractor trailer bearing down directly at me at full speed.

My situation at that point was pretty grave. There just was not enough room for the truck to stop in time before it hit me and even if my car was capable of going anywhere at that point, there was not enough time for me to get out of the way. The only option open to me was to open my door up and try to jump clear. An unattractive option from the outset since my legs were not working right, it became an impossible one once I realized that my door was stuck shut. The only thing I could do at that point that point was pray.

Now, I have never been a very religious person and have no history of regular church attendance. As a result, I lack the spiritual discipline to instinctively resort to prayer when things look particularly dire. I imagine that a good Catholic in my position, with a lifetime’s indoctrination into religious ritual and ceremony could just serenely close his eyes and move his lips to form the words, “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” My eyes on the other hand, surely opened up as wide as dinner plates and as I prepared to kiss the grill of that truck like some Freightliner version of the Blarney Stone, the only discernible utterance coming out of my lips was, “ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck...”

Fortunately for me, God does not appear to be much of a stickler in regards to getting all of the words to His prayers right and He decided to spare me anyway. The truck swerved into the only lane of traffic still open and missed me completely. After that, the wall of cars coming at me started slowing down and the risk of me being pulverized by more tractor-trailers dissipated.

Once the danger was gone, I looked around to try to piece together what happened. My rear view mirror was gone so I had to turn around to find out that the back of my car had disappeared. There was a Hyundai Sonata smashed into the overpass two lanes to my left and a bunch of other vehicles all pulled over to the shoulder from which people were emerging to assist the person in the Sonata. It did not take long for me to figure out that the Sonata had barreled into me from behind at full speed and judging by the condition of the Hyundai, never even tried to hit the brakes.

A Picture of my Car from This Morning

At first, nobody was coming over to try to help me at all. I was going to try to call out to someone but initially decided against it. I felt myself starting to break down and really did not want anybody to see me until I regained my composure. It was not the incredible pain in my back, the anxiety I had about my legs not working right or the fear about the whole situation in general that was causing me to lose control, it was just that after the near-miss I had with that truck, I just really missed my kids at that exact moment.

(Author’s Note: I have to break as the pain meds are putting me to sleep. Will continue this in parts until its finished. Those of you with my cell phone number, don’t bother calling it. My phone got lost during the accident and I won’t have a replacement until at least Tuesday.)

Tyke Fibbing

I will be the first to admit that before I got married and had children, I was not the most responsible person. An incorrigible libertine, my first priority was always the pursuit of a good time and I have done things in my past that I am now a bit reluctant to admit to, especially if I am not completely certain about whether or not the statute of limitations regarding such acts have run out yet.

Now that I am older, wiser and forced to serve as a role model to four little people who take their behavior cues from me, I know I have to set a better example and try to live my life as I would like them to live theirs. In order to teach them the value of hard work, they will never see me call in sick just to take advantage of a beautiful spring day. To teach them that stealing is not acceptable behavior, they will never see me pocket money that is not mine when a cashier gives me too much change back. To teach my kids the value of honesty they will never…well…they…well… OK, what can I say? I struggle with this one and I would guess any parent who does not wish to raise a con-artist struggles with it too.

On the surface, telling the truth should be a black-and-white issue but all too often that just is not the case. For example, there are millions of men out there who have had a woman confront them with the question, “Honey, do these pants make my butt look big?” This question only has one correct answer and it is not, “No, the pants don’t have anything to do with it.” When a woman asks a man a question like that, she is not looking for the truth and since I also intend to instill a strong sense of self-preservation into my two boys, you can rest assured that I will be teaching them to respond to such an inquiry with an immediate and unrepentant bold-faced distortion of the facts.

Do not misunderstand me. I would like to be just as honest around my children as I am around my boss, my friends or my wife but truth be told, I just can not bring myself to do it. Sometimes I lie to my kids for nothing more than fun. For instance, one time my son came home from his church-based day care a little unclear on the “Our Father” portion of the Lord’s Prayer. Over dinner, he looked up at me and asked me if I was God.

Obviously, my own parents must have woefully neglected my own religious upbringing because without even hesitating to consider the blasphemous implications of my answer I said, “Yup.”

My son’s eyes then grew to the size of dinner-plates as he asked, “Really? Did you create man?”

“Sure did.”

“How?”

“Well, first you need some molasses, some mustard, a car battery, some kitty litter, a couple of matches….” After giving him the recipe for Creation I then spent the week ordering him to clean his room unless he wanted to me to “smite thee like the wicked realms of Saddam and Tora Bora”. He finally called me on it when I proved incapable of turning water into orange flavored Kool Aid.

Another scenario when the truth becomes rather inappropriate is when children ask their parents about their own past, especially when the parents in question did not always make the best of choices while growing up. This is particularly true when the parents are actually a bit unrepentant about some of the worst choices that they might have made and can not convincingly portray any sense of regret about having made them.

For instance after watching a television show about cops and robbers, a child may ask their father if he had ever been in jail. The correct answer to this question is not, “No because Daddy was stationed in a lot of Third World countries when he was young and every time he got into enough fun for the police to get involved, he always had enough bribe money in his sock to keep him out of handcuffs. There was the one time in Thailand though where I wrecked the elephant but that was not Daddy’s fault. The police made a mistake and accused Daddy of driving the elephant while he was drunk. Daddy was not driving the elephant though, that #$%!@ thing was going wherever it wanted to no matter what your father tried to get it to do.”

However accurate that statement may be, it is too much for a young child’s ears to comprehend. Still, a parent will likely not want to just come out and tell an outright lie to his kids either. Fortunately, unlike in Thai traffic courts, children can not compel a parent to tell the whole truth so selective portions of the story can be left out. Tell the tykes that their father was too busy performing services for the community to go to jail. Just leave out the fact that this community service was court mandated and you are pretty much golden.

The Side Effects of Smoke Free Living

Writing is one of those endeavors in which starting is usually the hardest part. You sit in front of the keyboard, crack your knuckles like a cartoon pianist, make sure that you have a digit hovering over the a,s,d,f, h, j, k and l keys, lock your line of sight onto your commuter monitor and then, well, basically you sit there in a motionless state of catatonia until you have to pick your nose or something. Personally, I need inspiration in order to kick out an article.

Unfortunately, I get precious little of that these days. It is winter here in Michigan and for someone who has very little tolerance for the cold despite having grown up here, I just do not get out much between the middle of November and the end of March. I get up, go to work, come home, eat, help get the kids to bed, clean up the kitchen, turn on the TV and sit there watching Grey’s Anatomy with my wife as my brain melts and flows out of my ears. At least I think that’s what that stuff is that keeps ruining my shirts. If its not, I probably just need to rediscover the joys of the Q-Tip.

When you are not accomplishing anything noteworthy, it’s really difficult to come up with anything to note. Now there are things that occur at work that might make interesting copy but I have an inviolate policy of separating my professional and blogging life as it’s a good way to get more time for blogging than your checking account can handle. Granted, blogging’s fun but its the ten to twelve hours a day I spend in the psychological torture chamber that pays my internet bill.

With that in mind, just to get back into the rhythm of regular writing I am going to try to use The JEP Report as sort of a diary to document my effort to quit smoking. I’ll do my best to make this bearable for you all, but I need to warn you up front that I am dealing with VERY dry material here so I can not guarantee my results. If nothing else, I can always fall back on documenting those Chantix dreams. Last night, for instance I met with Pope Benedict to forward my suggestion increase church membership by moving away from ceremonies conducted in Latin to ceremonies conducted to the beat of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”.

I am presently on my 9th day of being a non-smoker and I have to say that some strange things have happened to my senses. For instance, I lost my sense of smell in 1993 after being involved in a chemical accident when I was in the military. Now, if you have to lose a sense, I guess losing your smell is the way to go. You lose an important part of your perceptive abilities but at the same time, you gain an amazing ability to tolerate military cuisine as well as my Aunt Helen’s tuna casserole. You can also manage to clean up after your children’s various bodily fluid mishaps with minimal discomfort and when it comes to Dutch Oven combat, well, let’s just say I haven’t been defeated for almost 15 years.

I might be losing that edge however. Today, I had a flash of odor recognition which even now I am unsure of whether it was a real smell or just some sort of olfactory hallucination. Of course, this did not happen to me while I was in a great restaurant or botanical garden so that my nostrils would be filled with the aroma of a perfectly grilled angus tenderloin or blooming orange blossoms. No, it happened to me while I was standing in front of the urinal listening to someone performing a paint-peeling posterior polka two stalls away so that my nose was assaulted by the reek of someone’s Crohn’s disease taking a terrible turn for the terminal.

Still I was strangely thrilled, wondering if my loss of smell was actually more because of my smoking than the lingering effects of the accident I was in. In order to find out, I exhaled and then drew in a deep breath through my nose to see if I could smell it again. I got nothing. Undeterred, I tried it again but still I got nothing. I did it a third time and, though my nostrils did not register anything, my ears did and I realized that the bathroom’s echo amplified my nasal inhaling and it sounded as if I was desperately trying to catch a whiff of the most aromatic rose the world had ever seen. That could prove tough to explain to the dysentery victim in the stall beside me and heaven forbid if he was in senior management. I had to rush and finish my work at hand and get out of there before he emerged since, I would guess that promotional opportunities for suspected flatulence fetishists would be awfully hard to come by.

The Joys of Chantix Among Other Things

Wow. It has been quite a while since I have been here. I’ve had the best of intentions of updating this thing but it seems like something always kept getting in the way. For starters, my home computer crashed and I was without reliable internet for months. On top of that are the usual time constraints that go along with my job and family commitments. Then comes just plain old writer’s block. The few times I did manage to get in front of a computer, I just stared at the screen with my mind completely unable to think of anything to write about. Then there is the fact that ever since the first of the year, I have been trying to kick the nicotine addiction that I have harbored for the past twenty-five years. Trust me when you’re doing that, NOTHING seems funny and that does not bode well for someone who at least tries to write comedy (though whether or not this drivel really can be called comedy is pretty much up to you).

Though I will not say that I am completely out of the woods on the smoking thing yet, I am definitely navigating through a pretty large clearing. My cravings are almost completely gone and even when they do arise they are generally very mild and can be dealt with by sucking on a lemon drop, eating some celery dipped in Ranch Dressing mixed with frank’s Red Hot Sauce or by ripping all of my clothes off and strangling the life out of trespassing bunny rabbits in the backyard snow.

I am now at a point in the quitting process that I can now see the bright side of being cigarette-free and for the first time in my life, genuinely consider myself to be a non-smoker. Among them:

I have gotten back in touch with hallucinations that I haven’t seen since high school.

Trust me if it was up to will power alone, I would still be smoking a pack a day. My success in getting this monkey off of my back is owed almost entirely to my prescription of CHANTIX. When it comes to smoking cessation, this truly is the Holy Grail of wonder drugs. As with any medication worth its salt, it also comes with a number of side effects that have afflicted me since I started taking it. For starters, I have been suffering from a mild case of nausea since I started taking it coupled with an awful taste in my mouth that makes nearly all food sound unappealing. It also induces in me a particularly harsh case of gas which makes me feel as if I’m digesting rusty nails if I try to keep it in but fills me with fear that I might set the couch or my children’s’ hair on fire if I let it out. Finally, I have trouble falling asleep at night but once I do, my night is filled with the weirdest, most vivid and intense dreams I have ever experienced in my life.

In those dreams I ran into Drago, the lederhosen clad leprechaun that used to hide beneath my parents’ basement stairway and loved to jump out and scare hell out of me when I tried to take a leak in the laundry tub because I was too trashed to make it up to the bathroom. He looks good, now employing a more pragmatic sense of fashion while trying to sell used cars on the west coast. I also ran into the nine-headed peyote demon, who has really mellowed out since Satan took him to the vet and got him fixed. Now he is just like a big ole’ puppy dog. A sixty-foot tall, razor toothed, virgin blood drinking puppy dog that reeks of decomposing wildebeests, but a puppy dog nonetheless.

In addition to reconnecting with some old friends, I’ve met some new ones too. In the past couple of weeks, I taught Genghis Khan how to play gin rummy, went water-skiing with Winston Churchill and went cow-tipping with the cast of The Golden Girls. I also went hunting for Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Thailand, took my kids fishing for giant man-eating penguins along the banks of the Amazon river and was surprised on Christmas morning with a real live mountain gorilla that my wife bought me, a gift that we had to eventually return because we had some issues with its potty training. Basically, it would shit on the floor and then rub my nose in it.

In the 1980s, I used to fork out good money and risk arrest or rehab for visions like these. Now, I get them legally, openly and even with my rotten health care plan, damn near for free. The only difference is that I am not experiencing them during fifth-hour social studies class.

Instead of treating the symptoms of stress with cigarettes, I am now forced to confront it directly and eliminate it at the source.

For instance, one source of extreme stress I have been dealing with emanates from the cat my daughter conned me into getting a couple of years ago. Now, I have a natural dislike of cats in general and rather vehement hatred of that one in particular before I quit smoking. Presently I have almost no tolerance for it, especially when to jumps up on the table to steal food or knock over glasses full of milk for a drink, something it does over and over again, caring little if you are even watching him or not.

Last Saturday night was the last straw. My son poured himself a large glass of milk before going to bed and only drank about half of it before leaving it on the kitchen table and forgetting about it. Unfortunately, I did not catch it before I went to bed. As midnight approached, I was just on the verge of drifting into sleep when I heard the unmistakable sound from downstairs of a glass falling over onto its side followed by the noise of a dairy waterfall flowing off of the table and onto the dining room floor.

Before I quit smoking, I would have gotten up, put on a pair of pants, shooed the cat away and then gone outside and had a cigarette until I regained control of my temper. Then I would have went back inside and calmly cleaned up the mess and then locked the cat in the basement with his food water and litterbox for the rest of the night.

I was up out of bed and charging downstairs in my underwear the instant I realized what had happened. When I burst into the dining room and flipped on the lights, I caught that son-of-a-bitch red-handed. On the occasions that I had caught the cat doing this in past, he usually shot me look of disinterest before nonchalantly jumping off of his perch and leisurely sauntering away. Not this time. Fishstix’s feline instincts must have kicked into overdrive and told him I had snapped because he looked at me with an unmistakable expression of sheer terror and then tried to haul ass for cover. The key word there is “tried”.

Now if we had not blown the money to get the damned thing de-clawed, the cat probably would have had better traction but as it stood, his legs started madly flaying about at ninety miles an hour, only he was not going anywhere. In fact, he didn’t get off of the table until I ran into it and knocked him off of it, at which time he hit the ground running at just a hair below Mach 3. At this point though I was so enraged that I was running just as fast. I chased him around the kitchen island twice, back underneath the dining room table and into the living room. He tried to seek refuge beneath the baby’s playpen but the thing has no weight to it at all and it took nothing for me to lift it up with one hand and toss it crashing into the couch. He then dodged beneath an end table but I was right behind him. Next, he fled underneath the armchair but with a flick of the wrist, this too was on its side and he was once again left exposed and vulnerable.

It was there that I almost had him. I reached out and wrapped my fingers around his collar, loosing a scream of victory as I did so. My wife however, had bought one of those safety collars that came easily unsnapped in order to prevent one of the kids from grabbing the animal by the neck and strangling it by accident. Obviously, she never even considered the possibility that her husband might have someday wanted to do that on purpose, otherwise she would have purchased something that wouldn’t come off in his hands just as he was on the verge of success. Before I knew it, the cat was back on the ground and getting a chance to catch his breath behind the television set.

I could have pushed the television over and easily gotten my hands on him and there is no denying that I nearly did exactly that. The Hollywood writer’s strike had just ended though and my marriage would have surely turned unbearably miserable if I had deprived my wife of the ability to see new episodes of Grey’s Anatomy in the near future. I had to be careful so I tried to reach for him. Staying put just out of my reach, I heard FishStix hiss at me. In response I told him that his mother did Dobermans.

When reaching for him didn’t work, I tired throwing things at him which didn’t seem to have any effect at all (probably a result of my aim completely sucking). Finally, I was forced to break out the vacuum cleaner. That flushed him out in no time, but now he was breaking for the kitty opening in the basement door. I knew that once he got down there I had lost him for good so I dropped everything and sprinted to head him off, throwing myself over the couch to tackle him as he hit the kitchen and finally nabbing the bastard less than a foot from reaching safety.

Now that I had him, what to do next just came naturally. If one of my kids had done what he had, I would have made them clean it up. I saw no reason why the cat should not be subjected to the same treatment. Carrying him by the scruff of the neck, I hauled him to the table and proceeded to try to wipe up the mess with him.

One would think that being completely covered from head to tail in thick fur would make an animal fairly absorbent, but truth be told, FishStix retained less water than I do. I spent quite a while wiping him up and down and back and forth across the table but the only thing I seemed to be able to accomplish was spreading the milk further around. I figured that he just must have been saturated and needed to be rinsed like any other rag so I dragged him to sink and dunked him the old dishwater that I had forgot to drain, shook him off and went back to work. I do not know how long I did this for but I finally had to pause when I caught myself laughing maniacally while contemplating if FishStix’s effectiveness as a dish rag would be increased at all if I tried to wring him out after the water-boarding sessions.

That’s about when I had to stop and think about what it would look like if someone suddenly walked into the room and saw what was going on. My wife and two daughters were spending the weekend at her mother’s house while she worked so I did not have to worry about them. I had the two boys however and my five-year-old is pretty perceptive. What would he think if he came downstairs to investigate the racket only to find the living and dining rooms ransacked, the kitchen covered in water and his father soaking wet in his underwear holding a cat in his right hand that was covered in bubbles and looking rather violated?

I’m sure that would’ve painted a rather pretty picture for his psychiatrist, so I locked the cat in the basement and spent the next half hour putting the house back together. I can’t say that I am particularly proud of snapping and terrorizing the family cat the way that I did but at the same time, I’m not going to say that I particularly regret it either. I haven’t seen the cat in days and frankly, I’m much more relaxed because of it.

Well there are other things, but I gotta go now and get to bed. My hallucinations are waiting for me. It’s been good to be back for a visit. Hopefully it won’t be so long before my next one.

Oh before I leave, my favorite corrupt politician on the planet, the mayor of the City of Detroit Kwame Kilpatrick, was finally nailed in a sex scandal after being caught dorking his chief of staff and then firing two police officers investigating whether he broke any laws in the tactics he used to cover it up. Since the story broke the mayor has been avoiding the media for obvious reasons. After a couple of weeks of official silence, I created a list of the “Top Ten Reasons Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick Has Decided to Remain in Seclusion Rather Than Make a Statement Regarding Lying in Court About His Affair With His Chief of Staff”. In case it’s a while before I make it back, I guess I’ll post it now:


10. Sees no point in talking to press as soon-to-be-released photos of him courting women in the city’s steno pool wearing a leather negligee and Richard Nixon mask pretty much speak for themselves.

9. Knowing that Marion Berry went to jail after he came clean, decided that sitting in the corner of a dark room while crying and wetting himself would be a less hazardous course of action.

8. Is too busy helping close friend Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm prepare for her American Idol audition.

7. Decided that now might not be the right time to announce to the city that he no longer wants to be known as “The Hip-Hop Mayor”, instead preferring the moniker “Tricky Dick Kilpatrick”.

6. Figures time spent getting roasted by reporters could be more constructively spent cruising for babes on MySpace.

5. Just can not find an opening to schedule a press conference with all the time he is spending with his Security Detail planning his going-away bash at Manoogian Mansion.

4. Is spending his time in deep meditation trying to answer the eternal question: “What would Clinton do?”

3. Would love to give a press conference to discuss the text message scandal but has been waiting in line trying to score Hannah Montana concert tickets since December 22nd and is not about to give up his place now.

2. Feels he can not discuss his affair with the press without jeopardizing the retainer he received for granting an exclusive interview to “The Jerry Springer Show”.

1. Is too busy fielding calls from male citizens asking, “If I throw parties with strippers and prostitutes at the mayor’s house, run up $250,000 bills on city credit cards, have taxpayers buy my wife a luxury SUV and fire any city official who looks into my misconduct, can I sleep with Christine Beatty too?”

Deniro and Pesci do Sesame Street

Well, I have a history of picking on Bert and Ernie, but this video does it so much better. Enjoy.

When Kids' aspirations Attack

My daughter has been taking dance classes since she was three and loves it. This weekend, she was practicing her steps in front of me when, after an impressive leap that caused me to be thankful that she had not inherited my coordination, she turned to me and asked, "Dad, if I'm going to be really good dancer, you need to buy me a pole that I can practice on."

Of course, my mouth went dry, my hands started shaking, my blood pressure shot up to heights that a double dosage of Zetia could not bring down and I was on the verge of going into irreversible cardiac arrest when I shot back, "WHAT?!?! WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU NEED A POLE TO DANCE ON?!?!?"

"My dance teacher, Dad. You don't dance on it though. You use it to help you stretch."

It then dawned on me that she was talking about the wooden bar horizontally mounted on the wall at dance studios, not the metal vertical variety that usually serves as the centerpiece of the stage at the Canadian ballet. For a second there, I thought that the dancing tuition I was shelling out was actually a down payment on her vocational training for a carreer that pays primarily in $1 bills. I haven't been that rattled since she tarted up her little brother in a pink tutu and eye shadow and then sent him in to wake me up one Saturday morning.