The JEP Report

JEP's Rules of Parenting

2011-05-30T08:40:00.006-04:00

Wow! I haven't been here in nearly three years. I miss blogging, or actually, I kind of miss the time of my life when I actually had time to blog. Between a job that keeps me working 14 hours a day and 5 kids that consume whatever little free time I have left, there is just no time for wordsmithing. If it wasn't for Facebook, which gives me the opportunity to occaisionally write (in 435 characters or less) I wouldn't be writing at all. Anyway, if any of my old readers stumble by the site, here's a little something new for you to read. I hope all of you are well and safe in these uncertain times.

JEP's Rules of Parenting

JEP's Rule of Parenting #1: If you’re caught in a dilemma about whether to grab your child to prevent wardrobe damage or grab a camera to document the act, always go for the camera. Soggy socks are a small price to pay for the opportunity to positively mortify your kid on prom night.

JEP's Law of Parenting #2: Clowns are innately evil creatures with insatiable tendencies towards cannibalism. Any three-year-old knows this and would be just as traumatized discovering his mommy hired one to play his birthday party as he would be to find she wrapped up a pair of rabid porcupines as his gift. She would be doing less damage to his nascent psyche by just hiring him strippers.

JEP's Law of Parenting #3: The more time, effort and fresh ingredients that are put into a family meal, the more your children will think it tastes like a midnight snack accidentally liberated from the cat's litterbox during the immediate aftermath of an epic tequila bender.

JEP's Law of Parenting #4: Men who complain about how hard it is to get a female out of her clothes have obviously never been subjected to the trauma of trying to get their squirmy 18 month-old daughter into them.

JEP's Law of Parenting #5: Omerta is not an adolescent concept. If you need to extract information from a five-year-old, just threaten to narc them out to Santa Clause and the little rats will sing like they were being waterboarded by Delta Force.

JEP's Law of Parenting #6: A multi-state drive should never be undertaken with a van full of children without several the use of several portable DVD players for there are only so many "Are we there yet?"s that a man can take before he starts reconsidering his views on abortion.

JEP's Law of Parenting #7: Kids' television shows are not made for adults and should not, under any circumstances, be watched by them. A lobotomy performed by a highly strung chimpanzee in the throes of a caffeine overdose could not begin to do the damage to the adult psyche that 15 minutes alone with the Wiggles could do.

JEP's Law of Parenting #8: The younger a child is, the higher its threshold for handling disgusting things is. For this reason, housholds with toddlers should reinforce the importance of flushing toilets early and often unless they want to find themselves frantically rifling through every nook and cranny of their home hunting down a "Deuce on the Loose".

JEP's Law of Parenting #9: If a parent has been forced to pry three random insects, belly button lint, the toilet brush and a sibling’s booger from a toddler’s mouth, they should be overjoyed by the fact that the kid refuses to try a single bite of the meal they’ve spent all day preparing. By the same token, given the same child’s enthusiasm for McDonalds, the folks behind the Happy Meal should be duly concerned.

JEP's Law of Parenting #10: Kids must stay active and exercise often, but care must be taken to ensure that they do not over-do it. The last thing any parent needs is a child that can outrun them. Particularly if the little pagan has your wallet and a single-minded determination to catch up with the ice cream truck that went through your neighborhood a half hour before.

JEP's Law of Parenting #11: Parenting must be approached with a sense of humor. Without it, vasectomy clinics would be more plentiful than tattoo parlors.

JEP's Law of Parenting #12: A parent should not consider it their job to publically humiliate and embarrass their children at every given opportunity. They should consider it a perk.

JEP's Law of Parenting #13: If your toddler tries to hand you something, ALWAYS identify what it is before you open your hand to blindly receive it unless you enjoy having boogers wiped across your palm. That goes double for that little "Open your mouth and close your eyes..." game.

JEP's Law of Parenting #14: Before dropping several thousand dollars to take your toddler on a Disney World vacation, consider that Mickey Mouse is to most one-year-olds what Jason Vorhees was to nymphomaniac counselors-in-traing at Camp Crystal Lake.

JEP's Law of Parenting #15: It will never be easy to teach our children the virtue of tolerance until we somehow make the act of delivering a swift debilitating kick to the crotch of the person irritating them significantly less fulfilling on a personal level.

JEP's Law of Parenting #16: The "Facts of Life" should only be taught to children by women. Generally speaking, men are blissfully ignorant of all elements of human anatomy that can not be seen in a Playboy centerfold and tend to overemphasize the role tequila plays in human reproduction.
(Ed. Note: I shudder to think how many of my former navy buddies tell their children the story of they got here by saying, "I'm a little foggy on the details but I remember ordering my sixth pitcher of Mojo in some Third World strip joint and next thing I knew it was nine months later and some doctor handed me this writhing little slime covered baby saying, 'Congratulations! It's a boy!' I'm afraid that until we teach your mother how to speak English, whatever happened in between is going to be shrouded in more mystery than the disappearance of Amelia #%!@?!$ Earhardt.")

JEP's Law of Parenting #17: If you REALLY want your child to expand their vocabulary dramatically, pitch the "Hooked on Phonics". Buy them "Calvin and Hobbes". Seriously, they'll start using words that will have YOU running for the dictionary.

JEP's Law of Parenting #18: Experts say that if you desire a house of tranquility and harmony, always approach your children with a toolbox full of unshakeable calm, limitless patience and unconditional love. In addition to that, its wise to keep a roll of duct tape, a loaded tranquilizer gun, an athletic protective cup and a bottle of Crown Royal in the junk drawer just in case that hippy shit doesn't work out.

JEP's Law of Parenting #19: A toddler’s ability to mimic words her parents say is directly proportional to the vulgarity of the profanities streaming out of a parent’s mouth. It may take months of pleading to get her to say “mah-mah”, but if she is within earshot of her father when his hammer strikes thumb instead of nail, she’ll easily recite a 15 minute stream of vindictive that would cause a union welder to blush.

JEP's Law of Parenting #20: Unrepentantly loud flatulence may be offensive, crude and indicative of an extreme lack of social graces, but there are few tools more effective when it comes to attempting to get multiple children to smile simultaneously for a family portrait. Children should be fed a high fiber meal at least 90 minutes prior to their appointment time at JC Penny’s photo studio.

JEP's Law of Parenting #21: Though the operators at Poison Control may beg to differ, one of the most effective ways to induce vomiting in an infant is for the father to hold it far above his head, look up, open his mouth as far as he can and in the highest pitched, puppy dog voice he can muster say, “Look at da prit-TAY smile on da prit-TAY bay-BAY!!” She’ll spew Similac right down your gullet inside of 15 seconds.

JEP's Law of Parenting #22: If you really want to know the honest truth about whether or not the jeans you’re wearing makes you butt look big, just go ask a child. If you really want to know the honest truth about how your grandmother’s antique lamp got broken however, you’d better have video surveillance footage.

JEP's Law of Parenting #23: Unless a man enjoys addressing his family in an octave that is reminiscent of Mickey Mouse suffering an emasculating industrial accident in a helium processing factory, he should never attempt to change a squirmy one-year-old's diaper without wearing a protective cup.

JEP's Law of Parenting #24: Just because you know from experience that your son is right when he says that there are times during the school day that could use a little livening up with an airhorn does not mean you should let him test his teacher's bladder control by actually letting him bring one to class. Unless, you know, you enjoy discussing the early signs of pre-pubescent psychosis with the school psychologist.

JEP's Law of Parenting #25: When coming up with a meal plan for the week, be sure to limit the fruit intake of un-potty trained children on bath night as a toddler basking in the afterglow of a furious high-fiber feeding frenzy can catastrophically foul water quality in ways that evenTony Hayword's misguided minions at British Petroleum could not possibly have dreamed of.

JEP's Law of Parenting #26: Every child is unique, therefore no parenting "expert" has the magic answer that will cure your kid of misbehavior. The exception of course, is the omnipotent and all-knowing Dr. Spock. I haven't read any of his books but that Vulcan Death Grip he came up with stops kids from doing what they're not supposed to EVERY FREAKIN' TIME!!!

JEP's Law of Parenting #27: The prospect of having to shave one’s legs is apparently quite mortifying to a young lady. In fact, she will go immediately to her mother for confidential counsel on the topic if she needs it. During this time, she is very sensitive about her appearance so a father needs to respect her privacy. And stop referring to her as “Grizzly Adams”.

JEP's Law of Parenting #28: Though you may consider yourself quite the domestic Magic Johnson, you should NEVER give in to the urge to attempt a twenty-five-foot hook shot into the kitchen garbage can with a dirty diaper unless you want to end up cleaning far more of the house than you first intended to when you got up that morning.

JEP's Law of Parenting #29: A father should not feel left out if his daughter does not come to him for advice on grooming. The fact is that leg shaving is just not a male area of expertise. Men know how to deal with unsightly ear and nose hair. If your little girl needs help with ear and nasal fur, you should still tell her to see her mom though because, genetically speaking, you’ve done enough damage already.

JEP's Law of Parenting #30: The plethora of naked Barbie dolls in a three-year-old girl's bedroom closet is primarily caused by the fact that the fine motor skills required to dress such toys are not usually developed until a child's fifth birthday. Not because of her overwhelming desire to constantly play "little lesbian nudist colony", therefore, there is no need for therapy.

JEP's Law of Parenting #31: If you have young children who live to argue amongst themselves, owning Pixar's "Toy Story" franchise is a must if you want to get them focused on something besides each other. It is the only way a man can approach a domestic confrontation with a Buzz and a Woody and not end up with more problems than he started off with.

JEP's Law of Parenting #32: Cherish the time in your child's life when they think that you are the coolest individual on the planet because it typically only takes them about thirteen years to figure out just how big of a dork that you actually are.

An Ode To My Christmas Gift

2008-12-25T12:34:00.000-05:00

‘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...

2008-07-22T16:31:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-07T20:21:00.001-04:00

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)

2008-05-12T06:28:00.000-04:00

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)

2008-04-20T16:43:00.001-04:00

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

2008-04-10T06:39:00.002-04:00

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

2008-02-28T19:08:00.001-05:00

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

2008-02-26T17:50:00.002-05:00

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

2007-12-01T09:44:00.000-05:00

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

When Kids' aspirations Attack

2007-11-13T06:11:00.000-05:00

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.

The Agony of Defeat

2007-10-30T20:15:00.000-04:00

One advantage to being a decidedly non-athletic individual is that I do not have too many sports related injuries to complain about. When I played football in middle school, I once lost sight of the football and stood straight up to find it, only to take a helmet to the groin from the midget who was carrying it. I fully recovered, though I played the rest of the game sounding a lot like Lucille Ball.

Then there was the time that while playing darts, I followed my throw through with a little too much enthusiasm and, with my sense of balance skewered by the two dozen beers I had consumed during the match, stumbled several feet off course before flipping over a table and getting a bloody nose. I am not sure if that counts though because I have done the exact same thing on several occasions just getting up from the bar to make my way to the bathroom. I also once got beaned in the melon while playing horseshoes. I was hit hard enough to make my ears ring but in the end, the only thing permanently injured in that incident was my pride since I somehow managed to do that one to myself.

This past weekend though, I think I really did it. I was bowling and though I am not sure what happened, I know that whatever it was it is extremely painful. In fact, it still hurts and I can barely type. The weird thing about it was that it happened while I was completely sober. A buddy of mine and I had taken our kids to the bowling alley and, as he is from Germany and painfully ignorant of the bowling concept, it was up to me to show the tykes how to send a fifteen-pound sphere of resin hurtling down a wooden lane at thirty-miles an hour, directly into the gutter.

I was on the third frame, when I had ordered the kids to pay attention to me so that they could see how I ran and how I handled the ball. Holding it up in front of my chin, I targeted the middle arrow, took my four steps while letting the ball swing down to my side and swung it back behind me. As I approached the foul line, I then went into my slide and brought the ball forward rapidly to let it go in a futile attempt to knock down at least one of the pins arranged in a triangle before me. I was in the process of letting the ball go when I felt my middle finger pop and, even above the din of a busy bowling alley, heard it crack like a popsicle stick.

The pain was instant and incredible. It brought me down to my knees immediately and I was buckled over in agony so intense that I did not even see how many pins I hit. To make matters worse, it was not really a fresh injury, but a much more severe aggravation of a football injury I had sustained the week before (I jammed it somehow while trying to open a jar of habanero salsa during halftime of the Detroit Lions / Tampa Bay game on October 21st).

Of course, as I was on my knees at the approach to lane 21, my buddy had to accuse me of faking the injury as an excuse to explain away how my two-year-old on the lane next to me was out-bowling me by three pins on the third frame. Frankly, I didn’t need an explanation for that as his lane was equipped with bumpers to keep the ball from going into the gutter whereas the lane the adults were bowling on had no such advantage, which we demonstrated time and time again. Actually, Carson came in second on that game, bowling a 61. His seven-year-old sister scored 63, barely beating him in the tenth frame.

I have no idea what I did to my finger. I know that it is not broken as I have done that before and know exactly what it feels like. I also know that I did not dislocate it, as I still have full movement in it as long as I move it slowly. Sprained? Could be, but I am not certain. All I know for sure is that it is excruciating and every time I type an “i”, I feel the pain all the way up to my elbow if I forget to use my ring finger.

Up until now, I had no idea how debilitating losing your middle finger is. As I said before, opening jars has become exponentially more difficult as has writing with a pen. I tried carving the Halloween pumpkins when we got home but eventually gave up. Typing has become sheer torture and I do not know how I will be able to continue driving my car in this condition as that particular digit is absolutely crucial in navigating urban rush hour traffic. Especially when you drive a car with a wimpy horn.

Dissertations on a Fundamentalist Fairy tale

2007-10-29T20:33:00.000-04:00

There is not much to do when you are stuck in a long line at the grocery store. After you’ve scanned the covers of the gossip magazines to check in on the impending break-up of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie or to see how Britney Spears’ hair is coming in, the only thing you can really do to entertain yourself if you have not had the foresight to put some adult beverages on your shopping list is eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. OK, I guess you could egg a faux-invalid as well but that opportunity does not present itself all that often.

A couple of days ago, I was stuck in one of those really long lines and was again reduced to tuning into the conversations of others to occupy myself until I could escape from Wal Mart. Unfortunately, the only conversation I that I could make out were two very large, fierce looking women expressing their outrage to each other over the fact that the local school system will not entertain their requests to have their children taught creationism instead of evolution.

Now, I am not an overly religious person but I try to keep an open mind to other people’s ideas and generally try to respect the beliefs of others as long as they do not attempt to cram them down my throat. In my opinion, religion is a personal matter that is between an individual and their creator. I would never think of judging a person based upon what their opinions on The Almighty are, and I expect the same courtesy in return. If you interrupt my hangover at eleven a.m. on a Saturday morning by knocking on my door and trying to shove a copy of “The Watchtower” down my throat however, do not be so surprised when I try to return the favor by handing you some literature that I feel can help you on our way to a better life, which will probably consist of “The Bartender’s Bible” and a well-used issue of Hustler magazine a liberated from my father in the late 1970’s(speaking of religious experiences….).

My vehement opposition to the mandatory teaching of Creationism, or “Intelligent Design” as it is called these days, is that I believe it to be little more than a fundamentalist fairy tale, with about as much basis in fact as “Snow White and The Seven Dwarves”. I am firm in this conviction, mainly because of the overwhelming abundance of obvious evidence contrary to the theory of Creation. For us to have been the end result of “Intelligent Design”, well, we are just designed far too unintelligently.

An intelligent designer would have at least designed the modern man with opposable big toes. This would have enabled us to hold a human baby, a bottle of formula and the television remote control simultaneously so that our wives would not catch us watching the last fifteen minutes of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” at two in the morning with the little tyke. This would also have given us the ability to more comfortably work on the basement plumbing, being able to hang effortlessly from the ceiling with both feet while working with both a blow torch and a flashlight. Not to mention that with the element of suspension involved, the ancient inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent could have added an extra five chapters to the Kuma Sutra. Ten if the designer could have sprung for a prehensile tail as well.

And what about having an extra eye in the back of one’s head? Besides coming in handy spotting saber-toothed tigers sneaking up on us from behind among the tall grasses of the prehistoric savannah, this could be incredibly useful in modern times for those of us cursed with dim-witted parents who think that a wrist rocket slingshot is the perfect birthday gift for their four-year-old grandson. I will go on record right now and say that if this ever becomes an elective surgery option during my lifetime, I will mortgage my house and sell my car to get one of those babies installed, if for no other reason than to freak out the folks in line behind me at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

It is not like there is no precedence for this in nature either. There are several thin-headed lizards in Africa with bulging eyes on the sides of its melon that can move independently of each other and basically provides the reptile with a 360 degree field of vision, sort of like a cold-blooded Marty Feldman. This amazing ability was granted to a creature with a brain the size of a chickpea, which in my opinion was a complete waste. It is not like the Jackson Chameleon was going to ever evolve into a species that would invent a longer lasting light bulb or anything so who cares if he is gobbled up by a passing desert rat?

And speaking of chameleons, what about the ability to change colors to match one’s surroundings? Though it would be great to blend into walls or forests and make oneself invisible, I would actually favor a much more subtle color change that would allow me to survive getting a flat tire in one of the rougher areas on Detroit’s west side.

I could go on, but I am sure all of you are smart enough to point out the advantages that could be found in having an elephant’s trunk, a porcupine’s quills or the ability of the birds to fly. You get my point. And of course, I am sure that there are those of you out there that will try to point out the disadvantages to a person possessing opposable toes, a prehensile tail, a thin head with bulging independently moving eyes where his ears should be and a skin that changes colors when he gets excited, but honestly, I can only think of one. That would be in the area of reproduction and the question would be, “Who would want to mate with such a hideous looking beast?” For sure that is a valid question, especially among the people of the Middle East and the Bible Belt of the United States whose religions prohibit them from drinking alcohol so that they have precious little experience waking up next to such creatures. Since these are the same people who so passionately advocate the Creationist agenda, I can not help but wonder if there is a connection there somewhere?

Effective Parenting Through Visual Aids

2007-09-19T06:12:00.000-04:00

We all want our kids to be safe. We try to keep them from juggling knives, poking pit bulls in the eyes, playing with matches (got that Alan?), and running while holding a pair of scissors. Being kids though, they generally look for the loophole and while they may temporarily stop doing something, like running with scissors, they will usually slightly modify their hobby by holding something else, like a hand grenade or gas-powered hedge trimmer.

Fortunately, these days there is e-mail and every once in a while you get something that makes your job as a parent a little bit easier. I have probably told my kids a million times not only not to run with scissors in their hands, but not with any sharp objects in their grasp be it knives, forks, pencils, syringes or meat thermometers. Each time I do, they roll their eyes and give me the disinterested, "Yes father, o wise bald one". Obviously, they don't believe me anymore than I believed my parents so I had to show them proof, whipping out a picture I recently received in my inbox to drive home the point on why it is not a good idea to goof around in the kitchen while holding a fork:

The effect the picture had was predictable. They gave the child his due sympathy by saying "Awwww, the little boy has a boo-boo on his nose! That's so sad!" and then went on continuing with their potentially lethal behavior. This forced me to up the ante and kick up the shock factor a bit by showing them the full efect of what really happened:

It was much more effective, but now they regard their silverware as if we slathered it in Mad Cow Disease before putting it on their place setting, preferring to eat with their fingers. With a little luck, I'm hoping that it will also counteract any body piercing fetishes they may develop as teenagers as well.

First Day of School

2007-09-05T20:14:00.000-04:00

My oldest son started kindergarten yesterday, which ended up being quite an exercise in anxiety. I do not remember having this with my daughter, as she takes after her mother and has a healthy respect for authority. My son however, seems to take after me and I half expected him to arrive home with a black eye, torn shirt, a decomposing turtle that succumbed to a lengthy incarceration in his Buzz Lightyear backpack and several hastily written prescriptions for industrial strength doses of Ritalin.

Don’t get me wrong, he is a very bright kid but the ability to follow directions is not exactly among his strongest character traits. But to be fair, if you listen to my wife’s point of view it is not exactly mine either. Our afflictions are a little different though. With him, you have to tell him four times to do something before he acknowledges that he’s being talked to, then you have to explain the requested task twice so that he can repeat it back to you, then you get to watch as he delegates the job it to the imaginary monster that follows him around the house (the same one that drops a healthy deposit of “Number 2” in the toilet in MY bathroom and then leaves without flushing or wiping) while he goes back to the couch to finish watching “Handy Manny”. In my case though its usually just a simple misunderstanding. My wife tells me to go to the store to pick up milk, eggs and bread and I come back with a six-pack of Labatts, a bag of Doritos and a fresh copy of “Girls Gone Wild: Topeka, Kansas”, which is actually her fault for mumbling.

The morning went as smoothly as it did on school days last year. Neither my son nor my daughter wanted to get out of bed, but my two-year-old burst out wide awake and was demanding 100% of his parents’ attention while we tried to get the other two ready. Then we had to force feed them a nutritious breakfast of sugar-spiked chocolate cereal so that we can be reasonably assured that their respective teachers are earning their paychecks. We usually wait until the second week of school before we pump them full of coffee and then send them out the door with a couple of bottles of Mountain Dew.

Afterwards we have to get them dressed. My daughter is quite the fashion pioneer so I was not the least bit surprised to see her emerge from her room wearing a pink camouflage skirt, white Hello Kitty top, tennis shoes and long, purple, leopard spotted gloves that stretched to her elbow, looking like a cross between elegant formal wear and the wrist-guard from the most flamboyant bowler the city of San Francisco has ever seen. My son has much simpler tastes in clothing and came down in a striped polo shirt, shorts and “Finding Nemo” flip flops. After a brief, albeit violent and bloody struggle, we got him into socks and tennis shoes as well.

Next was getting their backpacks loaded. My daughter’s was not too hard. As a second grader, she knew what she needed in school. My son though was a little less clear on the concept. It was another struggle, but we eventually got him to leave behind the Laser gun he got at Disneyworld, his Pirates of the Caribbean action figures and his Buzz Lightyear cell phone that he needed in case his imaginary monster got lonely and needed to call him. I told him that I was pretty sure his monster would be busy soiling all of the toilets while he was gone since I cleaned them over the weekend.

After a round of pictures, we got the group out the door to the bus stop. My daughter trudged up the steps without hesitation, but I saw my son pause at the top to take a moment to talk to the bus driver. I do not know what he said, but I hoped it was not something along the lines of, “Hi! My name is Forrest Gump. People call me Forrest Gump.”

After that, he was gone. Then my wife called me a little after 11:00 to tell me that the school had called. My mind immediately raced to my son. Did he come to the conclusion that kindergarten just was not for him and decide to make a break for it? Did his imaginary monster arrive to and decide to bust the joint up? Did he greet the teacher with words that he probably learned from me while watching the University of Michigan football game last Saturday? Though I had talked to him several times about how inappropriate it was to moon people at daycare, did he think that it was OK to do it in kindergarten?

Actually, it turned out my son was just fine. My daughter on the other hand, had pink-eye.

For the Football Fans:

2007-09-03T00:15:00.000-04:00

It is a sports story that is hard not to be inspired by.

Sometime over the summer, one of the most respected college football teams in the United States went out looking for a sacrificial lamb that they could trounce on national television as a warm-up to their real competition in a few weeks. To ensure a victory, they chose a paltry, little-known school in the mountains of North Carolina and offered them almost half a million dollars to help convince them to come to their campus and get beaten bloody by a team that would almost certainly be playing their third-stringers by halftime.

That was an awful lot of money for a little school, so they took the bait. Instead of resigning themselves for the inevitable however, they watched the films, noted what they believed to be weaknesses in their opponents’ strategy and trained to exploit them. When game day arrived, they were accorded so little respect that the national networks did not even bother to broadcast the game. The match was aired on a fledgling network that focused exclusively on the conference they would be playing against.

Still, this team sprinted right out of the gate and lunged at their opponents like their lives depended upon it. Despite the odds, they scored some early successes in the first quarter, even managing to get a touchdown which was probably initially regarded by their opponents’ fans as little more than dumb luck. These little guys from North Carolina though would not let them stay in denial for long however, for they owned their opponents during the second quarter.

They hit their opponents hard and mercilessly, driving them deep into the dirt and then dancing upon their graves. Before halftime, they scored 21 more points and allowed their adversaries one measly field goal. As the half ended, the stands were silent as over one hundred thousand of the most zealous fans realized that their cherished team was sinking faster than Tony Soprano in a cement Speedo.

The fans did get a little reassurance in the third quarter as their defense regrouped and kept those feisty bumpkins to a solitary field goal, but the visiting defense never let up and kept the home team to a single touchdown and a field goal. It was the fourth quarter though that really got exciting.

The visiting offense was getting tired and the defense was getting beat up. The home team finally rallied and, with 4 minutes and 36 seconds left in the game, took a one point lead. In a truly Herculean response though, the visitors managed to march down the field just enough to launch a 24 yard field goal that put them back on top with a mere 26 seconds left on the clock.

Then the unthinkable happened to the little team from North Carolina. A couple of solid plays by their opponents put the heavily favored home team into field goal range. With absolutely no time left to respond, all they had accomplished on the field looked lost. They had made a giant effort and earned the respect of the nation but in the end, it appeared as if they would still leave the field with a heartbreaking loss. As the home team snapped the ball, they had established themselves as true gladiators even though they were facing down almost certain defeat.

But then someone on the offence missed an assignment and against the odds, the visiting team blocked the kick. The won the game and left the entire country reeling and applauding what could very well be the greatest upset in college football history.

Their accomplishment was astounding. It was uplifting. It was inspiring, joyous and miraculous. How could anyone not love these exceptional players for pulling off one of the greatest wins to ever grace the world of collegiate football? The answer to that question is quite easy actually. THEY ACCOMPLISHED THIS FEAT AGAINST THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN FREAKIN’ WOLVERINES FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

I LIVE IN FREAKIN’ MICHIGAN! OUR FOOTBALL OPTIONS ARE RATHER LIMITED, PLAYING HOST TO LACTATING MATT MILLEN AND HIS PATHETIC LIONS! THE WOLVERINES ARE THEY ONLY THING I’VE GOT WHEN IT COMES TO FOOTBALL! DOES ANYONE OUT THERE REALIZE HOW LONG THIS SEASON IS GOING TO BE FOR ME NOW?!?! DO YOU?!?! ALL I ASK FOR IS TO HAVE ONE FOOTBALL TEAM THAT I CAN RELY ON! ONE! AND THIS IS WHAT I GET?!?! WHAT IN THE WORLD HAVE WE DONE TO DESERVE THIS?!?! WHAT?!?! I MEAN…SON-OF-A-BITCH!...WHO ARE WE GOING TO LOSE TO NEXT?!?! THE MARY KAY INSTITUTE’S BADMINTON LEAGUE???

Man, this is EXACTLY the kind of thing that breeds atheists.

CSI: Southgate

2007-08-29T00:07:00.000-04:00

The way I see it, there are several levels of drinking bouts and they can be rated in much the same way that NORAD classifies the threat of a nuclear holocaust. DEFCON 1 is a simple evening out on the town. You meet up with friends, you have a few drinks, share a few laughs, go home and go to bed. No harm, no foul and your biggest threat is a little headache when you wake up in the morning. This is exactly the kind of evening you are doomed to have if you bring your wife with you.

DEFCON 2 is typically what you are in for when you leave your wife at home. It is not all that different than DEFCON 1, but there will possibly be some vomiting involved and there are even odds of you arguing with your spouse once you have stumbled through the front door. The aftermath of this type of outing is waking up on the couch with brain pain that will need at least 12 hours of aspirin therapy to recover from.

DEFCON 3 is what you typically experience when you close the bar. The specter of vomiting graduates from being a possibility to more of a probability and you can usually look forward to an adrenaline charging ride on the Merry-Go-Sofa for at least a third of the four hours you have to sleep before going to work. Once again you will wake up in the living room, nearly fully clothed as you have only managed to get your coat and shoes off before collapsing on the Chesterfield. After a journey into this level of inebriation you can look forward to a hangover that is going to last for days, complete with a migraine that is impervious to Ibuprofen and a stomach unable to process anything stronger than filtered water and Sodium-free crackers. Your wife will probably give you at least 48 hours of silent treatment (which can come in handy during football season).

I am not really sure what goes on during a DEFCON 4 binge as my memory usually gives out right about the time the eleven o’clock news comes on. There are hours that are unaccounted for. One minute you find yourself toasting a successful game of pool and the next thing you know it is mid-morning and you find yourself face down on the kitchen floor. You see that you have tried to undress before hitting the couch but, having forgotten to take your shoes off before removing your pants, got your feet tied up in your inside-out trouser legs while your upper half became entangled in your coat as if you had been involved in some sort of hockey brawl in your underwear. This is the highest level of intoxication a man can attain and still reasonably expect to remain married. Make no mistake though, it will be years before your wife lets you forget about the night that you can’t remember in the first place.

Unless you have resided in a trailer park for more than a decade, it is nearly impossible to achieve DEFCON 5 in a single 24 hour period. It requires a sustained effort over the course of several days and typically involves distance as well as drunkeness. If you start off drinking in a benign place like Toledo, Ohio and come to your senses two days later in a 1980’s vintage Ford Taurus barreling towards Las Vegas at 115 miles per hour, you have reached DEFCON 5. DEFCON 6 if the Taurus’s transmission is in reverse.

You would not even know if you have ever reached DEFCON 7 unless there was a teetotaler in your crew taking pictures and even that may not work if the photographer gets picked up by the feds while trying to pay for his double-prints at CVS. The first clue one usually has that he had this much fun is when he gets sued for paternity in a class action lawsuit filed by dozens of women he has never heard of living on continents that he is sure that he has never visited.

In my service days, I was a reliable DEFCON 3 drinker though I journeyed semi-regularly into the realm of DEFCON 4. Maybe once or twice a year I made it to DEFCON 5 and in my entire life, I only had one instance where I might possibly have experienced DEFCON 6. DEFCON 7 is just simply unattainable to most people who were not born within the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union.

Sacto Ritch and I typically set the DEFCON bar at 3 when we get together. 2 if we’re just meeting up for lunch. When we got together on August 18th however, not only were our wives with us, so were a couple of girls we graduated high school with as well as the husband of one. We were at DEFCON 1 from the evening’s larval stages and I was personally muzzled as my wife does not get out much and if I got us into trouble during the first time she’s been out to a bar in years, I was in for consequences more appropriate to DEFCON 4.

Jo, Ritch, Jake's Wife, Me, Jake, My Wife, Caretaker Matt

A lower DEFCON rating does not necessarily translate into a lower level of fun, and August 18th was a great example of that. I had a lot of fun catching up with old friends and I enjoyed myself immensely as I typically do in good company. Of course it helped that, since Sacto Ritch and I were not going to make it to DEFCON 4 ourselves, we sent someone else there in our place.

Our victim’s name was not Jake but since I do not use real names in The JEP Report (and the fact that he kept calling my wife Beth, which is not her real name) I am going to call him that anyway. Now Jake is the husband of one of the girls we graduated with and he is a big, boisterous guy. Though I have only had the pleasure of knowing him for a couple of hours, it was immediately apparent that he had a rather friendly disposition, an extroverted nature and held a rather lengthy repertoire of humorous anecdotes that rivaled the collection that I have been documenting over the last three years. He also looked like he could swing a mean bar stool if the need arose, which also comes in handy on occasion as long as we are not the intended targets of the wielded pub furniture. At first glance, it looked as if Jake would perfectly compliment the established drinking habits of Ritch and I.

The evening went well. The beer flowed freely and Mallie’s, the establishment in Southgate Michigan that hosted us, served us nachos, buffalo wings, fajitas and burgers that were all very tastily put together. We all caught up on old classmates and were surprised to find that to date, we only lost one of classmates who had succumbed to a drug overdose a few years ago. I found this surprising since my social circle outside of school, which was far smaller than my graduating class, lost three. Apparently, turning gay was a far more prevalent threat that we had lost six to.

By the time dinner was finished, we were comfortably numb and despite the presence of our spouse and old friends, I decided to up the ante and try to take our session to DEFCON 2 by ordering shots of tequila. Ritch, who I do not believe has allowed tequila to pass his lips since 1990 when it made him gag a Tijuana cab driver, was even persuaded to do a shot. Remembering what transpired the last time I saw him drink tequila, I kept myself ready to leap out of the way in case he broke out into another fit of Technicolor laughter. Ritch was quite a trooper and though the look on his face betrayed the fact that he had not missed a whole lot of tequila over the past 17 years, he suffered no ill effects.

Shot Time

Fortunately, the same could not be said for Jake. He seemed to do the shot fine, but not long afterward he completely disappeared.

Now, we liked Jake and could not just let him go off on his own in the condition he was in without the protection of the pack. In the shape he was in, he could have gotten into a scrape with a bouncer or something and if we were not watching his back, well, we could have missed a really good fight. Ritch went outside looking for him and after slipping in some evidence, stumbled upon a trail that lead him directly to Jake’s car where he was passed out cold. Unsure of what to do next, Ritch came back inside and sought my counsel on what to do next. Based upon Ritch’s description of Jake’s condition, I told Ritch and Jake’s wife that my medical opinion was that Jake was afflicted with a condition that could only be remedied with women’s make-up, a digital camera and internet access. Ritch agreed and once we got our hands on some cherry red lipstick, set out upon the only right course of action in that sort of situation.

As I said before, Jake is a pretty big guy so we had to proceed with caution. We needed to be sure that he was out. We decided to start with an investigation of his stomach contents. The great thing about dealing with the highly intoxicated is that you don’t have to wait to do this post-mortem like the guys on CSI: Miami do. All you had to do was grab a flashlight and study the parking lot. After cataloguing a copious amount of shredded chicken, ground beef, nacho chip fragments, corn, some peppers and potatoes, we were able to deduce that there was not possibly enough solids in that man’s gut to ruin his buzz so it was safe to proceed. When the mission came to the moment f truth outside of Jake’s car though, we were still struck with a moment’s hesitation. Ritch turned to me and asked, “What do you want to do, the camera or the lipstick?”

“I, uh….I could…uh…I dunno…”

Ritch handed me the camera. “I’ll do the lipstick. You’ve got twice as many mouths to feed at home than I do.”

It was a wise decision. The way I saw it two things could go wrong with our little stunt. The first was Jake could wake up swinging and if that was the case, Ritch undoubtedly had a better dental plan being a union employee and all. Second, in Jake’s twisted state of mind he could wake with the weird realization that he was into being made up like a woman and in the highly unlikely event that this happened, well, I just felt more comfortable with Ritch being the one holding the lipstick. Living in California, I imagine Ritch being just a trifle more open-minded about that kind of thing than I am.

When Ritch was through, Jake was a little startled but it appeared to me that he was mostly oblivious to the whole thing. We made him up, took pictures and were prevented from having anymore fun with the guy by his wife who decided to drop him off at her parents’ house around the block to save him from further humiliation. She came back later and described a chaotic scene as she tried to get him into the house. Apparently Jake was pretty much dead weight and she had to have her father help get him inside. Their two kids were also not used to seeing their father in that kind of shape either and apparently went into some sort of hysterics when they saw him, being far more traumatized by it than she had anticipated. That is no surprise. Coming home drunk is one thing. Coming home drunk AND tarted up in your wife’s Mary Kay ensemble is something else altogether. I’d freak too if I were them.

So what was the final verdict on Jake? Overall, I would say that he passed every criteria there is for joining our drinking circle with flying colors and I look forward to downing tequila shots with him and his wife again sometime in the future. There is only one thing left that we have to before we officially welcome him into the fold:

See how he reacts to having his picture posted on the internet while wearing his wife’s lipstick.

-This article brought to you by Jep and Sacto Ritch

General Nonsense

2007-08-21T20:16:00.000-04:00

Well, I sat down to pound out another article on the weekend's events, but can't quite decide on what angle to take on it yet so as I begin this post, I have absolutely no clue what this entry will be about. I could go with the first thing that pops into my head, but the only thing that immediately registers is something I saw a little while ago at the grocery store. For some reason, I glanced over at an older gentleman in the line next to me when I saw his face contort into a pained grimace as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. Getting the piece of cloth to his nose just in time, he then let out a violently explosive sneeze into it then set about examining the piece of fabric for what I judged to be an inordinately long amount of time.

Granted there are not a lot of things in the supermarket check-out line to keep a person occupied, but there have got to be better ways to amuse oneself than studying nasal discharge as if you are going to be tested on it once you reach the cashier. I could not help but wonder what he was looking for so intently but in the end I decided that it must have been brain tissue. Judging from the man's appearance and the ease with which he entertained himself I could see how losing gray matter through his nostrils might have been a real concern, especially if it had happened before. If I once recovered from a particularly vicious sneeze to find that I had lost my ability to do arithmetic, I guess I would be checking the house for stray synapses as well.

As I put a bit more thought into this, I can't help but think of what men of my generation do in similar situations. We do not carry handerkerchiefs anymore so when we feel a sneeze coming on, how do we handle it? Trying to recollect my last great sneeze in a public place, I have to say that I put my bare hand over my nose, being careful that my palm was not exposed to my nostrils' line of fire, pointed my head away from any person that looked as if they had a short temper and a debilitating right hook and fired away. I guess if I had the time I would look for an amusing target that I could outrun in case anything actually escaped but there usually is not a lot of advance notice when this type of opportunity arises.

Great. I sit down to do a train-of-thought writing exercise and just managed to write 437 words on snot. This is exactly the type of thing that convinces me that I will never write professionally. I really need to work on subject matter discipline.

What is encouraging however, is that The JEP Report seems to be generating a bit of renewed interest of late. The visit count is up and I can see that people visiting are reading, and reading quite a bit at that. In the blogging world, the number of people who visit your site and the amount of comments you receive is kind of like currency and it may be a bit narcissistic, but that is what motivates bloggers to write. We are definately not in it for the money.

And speaking about that, I am also pleased to report that The JEP Report store actually made a profit this quarter. It did not make enough for Cafepress to send me a check, but you still get a sense of accomplishment for having someone attach enough worth to something you've created to actually pay money for it. Anyway, I added a couple of products to it to celebrate if you want to check it out. The link is to your right.

Speaking of the right, I learned some basic html today and created a couple of other link categories. Beneath the link to The JEP Report store, I have added a "Reader Sites" catagory. In the past I was reluctant to do this for two reasons. First, blogs have a tendency to disappear just as quickly as they are created so my links would be obsolete from the moment they were posted. Second, the subject matter is usually much different than what is found here. Still, people who read this stuff invest a lot of time doing so (thanks to me being very long winded), so I wanted them to get something in return.

Inflammable Hamster is a blog that, as far as I can tell is documenting Alan The Great's attempts to blow himself up using commercial fireworks. He's kind of disturbed. He dispenses some good blogging advice though and I will take this opportunity to dispense some advice right back to him: It's not funny if you actually blow yourself to smithereens...unless you make the Darwin Awards.

RightMichigan is a political blog that I have found rather interesting. Granted, The JEP Report enjoys a very international audience base so I do not know how much appeal its regional focus will have here, but I would reccomend checking it out if you are inclined that way. It had a recent article using a muppet character to point out the governor's recent trip to Sweden so it has promise.

And then there is the "Great Writing" section for the word nerds. Where the Hell Was I? is currently on hiatus but with 1200 posts, there is plenty to read. If you like The JEP Report, you'll definately like Charlie Hatton's site. Until this month, the guy was completely immune from writer's block.

And finally, I have to point out the MySpace page for the Mighty Josephine, Sacto Ritch's band in California. I actually stumbled across this by accident since Ritch never mentioned anything to me about it and quite frankly, they are awesome! I have taken to listening to "Southern Cross" on a regular basis and think it has great potential as an internet indie rock sensation. Solo, if you're out there and still posting music clips, you're going to have to check this one out.

Well, that should do it. It's ten o'clock and work comes early. Adieu.

-JEP

The Third World Inebriate

2007-08-19T22:31:00.000-04:00

In the pursuit of exhilaration, some folks like to gamble. Others may like to take to the woods and taunt animals with high caliber weapons. Then there are the people who just can not entertain themselves unless their recreational endeavors carry the possibility of severe personal injury or death. These are the types of individuals who get their thrills by engaging in mountain climbing, sky-diving or marriage. In my personal opinion however, if you are a person seeking the highest level of adrenaline ecstasy, few things can match the charge you get by embarking upon a brutal booze bender in a Third World nation.

Now anyone can buy a ticket to the Dominican Republic and spend a week sipping Margaritas on the beach at a Sandals resort, but it takes a special breed of drunkard that will feel comfortable getting positively pie-eyed in the red light districts of Santo Domingo then brave an illegal border crossing while avoiding UN military peacekeepers, marauding bands of brigands and zombie-generating voodoo witch doctors just to consummate a promised tryst with a Haitian chamber maid in Port-au-Prince. This particular type of bacchanalian is called the Third World Inebriate.

So what makes the Third World Inebriate different than the common lush? Well, there are several things. First off, the common lush usually prefers to drink in a familiar environment and is a creature of routine. You can usually find him sucking down shells of a cheap domestic at his local dive bar, doing shots of low-quality vodka in his living room or guzzling a four dollar bottle of ripple next to a garbage dumpster behind a neighborhood Applebee’s restaurant. The Third World Inebriate is quickly bored by repetition and if his chosen establishment is not the scene of a drug deal gone bloodily awry or offers a front row view of the ruling junta being thrown out of office by an ambitious military upstart, he will usually try to find a more happening venue to go get tanked in.

Another difference between the common lush and the Third World Inebriate is the company he keeps. The lush is most likely to find himself drinking with a former high school football hero turned factory janitor, a retired welder trying to suppress the memory of his fifth failed marriage, an unemployed biker contemplating a career change into the potentially lucrative field of methamphetamine distribution and a married hairdresser seeking to delay the realization that she is about to become a grandmother by seducing the bartender. The Third World Inebriate will likely be sharing his table with a couple of heartbreakingly beautiful bargirls, a former French Foreign Legionnaire, a couple of local longshoreman who occasionally moonlight as high-seas pirates, some British military contractors spoiling for a fight with the table full of Australian sailors across the bar and the madam of the establishment who looks and awful lot like an Asian version of Marilyn Monroe, if the comparison had been done several months post-mortem (bar girls typically do not age very well).

To further distinguish the Third World Inebriate from the common lush, one should look beyond the company they keep and explore the company that they kept. Under the best of circumstances, the common lush might wake up face-to-face with the matronly hairdresser who struck out with the bartender at closing time and decided to go home with someone too drunk to be turned off by breath that reeked of Newport cigarettes, stale Buffalo wings and fermented vomit. Under the worst of circumstances, the lush may have found himself waking up in the bed of the unemployed biker and, discovering that he has been handcuffed to the headboard, unable to escape before anyone finds out.

The Third World Inebriate on the other hand, is more likely to crack his eyes open at sunrise and smell the fresh Pacific breeze rolling in off of Pattaya Beach through the silken jet black hair of a Siamese nymphette that did things to him that he could not possibly have imagined, despite possessing a highly overactive imagination. He will have a memory he will cherish for the rest of his life, even if he has forgotten the nymphette’s name by lunch, which he probably did considering that it is highly unlikely that he could pronounce it correctly even when he did know it.

The rewards of being a Third World Inebriate are immeasurable and though becoming a black belt in the art requires an irrepressible sense of adventure, a Kryptonite liver and years upon years of training, the experience gained in the process will equip one with a repertoire of anecdotes that can entertain his grandchildren for years to come.

Of course, there are few that possess the character traits (or flaws, depending upon your perspective) to make it as a Third World Inebriate. Even among those that do, many try to advance too far in the field too fast and see their promising rise obliterated by inexperience. They find themselves driven insane by absinthe, killed by brigands, involuntarily caught up in the sexual slavery trade, enduring a lengthy incarceration in the Philippine penal system for not carrying an adequate amount of bribe money or maimed by a case of genital crabs the size of freakin’ tarantulas.

With a bit of patience, a lot of hard work and an experienced mentor however, one can not only survive in the field but thrive. The following are a few tips that will help one get started in the field if they so desire it:

1. Begin Your Training Early and Train Hard -Black belt Third World Inebriates start drinking very young in life. Rumor has it that by the age of 18 months Aussie Alcoholic Jacob Brees, known as “The Rake of Rangoon” among the expatriate community, had already figured out a way to disassemble his baby bottle and fit it over his father’s mug of Guinness Stout. Admittedly, Brees was sort of a prodigy (though many actually considered him an idiot savant because of his usual state of being too bombed to form a complete sentence or keep from drooling all over himself) and this level of natural talent alludes most of us mere mortals, but if you are going to succeed, you need to set the bar much higher than you think you can actually reach.

By the age of ten you should be plotting creative ways of getting your hands on intoxicating drink. It will most definitely take years for you to succeed but the improvisation skills you will gain in the process will prove invaluable later. If you haven’t succeeded by the time you are fourteen, you’d better stick to sipping Hot Totties with your Aunt Margaret. You just do not have what it takes.

By sixteen, you should have conquered tequila, able to do continuous shots long after your peers have passed out in puddles of their own puke. By eighteen, you should be able to pass a field sobriety drill despite the fact that the breathalyzer test registered a reading higher than the closing volume of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Then, and only then, will you be ready to take your show on the road.

2. When Considering Destinations, Start Off Easy - No matter how much talent a potential Third World Inebriate has, it would be suicide for him to think he could survive a week-long binge drinking session in Bangkok if he has never even left the city limits of Des Moines, Iowa. He should start off with a weekend road trip to a Six Flags park in another state. After that, he should consider visiting a foreign country that is relatively safe but where English is not spoken as a first language. Quebec serves this purpose well and has an added bonus of hosting a population that is just slightly less anti-American than the Taliban, but unless you fall in with the Montreal chapter of the Hell’s Angels it is far less violent which gives you room to err. This helps the average American temper any unrealized arrogance, which can be the kiss of death in a developing country. If you can not make it to Quebec, the exact same experience can be had in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Massachusetts.

If you want to start off in a location where people communicate in words you will not understand but will not dislike you because of your national origin, try the mountain regions of North Carolina or anywhere within 200 miles of the Mexican frontier. Just keep in mind that you are in the Bible Belt down there and take care that you do not end up trapped in a dry county without the proper provisions.

After you are comfortable drinking on the road, it is time to venture into the Third World. Tijuana, Mexico is the perfect place for the debutante drunk. The natives speak an unintelligible language, the average citizen lives in abject poverty, due to the burgeoning trade in illicit narcotics folks there are naturally distrustful and hostile to outsiders, there is a myriad of vices readily available for wanton indulgence and the law enforcement officials are shamelessly corrupt. If you live on the sunrise side of the United States however and the west coast is out of your range, Louisiana can serve as a near perfect substitute.

3. Choose a Geographic Area to Ply Your Expertise - Third World Inebriates usually focus upon a certain area of the globe. Some prefer to bounce around Latin America. The main advantage of specializing in this area is that by learning one or two different languages, one can effortlessly communicate with virtually an entire continent. Africa is mainly the domain of the European sub-culture of the Third World Inebriate and offers non-stop action in the form of incessant political violence, economic collapse and epidemic disease. Trust me, nothing brings out the party animal in people like civil strife and insurrection. Others prefer the Orient which has a decent mix of calamity though the deadly sexually transmitted diseases are a little better controlled.

Once you have picked an area, try to visit a relatively modern country there to get a feel for the place. South Africa is the closest one can find to this on the Dark Continent. Costa Rica, Argentina or Chile will do in Latin America and in Asia, Japan is the obvious destination. This will allow you to get your feet wet in a place where the consequences of letting your guard down are not so dire. Truth be told though, letting your guard down in South Africa can still rather easily result in you being robbed, beaten, murdered or sentenced to a slow death by an acquired auto-immune disorder. Why Europeans gravitate to this place mystifies me almost as much as the fascination the French have with Jerry Lewis.

4. Learn the Essential Phrases in the Language of the Land You Are Visiting - Though it is true that English is spoken across the globe, your ability to communicate with people in their native tongue will separate the Third World Inebriate from the common tourist that is ripe for fleecing. In some areas it may also prove crucial to ensuring that you remain properly lubricated. Before you set foot in a foreign land you should be able to say the following in the local lexicon:

1. Can I have two beers please?
2. Do you want to dance?
3. No, I am Canadian. Really.
4. I am not the only one who threw up in the aquarium. Why should I be the only one that pays for it?
5. You have really beautiful eyes.
6. Are you sure you are not a transvestite?
7. ‘Cause I’m pretty sure that’s an Adam’s apple you’re sporting unless you’re choking on the cork to the champagne bottle.
8. How much is it going to cost to get me out of this?
9. Will you marry me?
10. Would you please make sure that the German Shepherd is cooked well done? The last time I ate here I came down with a vicious case of canine distemper.

A Third World Inebriate should also be able to communicate his basest, most disgusting sexual desires to the woman seated next him at the bar. If she has any shred of decency about her, she will try to break his nose and claw his eyes out before storming out of the bar in huff. This is perfectly fine, because the last thing he wants to do when overseas is waste valuable time and money buying drinks for a woman possessing a code of sexual morality straight out of Victorian England. The Third World Inebriate will usually seek out a woman who will hang on every rank suggestion he makes and then, after hearing it all in its dankest glory, will smile coyly at him and say, “That might cost you a little bit extra.”

5. Take a Geography Lesson - Americans generally have a poor grasp of the world around them and, if you are planning upon taking on the lifestyle of a Third World Inebriate, you had better have an idea of where you are going. You do not necessarily have to know that Riyadh is the capitol of Saudi Arabia. You had damn well better know however that it is located in the middle of a desert, presides over the largest dry county on the planet and is inhabited by short-tempered religious fanatics that are capable of murdering you just for casting a side-long glance at one of their women. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, you might be better off just buying a Winnebago and taking a long trip to Utah.

These five tips may prove somewhat less than exhaustive, but they are more than enough to get your average lush larvae started. After a few months of crawling through jungles, over open sewage ditches and into the back doors of nightclubs you have been repeatedly banned from in search of a good time, you will be able to judge the quality of a country’s nightlife solely by the types of side arms the police carry as well. But why should you? What exactly is the draw of this sort of lifestyle? What drives a person to spend years of his life bar brawling his way across the developing world?

Well, it’s hard to say. What I can tell you is that no matter how elaborate your living room’s sound system is, it just can not do justice to the audio assault that is the Rappongi district of Tokyo at three in the morning. And even though Sally Struthers is without equal at tugging at your heartstrings on behalf of the world’s hungry children, you have to walk through a shanty town built atop a Philippine garbage dump to get the full effect. You can watch the file footage of a student protest turned brutally violent in Korea but you will probably forget it before the next commercial break. If you have a tear gas grenade bounce off of your bare ass while you are mooning the riot police however, every aspect of that event will be seared into your memory, as well as your posterior since those things can get pretty damned hot, until the day you die. With equal lucidity, I can recall the acrid odor of the smog in Hong Kong though I lost my sense of smell in 1993. I know what the bare knuckles of a British Royal Marine feel like when they are smashed across your left cheek during a pick-up rugby game in Singapore. I know what a duck egg tastes like after it has been hard-boiled just as it was ready to hatch and then left to ferment. I can also instantly recall the flavor of live shrimp, Yakisoba, yakitori chicken and Kirin beer separately going down as well as all combined together when they were on their way back up.

Many of those sensations were rather unpleasant and are not things that I am yearning to rush out and experience again, but all are remembered quite fondly now. Nothing sweetens a sour memory like the satisfaction of knowing that you had the courage to strike out on your own and brave the hazards that you had to in order to experience the things you did, even if the source of your courage was 150 proof. And if this can turn a bad recollection good, what it does to a great memory absolutely defies description.

Also, when you reach your late thirties, have been married a few years, had a few kids and acquired a sizeable mortgage, thinking of all the recklessness you survived in your youth takes a lot of the edge off of realization that you’re actually kind of a pathetic wimp now that you’ve sobered up.

Agana Goon

2007-08-17T21:04:00.000-04:00

If there was one hard rule that I traveled by back in my navy days, it was that when I was in a foreign country, I tried to get as far away from my fellow American servicemen whenever I could. The only time I ever violated this rule was in 1993 when my ship pulled into Guam.

Now technically, my rule was not violated since Guam is actually part of the United States and even if I traveled so far into the interior that I stumbled across a lost tribe of Chamorro cannibals, I would still legally be amongst Americans. Granted, the island is only around four miles wide and at most, fifty miles long so there is not a lot of unexplored territory to stumble into. It is probably safe to say that there are fewer cannibals on Guam than there were in Milwaukee during the Jeffery Dahmer era.

Of Guam itself, there is not much that I can tell you about it since I do not think that I ventured more than five miles from the base. We were only there for two days and as luck would have it, I spent the first of them on duty. As liberty for the ship was going to be cancelled at midnight in preparation for our departure early the following morning, I found myself with just over 12 hours of free time to work with to experience what the island had to offer.

It did not leave a big impression. It was hot there of course and the island did have its share of palm trees but for the most part I remember the island as being brown rather than a lush tropical green and covered more by low brush and tall grasses than thick equatorial rainforest. I would not take this as an accurate characterization of the entire island because, as I said before, I did not get out much. In addition to that, it has been fourteen years since I have been there and most of my memories of the visit took place at night.

A buddy of mine, Ben Wathen, was in the same predicament that I was and the two us decided to at least get off of the ship for a little while and see what the place was like. We went to a ship-sponsored Lu’au not far from base (the furthest from it we got) and ate some spit roasted pig while some native hula dancers performed in front of us. The food was top notch but I suspected we got third-string dancers though. They were much larger than the svelte mocha-colored girls that flashed across my family’s television screen during the opening theme song to “Hawaii Five-O” when I was a kid, shaking their hips as if someone had slipped a few Brazilian fire ants in their underwear. The dancers we got looked like Winston Churchill who, after downing a case of Stolichnaya with his frat buddy Josef Stalin, decided to don a bad wig and a grass skirt and push an imaginary shopping cart around the campfire for a couple of hours.

After we ate, the two of us tried to go swimming but were prevented from doing so by rough seas and a riptide threat. After that, we decided to just go back to base and get drunk at the enlisted man’s club.

The EM club was nothing to rave about and initially Ben and I were both rather disappointed that all they played was country music. This drove us nuts for about the first five pitchers of beer we drank but by the sixth, we were standing on tables singing Merle Haggard louder than anyone else in the bar. Overall, we were having a grand time until about nine o’clock when I left our table to grab ourselves another pitcher. By then, the bar was packed. There were two large ships in port, my vessel the USS Belleau Wood and our sister ship, the USS Peliliu which was identical to ours. Between the two boats, we had unleashed over 1000 people upon the small base and it seemed like most of them, along with nearly everyone stationed on Guam, their dependants, and a heavy contingent of Shore Patrol and Military Police were packed into that little club.

It took me forever to get through the mass of humanity to get my pitcher filled but luckily I was able to pass the time talking with another buddy of mine, Ryan Baker, who had drawn Shore Patrol duty that night and had been assigned to the club. He, like the rest of us, was lamenting the lack of women on base and how he could not wait to pull out the following morning and head to Australia. I remember that only because when I returned to the table, one of the few women I had seen in the club was sitting on Ben’s lap sucking his ear lobes and as it turned out, she just happened to be Australian. I have to say as well, she was incredibly attractive for a woman who was smashed completely out of her gourd. She had straight shoulder-length blond hair, a body that could cause sins of commission at 15 miles and bright blue eyes that must have been just striking when she was able to keep them all the way open. In other words, she was way out of our league.

“Wow, Ben.” I said as I retook my seat. “That’s not a bad job for someone who hasn’t left his seat all night. Would you like to introduce us?”

Ben tried to answer but as soon as he opened his mouth, the girl on his lap leaned over and tried to stick her tongue into it. He gently grabbed her head and guided it back to his ear. “I would but I have no idea what her name is. As soon as you left she just plopped right down on my lap and started sucking on my neck.”

“You’re quite the Studmuffin, Ben. So, you two getting out of here or what?”

Ben shook his head. “If she was just sober enough to tell me her name I might consider it but in the condition she’s in, it just wouldn’t be right. Besides that, my Spidey Senses are going off big time. She’s giving me some bad vibes.”

Ben was like that. If someone needed help he was always there. He was painfully honest, possessed an unshakeable sense of morality and could always be depended upon to do the right thing. In short, Ben was the sort of guy that I would avoid like the plague if I was embarking upon a tear of Third World drinking establishments, preferring the company of someone who was much more comfortingly sociopathic. For some reason though, I liked the guy and felt compelled to put him on the right path. “Bad vibes? They look pretty good from this angle.”

“No man, something’s not right about this.”

“I’ll say. She should have picked a heterosexual to try and seduce.”

“Ha. Ha.” Ben paused for a second to place his hands over the girl’s cheeks and pull her towards him so that they were face-to-face. “What. Is. Your. Name?”

In answer to Ben’s question she leaned forward and whispered it into his ear before going back to licking his neck.

“Well?” I asked.

Ben shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. It sounded something like ‘Yynjelffijick’. She’s from Melbourne.”

I waved at her. “Hi Yynjelffijick! Glad to meet you.” She did not respond. My guess is that she had no idea that I was even there. “Well Ben, the way I see it you’ve got two choices here. It’s kind of hard to drink beer with someone else’s tongue in your mouth so I would advise you to either tell the angel on your shoulder to go take a hike or quit stringing Yynjelffijick along and end this thing with her now before you break her heart. She looks like the innocent fragile type so it might be a little hard on her now, but if you wait too long she’ll never get over it.”

Just then Ryan and a couple of the other guys on shore patrol stepped up to our table to check out Ben’s new squeeze. He let out a short whistle and said, “Man, I never figured Ben to be much of a player but…Wow!”

“My man here’s got the goods, what can I tell you?” With more of an audience, Ben’s discomfort grew exponentially and finally he had enough. He grabbed her gently around the waist, lifted her off of his lap and told her that he just was not interested and it was time for her to leave.

Yynjelffijick actually seemed to take the rejection fairly well. She just swayed a couple of times, smiled seductively at Ryan, then fell over backwards. I threw my arm out and caught her before she hit the ground, a gesture she seemed rather surprised, and impressed, by and as a token of her appreciation, she sat herself down on my lap, grabbed my head and proceeded to try to lick the back of my throat.

Of course, that is exactly the moment that her husband walked in through the front door.

Now, I do not believe that I am clairvoyant in any way, shape or form but when I saw Yynjelffijick’s husband enter the room I instantly knew what his relationship was to the woman on my lap. He was a big man and being in uniform, I could immediately see that he outranked me by several pay grades. He was obviously quite pissed off by something judging by the expression on his face, his body language and the fact that he seemed to be looking for something other than a drink since he was scanning tables instead of the bar. He looked like a bruiser who desperately craved to get his hands on a head that he could crack open and within a split second I deduced that the melon that was destined to be split was mine. Like I said, I do not have ESP. I just have really bad luck when it comes to that sort of thing.

I tried to sink into my seat to make myself a smaller target but he made me almost instantly. By the time Ben and Ryan saw the guy, we had already made eye contact and he was charging. He was not running at me so much as he was marching double time with homicidal intent as he pushed people out of his way to reach us.

I tried to size up my odds. We were the same height so that was a draw. He outweighed me by thirty muscular pounds so I was definitely at a disadvantage there. He was also a good twenty years older than me so I was pretty sure that I was faster, giving me something to neutralize his strength. Then again, I was weighed down by one hundred and ten pounds of his drunken wife as well which negated the one advantage I had. Factor in the fact that I was drunk and he was not and the motivation angle (he surely wanted to kill me much more than I wanted to kill him) and I was pretty much screwed. Still, I had surprised myself in these types of situations before so I tried to remain optimistic. This naïve optimism was crushed once he got close enough for me to make out the pin insignia he wore above the left shirt pocket of his uniform however. The eagle perched upon the trident meant that he was a US Navy SEAL and that I was fucking doomed.

My only chance was for Ryan and his partners to step up and keep us separated but judging by the two steps back they all took, it was pretty obvious that they were going to go Swedish on me. Ben bore a highly inappropriate expression of giddy relief on his face, apparently overjoyed that he was not the one caught with a naval commando’s wife on his lap. Yynjelffijick had her back to the door and was completely oblivious to the catastrophe unfolding behind her. Her last heavily slurred words to me were, “Let’s get out of here.” Come to think of it, those were the first words she said to me too.

When the chief reached our table, he reached over, grabbed Yynjelffijick by her arm and ripped her off of my lap, knocking our table over in the process and sending beer flying all over Ben. Screaming at her to go outside and get in the car, he called her “Angie”, confirming my suspicions that Yynjelffijick was probably an alias. Then instead of turning back around to finish me off, he followed her through the front door, disappearing into the night. Though the music was still playing, there was little other noise being made in the place and at that moment I had center stage.

The only thing I could do was laugh. It was not the humored, giggling that one does when he finds something funny, but the nervous maniacal roar of a person who just survived a near death experience and just can not believe that he is still alive. As I started laughing, most of the people in the bar did too and soon everyone went back to doing what they were before they were interrupted. I then got up out of my seat and took a couple of steps towards the front door before Ben jumped up and grabbed me. “Where are you going?”

“Outside.”

“Are you nuts?!?” Ryan asked. “Give them a couple of minutes to get out of here first. The last thing you want is to get caught by that guy in a dark parking lot.”

“I’ve got to talk to him.”

“What the hell for?!?”

“To tell him I was not trying to pick up his wife.”

Ben was incredulous. “Do you honestly think he gives a shit? Dude, you need to sit down, give them some time to leave and get the hell out of here yourself.”

“Can you imagine what that guy feels like right now?” I asked. “He’s a Navy SEAL and a chief petty officer. He has earned the right to be respected and was just publicly humiliated in his own back yard. This is a small base and I can guarantee you that EVERY-one is going to be talking about this tomorrow. I need him to know that I did not play any part in that other than just being there.”

“Yeah. The only thing you did was try to get me to play a part in that.”

“Well Ben, truth be told, you could use some corrupting.”

As I waited for Ben’s response, the bar went quiet again and the color drained right out of my drinking partner’s face. Ryan and his two Shore Patrol partners again took a couple of steps back but at least this time I saw Ryan’s fingers wrap around the handle of his nightstick. I looked back over at Ben and asked, “I don’t have to go to the parking lot, do I?”

“Nope. He’s right behind you.”

I stood up straight and turned around, finding myself nose-to-nose with the woman’s husband. “Chief, I…”

“Shut the fuck up. Did my wife leave her purse here?”

“Duh..I..buuh…I don’t think so. Ben? Is Yynjelffijick’s purse over by you?”

Ben shook his head.

Giving both of us a long hard look, the SEAL then turned around to leave. “Chief!” I called out after him. “I was just sitting there, when she fell on my lap. I wasn’t trying to pick up your wife. I didn’t even know her name let alone that she was married.”

The chief then turned back towards me. The man was a SEAL and by default an efficiently lethal individual. I am positive that he had seen and done things that would have made my blood run cold. He was as tough as they come, as hardened as a man can get and forced to endure things during the course of training that would have utterly destroyed me both mentally and physically. Yet, after I told him that, I could see that he had tears in his eyes. “Is that supposed to make me feel any better? Thanks for telling me that my wife, the mother of my daughter, is such a fucking gutter slut that she’ll pick up any nameless piece of shit she can get her hands on to have herself a good time with. At this particular moment, that is EXACTLY what I need to be reminded of. Do you feel better now? Do you? ‘Cause I sure as hell don’t!”

I had not thought of that. I decided right then and there that if he did not want me to confirm his suspicions about his wife, he definitely would not appreciate me suggesting he get a paternity test done on his little girl. “I’m sorry, Chief. I just don’t know what to say.”

“Then keep your goddamn trap shut.” With that he stormed out of the bar, without his wife’s purse.

I felt horrible for the guy and having played a part, no matter how small, in forcing that chief to realize just how dysfunctional his marriage was, I was in no mood to continue the festivities. I was in the mood to depression drink so I switched from beer to tequila. I even conned Ben into joining me. A little while later, a waitress told us that Yynjelffijick, or rather Angela, was a regular at the club and was known for her rather prolific infidelity, and the numerous occasions with which she had been caught there by her husband. I was not the first and it as unlikely that I would be the last.

By 11:30, I was comfortably numb and Ben was passed out at the table. Realizing that I was going to have to carry him back to the ship so that we could get there before our midnight curfew, I decided to hit the bathroom first. When I returned, Ben was gone.

I tried to find him but just did not have much time. I suspected that he might have woken up while I was gone, thought that I’d left him and tried to make his own way back to the ship. After a cursory ten-minute search, I left too.

I made it back to the boat and was a little concerned when I checked Ben’s rack and found it empty. Assuming that he had probably just went to the RADAR shop to watch some television instead of going to bed, I turned in for the night.

The following morning, Ben was not at roll call. He was not in the shop either. After an exhaustive search of the boat, it was determined that he probably was not on the ship at all. That made my life particularly miserable as I was the last one to be seen with him and had to endure a barrage of questioning from my division officer and Master Chief. Particularly painful was the account I gave of the Yynjelffijick incident. This resulted in a call back to base to see if the chief had possibly caught Ben on his way back to the ship and slaughtered him in the dark. I was there when the call was made and whoever was in charge of the base’s security assured us that he knew exactly what chief we were talking about even though I did not know his name and that they had a full account of his whereabouts from about a half an hour after the point where we had encountered him. That sounded a lot to me as if they had him locked up. Though I had no idea whether or not that was true, I hoped that if it was, no one got hurt too badly.

At eight o’clock I watched our sister ship, the USS Pelilieu, get underway. At nine o’clock it was our turn to go and unable to wait anymore, we left without Ben. I was quite concerned. Ben was a stellar sailor, aced his performance evaluations and was one of the best men I had in my shop. I found myself in the awkward position of hoping that he had not been seriously hurt but on the other, hoping that he had been hurt seriously enough to justify being charged with Missing Ship’s Movement, which was a fairly major offence and similar to being declared AWOL.

We had been underway for an hour when we got the call from the USS Pelileu informing us that Ben had been found. My first fear was that they had found him floating face down in the Pacific Ocean but our sister ship reported that, aside from being a bit hung over, he was just fine.

Like my vessel, the USS Belleau Wood, the Pelileu was an amphibious assault ship. It was identical to ours in nearly every way except for the number painted on the hull. Apparently Ben, being as blasted as he was, walked up the gangplank of the wrong ship. The Petty Officer of the Watch must not have been checking identification cards as vigilantly as he should have and just waved him aboard. He then walked down to the Pelileu’s berthing area, crawled into the rack that would have been his on the other side of the pier, and passed out in a bed that, as luck would have it, was vacant. He slept through Reveille and did not wake up until the ship was well underway.

He was back onboard the USS Belleau Wood by lunch, but still facing the specter of a Missing Ship’s Movement charge. Both my master chief and I appealed to the captain for leniency, citing Ben’s excellent record but, at least initially, the captain seemed unmoved. Ben was placed on report and ordered to go to Captain’s Mast for non-judicial punishment. In the end though, we were able to get him sprung on a technicality. The captain could still have had Ben’s ass but my belief is that all he was trying to do was let the guy sweat his fate for a while before the skipper dropped the charges. In the end, he let Ben off because he had actually gotten underway an hour before the rest of us and so, technically, did not miss ship’s movement.

He said it just did not feel right to bust someone for being overly punctual.

Editor’s Note: I’ve been trying to document my sea stories for later publication. Keep in mind that I am trying to recall these things from nearly two decades ago out of a memory muddled by a sometimes impenetrable alcoholic haze, so there is some amount of literary license taken. I have also deliberately altered others so that those involved will not recognize the events too easily (keeping my ass out of court). Still, the events described remain pretty true to what happened. For The JEP Report’s newer readers, the related entries can be found at:

1. Savage Sushi
2. The Intricate Hazards of Philippine Cuisine
3. Conquering Fuji-san
4. Thai-ing One On
5. Tijuana Travesty
6. Decataur Debacle

With the exception of Tijuana Travesty, all names have been changed to protect the sickeningly guilty. Sacto Ritch, like myself, is rather proud of our adventures in Tijuana so I used his sign on name. That one is completely substantiated by the only person I know to have ever gone out with us in a Third World country and remained completely sober the entire night: frequent commenter Caretaker Matt.

This series will wrap up if I can commit my experiences in Korea, Hong Kong, Okinawa, Australia and Singapore to verse and manage to keep it fresh. This one was rather tough and Singapore will be absolutely brutal as that place was just too expensive and oppressive to have any fun in (I’m leaning towards making it a social commentary piece – you know, make fun of the locals).

For future entries, an article on the joys of being a Third World Inebriate has been written and submitted to Zug.com in response to the request of several members there. Once it shows up there I will post here so as not to spoil the anticipation. Also, I am meeting Sacto Ritch for drinks tomorrow night so if tradition holds true, I should have something else posted by next weekend.

Unless our wives hold true to their threats and refuse to bail us out of the hoosegow this time. - JEP

The Curse of Friday

2007-08-11T10:36:00.000-04:00

I used to look forward to Fridays but after the last few weeks, I have been dreading them almost as much as Mondays thanks in large part to the way I have been spending my Thursday nights. It started three weeks ago when a buddy of mine suggested we go to a local bar for a quick beer. Now, I used to be an Olympic-caliber drinker but after having a couple of kids it turned into one of my hobbies that I found myself neglecting more and more and as this “quick beer” turned into several that were complimented by multiple shots of tequila, I discovered that my tolerance for alcohol is nowhere near what it used to be.

On that particular evening, things started to go downhill when a biker entered the bar and for some reason decided to take up his post right next to me. The guy was huge, loud, boisterous and obviously looking for trouble, making rude comments to several other customers and being a general nuisance to what up to that point was turning out to be a fairly pleasant evening. He mellowed out a bit once he noticed my buddy’s accent and found out that he was from Germany and we ended up discussing fine Bavarian beers with the guy. Then we started doing shots with him. I am not sure how things progressed, but ultimately we ended up in the middle of a huge group of people doing shots and having a grand old time.

At 1:30, we ordered another round when the barmaid leaned in towards us and asked who was driving home. We both looked around and scanned the crowd before saying, “Our designated driver is around here somewhere…”

“Yeah, right. You two came in here by yourselves. I’m sorry but I’m afraid I am going to have to cut you off.”

I gasped in horror and indignation. I have never had my drinking cut off by a barmaid before. I’ve had it cut off by bouncers, police officers and angry boyfriends, but never a barmaid. It was quite humiliating. Getting cut off by door goons or the authorities at least leaves you with an amusing story to tell your grandchildren but getting cut off without incident by the serving help is just sad. It put me into an immediate funk. I was just getting over the shock of it when someone unexpectedly placed another beer and a shot in front of my buddy and I. It was a very large woman who looked almost exactly like the Wheezy from the television show “The Jeffersons”. I decided to leave when I felt Wheezy’s hand start working her way up my thigh.

I got home sometime after 2:30am, as I remember looking at the clock as I stumbled through the front door. Luckily, I had the house to myself (the rest of my family was taking advantage of a last-minute offer to stay at a relative’s cottage in Ludington) so I did not have a wife and kids around to wake up. Even though I do not remember it, I did somehow manage to get up the stairs and into bed.

My alarm went off at five, and when I woke up I was still pretty messed up. After silencing the clock, I took off my shoes and the clothes I wore to work the day before, and stumbled into the bathroom. I then got sick and passed out on the floor of the shower after I got the water the right temperature.

I hear of people drowning in the bath tub all of the time but I don’t think I recall being told of anyone who ever drowned in a stand-alone shower. Though I was in no danger killing myself while bathing that morning, I discovered a way that someone could. When I regained consciousness, the water level on the shower floor had risen deep enough to cover my ears because my back had plugged the drain. A little position change fixed the situation though and once the pool of water began disappearing I slept clear through until the point that I had run out of hot water.

After turning the water off, I found that I could barely move. I was laying on the floor of my shower for probably at least forty minutes with my feet stuck up in the air resting on the wall. I was stiff all over and it seemed like every movement was excruciating. I prayed that it was not rigor mortis setting in. I was in such bad shape after showering that I could not even bring myself to dry off. I just wrapped a towel around my waist, walked to the couch in the upstairs family room, turned on the news and went back to sleep.

When I woke up after that, I noticed that the time was when I typically would be arriving at my desk. I really wanted to call in sick, and technically I was, but I have a neurotic aversion to calling in sick because of a drinking incident. I forced myself to get up, get dressed and go to the office and in the end, was still the first person of my group to get there, though just barely. I also kept wondering on my way to work what my BAC would register if I got pulled over by the police.

The morning was miserable but actually went well from a professional standpoint and I managed to successfully conclude two morning meetings before spending my lunch hour sleeping in my car in the office’s parking lot. After lunch I was fine, got a lot done in the afternoon before going home and going to bed for the night by 7pm.

I was supposed to be going on vacation to my parents’ house in Northern Michigan last Thursday, but my oldest son came down with pink-eye that forced us to cancel. I ended up back at my buddy’s house that night spending the evening back on beer and tequila in his back yard until closing time. It was a good night but fairly uneventful aside from having nearly had my body’s blood supply sucked out of me through my ankles and toes by a swarm of ravenous mosquitoes. My feet are so tore up right now that it looks like I have some strange form of bubonic plague that only affects my lower extremities.

The good news was that I did not have to go to work the following day as I was on vacation. The bad news was that I did not have to go to work the following day as I was on vacation. Small children do not have the ability to feel any sort of empathy towards a hung over adult and they took great delight in torturing me until I had sweated every last trace of Mexican fire water through my pores (which produces a gut wrenching odor akin to a rotting water buffalo according to my wife).

This last Thursday, a colleague of mine from Toronto blew into town and I spent my third Thursday in a row trying to pop a cap into my own liver with a few colleagues. Even though I left by 9:00 (thank God I live so far away. I was the only one who went straight home and the other three closed the bars in their respective neighborhoods leading to various misadventures), it was still rough waking up Friday though not nearly as bad as the previous two Fridays had been. This was quite an accomplishment considering I had drank so much that I was hallucinating during my entire drive home. There were sounds coming out of my radio that made it sound as if the Detroit Lions made three scoring drives in the last quarter of the game to overcome a 16 point deficit and beat the Cincinnati Bengals by 1.

The hallucination was so realistic that I spent five minutes in my driveway yelling at my radio after I had arrived home. I have no idea how much you have to drink to experience wild visions of that caliber but I am quite sure that it was enough that I really should not have been driving. I should also have felt far worse than I did Friday morning too. In fact, I shouldn’t have been able to go to work. I should have been in the hospital with doctors rushing frantically around me trying bring me out of my tequila coma.

The crazy thing is that I am still having flashbacks. Just five minutes ago, I checked the sports page to find that they have listed Detroit as having beat Cincinnati during that game 26 to 27. Does anyone know what the score of that match actually was?

Beaver Barbarism

2007-08-10T19:18:00.000-04:00

I’m used to hearing about animals attacking people, but this is definitely a new one. Apparently, a grandmother was taking a swim in a Swedish river when she was set upon and mauled. Her assailant was not a shark, not a crocodile (you’d be surprised at how rare those are in Scandinavia) and not a polar bear on a snorkeling excursion. Her attacker was a beaver. Now THAT is something that you just do not see every day.

Now, when I am strolling through the woods I try to be on the lookout for predators. The last thing I need is to turn a blind corner, run into one of Yogi Bear’s more irritable cousins and end up in a life or death struggle over the bag of Doritos in my back pack. If I spent any considerable time in the far northern reaches of Michigan, I would probably take some precautions against wolves as well. I would hesitate to trek through the forest without a pack of Yorkshire Terriers on a leash. Yorkies probably are not much good for protection but I bet that in the eyes of a wolf, they would make a great appetizer and hopefully buy me enough time to find a sanctuary or a firearm.

I also give chipmunks a wide berth. I am pretty sure that there has never been a proven case of human meeting his demise beneath the claws of a horde of chipmunks but quite frankly, I don’t trust the savages and do not want to be the first. I am also not a big fan of chickens but I can’t say that I have ever come across any in the wild. I would guess that the feral populations of these birds are probably kept rather low by their natural enemies: foxes, coyotes, raccoons, possums, deep fryers and Frank’s Hot Sauce. I run into their brethren, the ring-collared pheasant, all of the time though and let me tell you, nearly stepping on one of these things during a quiet Sunday-morning sabbatical in the wilderness can result in being overcome with a sense of sheer terror that you would be hard-pressed to match unless you are susceptible to enjoying your holidays in the Sunni Triangle. They wait until you are right on top of them and then they burst towards the sky in an explosion of feathers and fallen foliage while emitting a shrill pulsating shriek that sounds eerily reminiscent of a landing UFO. I would love to hunt these things, not so much out of a love of the sport but mostly to avenge a couple pairs underwear from when I was a kid.

Considering all of the time I have spent in the woods (I do hunt, though not very well. The only thing I have ever killed at deer camp besides bottles of beer and brain cells was a chipmunk who had cut off my escape route and had me cornered), I have never felt threatened by a beaver. They seem to be a rather docile animal and I have had several swim very close to me while I have been salmon fishing. None of them have ever given off bad vibes nor have any ever made any menacing moves in my direction. Still, if you take a really close look at one, I can see how one of these things could wreak havoc on a human if it were so inclined. Like most mammals, they are equipped with claws. Though not nearly as impressive as those found on a bear or a mountain lion, I am sure that they are up to the task of doing a number on the thin human skin. They also have a rather impressive set of teeth for an herbivore, and seeing the short work these animals can make of a tree, I can see how a brawl with one of these things could result in a lost finger or at least a missing nipple.

Either way, I am looking at beavers in a whole new light now and next time I go fishing on the Ausable River, I will probably be packin’.

A Million Dollar Question

2007-08-08T23:23:00.000-04:00

A certain high level executive in my industry asked me a question today while he was in mentoring mode that for the life of me, I could not answer seriously. The problem is that this individual is known for not possessing any shred of a sense of humor and no tolerance for levity during work hours. During meetings, he acknowledges your presence not by saying “Hello” but by saying, “You have 30 minutes to convince me of ________”. His way of saying good-bye is, “Your time is up.” If the meeting goes well, he will publicly question your competence and your mother’s sexual history. If it goes bad, he will have a couple of security goons remove you from the conference room and beat your ass in the lobby, get some old hag from the mail room stomp your personal effects to smithereens in the parking lot and order a couple of scullery apes from the cafeteria to key your car.

In addition to having a savage management style, the man is extremely intelligent and very powerful. As a result he is either highly respected or deeply feared, depending upon what rung you occupy on the corporate ladder. The rung I sit on is just low enough for the man to scare the living shit out of me. He can have me fired with a phone call and with a couple of well-placed letters, ensure that I never work in the industry again.

Anyway, today he asked me a serious question and he expected a serious answer. I came up with three replies almost instantly, but lack the intestinal fortitude to say any of them. The question was, “How do you wish to be remembered?”

My first thought was, “As the guy who came to work buck naked after winning a 300 million dollar jackpot in the Mega Millions lottery.”

My second was, “As the guy who pulled up to the main gate of the American embassy in Karachi, Pakistan behind the wheel of an old Mini Cooper and told the gate guard, ‘Yo! Sergeant! If you’ve got twenty-five million dollars I’ve got most of Osama bin Laden stuffed in the trunk!’”

My third was, “As the guy who had to hold a national press conference to tell the public that despite the videos circulating around the internet that made me an indisputable candidate, DNA testing has confirmed that I am not the father of Paris Hilton’s love child”.

In the end however, I woosed out and mumbled some barely intelligible utterance about being a mentor, blah, blah blah. Truth be told I do not really remember what I said. Luckily, this executive’s English is not all that great and he probably did not understand me anyway. I consider myself fortunate that he also has no clue that, though I am by no means fluent, I can passably converse in his native tongue.

So, how would you like to be remembered? Let me know so that I can shamelessly plagiarize you the next time I need a serious answer to that question.

I Need A New Bar

2007-08-03T13:47:00.000-04:00

My favorite bar has met its demise and rumor has it that my backup will soon follow it into oblivion. That means I need to find a new haunt. My requirements for a new watering hole are:

1. Is centrally located

2. Has good beer and a wide selection of premium liquor (past experience tells me that I have very discerning taste buds until our seventh serving, after which I can drink dirty dishwater without getting all whiney about it).

3. Serves Buffalo Wings or some other sort of filling food that will at least give me a fighting chance at the first sobriety checkpoint I come across on the way home.

4. Is presided over by an understanding bartender that will not cut you off for trying to make it to the bathroom on all fours.

5. Must have quality eating utensils, made of a premium metal alloy that will not bend easily under duress and are sharpened to a level that would be found acceptable to a samurai swordsmith. You never know when you might need them to fend off an invading band of Hell’s Angels, battle a fifteen-foot-tall, three-headed, venomous hallucination brought on by a Jaegermeister overdose, silence a snitch or keep the wait staff from getting cheeky.

6. Though not mandatory, having an aquarium handy would be nice too in case someone needs to get sick.

7. I would also like to see our new bar equipped with a video surveillance system so that future outings can be financed by selling recordings of our antics to the producers of the Overweight-Balding-Middle-Aged-Managers-With-Stalled-Careers-Employed-In-A-Dying-Industry GONE WILD!!! series of home videos.

8. I am not sure why, but I have found that some of my best drinking experiences have been in places that employ Rastafarians as dishwashers. It just adds something to the atmosphere that makes you think of soothing tropical beaches, steel drums, cool ocean breezes and Cheetos. Lots and lots of Cheetos. And Chips Ahoy! cookies, too.

9. The bartender should be able to mix, from memory, at least 27 drinks made with vodka, 25 made with tequila, 16 with rum, 4 with corn mash moonshine and be able to concoct at least one chaser with Windex as the main ingredient. Extra points could be awarded to him for also being able to produce, on demand, an eclectic mix of vintage industrial solvents inhaled out of a brown paper bag.

10. Pets should be allowed on the premises, since there are so many neat bar tricks that can be performed using furry animals. Seeing-eye dogs in particular can provide hours of entertainment to a sociopathic inebriate.

Real Fantasy Football

2007-06-25T23:07:00.000-04:00

With 46 days to go before The Detroit Lions take the field to get trounced during their pre-season opener, they are already defying imagination. Jon Kitna today announced that the team, who under General Manager Matt Millen has the worst record in the National Football League, will win MORE than 10 games during the 2007 season.

Now, I have been a Lions fan since I started following football again in 2001 and during all that time, the BEST they have managed to accomplish was to win 5 games in one season, which is a hair over 25%. If they won six games, it would probably bring tears to my eyes. If they won seven, I would likely lose bladder control. If they won eight, I would suspect that the team spent the entire summer on a steroid and amphetamine bender at Chuck Rogers’ house. If they won nine, I would have no choice but to believe that the games had been fixed by the mob. If they won ten, I would have to send a thank you card to my dealer in high school and compliment him upon the staying power of the LSD he sold me in 11th grade. If they won MORE than ten, well, I guess we would have to get in touch with Satan and ask him if he needs help getting his furnace fixed.

Personally, I like Jon Kitna. He is one of the toughest quarterbacks on the field, racking up impressive passing yards for a man who takes more hits in an average game than Mohammed Ali took in his entire boxing career. I’m beginning to think however that the abuse he had taken out there has short circuited his synapses and lead to early onset dementia. He has crossed the line from being amusingly overconfident to being hysterically delusional. My first reaction to hearing Jon Kitna’s proclamation was similar to the reaction I had when my four-year-old son came up to me and announced that he was going to grow up to be the president of Japan. I just patted him on the head, told him he had to aim high and follow his dreams and as he waddled away I thought to myself, “Aaaaaaw, how cute!”

Since then my son has also told me that, in addition to heading up the occupation force that will one day conquer the Land of the Rising Sun, he wants to be a pie maker, a boat driver, Spider-Man, one of The Wiggles, a bee killer, a trucker and the king of a world where no one had to wear any clothes. I agree that my son is a bit impulsive and irrational but overall, his psychological health still seems to be in far better shape than that of Jon Kitna’s.

My prediction: The Lions will win 4 games in 2007. That is still a marginal improvement over last year yet remains a bar that is set a good six inches below Danny DeVito’s kneecaps. With expectations that low, it’s hard to disappoint me. In fact, it is actually quite a challenge yet year after year it is a challenge that the Lions not only rise to, but effortlessly obliterate.

At least this year no one on the team has been arrested for driving drunk and naked through a Wendy’s take-out window.

Father's Day Blowout

2007-06-18T18:17:00.000-04:00

Part of the struggle of having a career and a family is finding the time to have a hobby. I used to really enjoy the pleasures of highly irresponsible drinking but after I started having kids, I realized that children are particularly merciless when it comes to tormenting a grown-up with a monumental hangover. When the pain I had to endure on Saturday morning exceeded the fun I had on Friday night, I started planning my monumental benders around days when I could count on waking up in an empty house.

In order to fill the empty void left by my excessive sobriety, I took up fishing. It is a fun sport, not too expensive and provides me with some precious quiet time where I can be alone with my thoughts, however disturbing these can be at times. It also has the benefit of getting me out of the house and to a cabin on the Pere Marquette River for a full week every other year where I am guaranteed to wake up in house occupied by no one other than fellow inebriates so that our hangovers can be enjoyed in the manner that they were supposed to be. Unfortunately for this pastime, with each child I get the time I have to spend on this endeavour decreases dramatically and now that I have just had my fourth, I fear that this hobby is going to be neglected just as bad as my drinking has been of late.

Then there is my barbecue. With me not able to drink or fish as often as I'd like, I took up grilling. I really enjoy the process of cooking up my own sauces, marinades, rubs, bastes and condiments and exploring the process that goes into creating the perfect meal. I have gotten outdoor cooking down to an art and among my family and friends have achieved the status as a grilling deity, producing table fare that is often reminisced about when we are confronted with the spectre of food prepared by my less-than-adequate relatives. Barbecue has become one of my favourite hobbies, though I must admit that cleaning it has not.

That is why, after I started to heat the grill up this Father's Day weekend and went back inside the house to collect my ingredients, I was not at all concerned when my daughter called out from the bathroom that she could see smoke coming out of the barbecue. This was not unusual in the first few minutes of grilling, so I told her it was not that big of a deal. "But Dad, it's a lot of smoke!"

"Well, the grill's got a lot of stuff on it from the hamburgers I cooked last week," I answered as I was chopping green onions. "Just give it a couple of minutes, Honey. It'll burn off."

My wife was changing the baby in the living room. "Shouldn't you at least go look?"

"I will. Just let men finish chopping these onions first. It'll only take me a second."

"Well, a seconds all it takes to..."

"Do you want to chop the onions? Just give me a second and I'll take a look."

"Jep, I..."

She was interrupted by my daughter. "Daaaaad! There's fire coming out of it now!"

"Jep, go see what she's..."

"All Right! All Right! I'll go take a look for cryin' out loud!" I threw down my knife and walked over to the sink to wash the onion juice off of my hands. The batch of hamburger my mother had bought for the last time I grilled was excessively fatty and it was no surprise to me that the grate could be on fire. In fact, I had the heat up all of the way for that very reason. I was trying to burn it off. As I leisurely strolled to bathroom to look out the window that faced the part of the driveway where my barbecue was, I cursed under my breath and wondered what it was about female biology that caused them to nag incessantly. I vowed to contribute a thousand dollars to medical research if that community would just consider looking at that particular part of the human genome.

To add to my irritation, when I finally opened the bathroom door to get to the window my daughter started whining about my sudden intrusion into her privacy. "Daaaad! I'm going potty!"

As I pulled back the window shade to look outside, I told her, "Then you should have waited until you were done to...OH MY $&#!% GOD!!! SHIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTT!!!"

The grill was entirely engulfed in fire, spewing thick smoke into my third car garage and sending flames shooting up through the stainless steel doors of the compartment that holds the propane tank. Knowing that the tank could blow at any second, I grabbed my daughter by the arm ripped her off of the toilet and practically through her threw the breezeway and into the kitchen. Panicking, she waddled around the kitchen while she desperately tried to pull her underwear up above her knees while screaming "FIRE! CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT! FIRE!! FIRE!!! CALL...AAAAAARRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!"

My four-year-old son was sitting at the dining room table drawing and took his sisterâ€™s distress much more seriously than I did. His eyes got as big as pie plates and as he looked at me, he cried, "COOL!" He then jumped up from his seat at the table and took off running, disappearing before I had a chance to tell him anything. I then took off in the opposite direction and bolted outside to see if there was anything that I could do.

As soon as I ran out of the garage door, I saw that the hose was still out, running across the front lawn from the landscaping I was doing earlier. I could not see the grill from that vantage point but I knew that it was still burning furiously from the thick smoke blowing across the driveway. I sprinted out into my yard, turning away from the grill to get the hose. Once I had the end, I ran back to the other side of the yard where the spigot to turn it on was, barely seven feet from the inferno.

When I rounded the corner, the first thing I saw was not my burning barbecue, but my four-year-old son. He was sitting cross legged in the grass, maybe two yards from the blaze. The expression on his face was full of surprise and awe, of wonder and excitement, basically having the same gleeful look on his mug that he had when I took him to see "Sesame Street Live" earlier in the year. If I had come out with my arms full of Graham Crackers, Marshmallows and Hershey Bars instead of garden hose, he would have been in paradise. I screamed at him to get inside but the urgency in my tone of voice just seemed to scare him and instead of ducking to a safe shelter, he just ran around in a circle aimlessly as I turned the water on.

I know you are not supposed to apply water to grease fire, but I had no choice. The fire was so hot that it had warped the drip tray, which had collapsed and was dripping organic napalm onto the propane tank. If the water did nothing but relocate the fire, I would have been happy. As it worked out however, the water worked spectacularly. It produced an interesting array of sound effects like the hiss of instant evaporation, the popping of cooling metal which sounded eerily like a hopelessly stoned Jamaican steel drum band and the roar of exploding grease. It was quite impressive and actually caused my son to stop running enough to "oo" and "ah" as if he were at a fireworks show.

When the grill cooled down enough for me to look it over, I found it to be a total loss. To add insult to injury, I had to spend the rest of the night listening to my wife ask me why I didn't clean the grill like I said I was going to and my daughter remind me how I needed to listen to her when she told me something. If they weren't chirping at me, my son was running around telling everybody in the neighbourhood who passed by how I had set the barbecue on fire. On Sunday, my baby daughter was baptized, so Mason gave the preacher a full blown account of the fire as well as my entire family, my in-laws and the rest of the congregation. The story gets more fantastical with every telling and in the last version I heard, we were all saved from a fiery demise by Spider Man and the Backyardigans.

On the bright side, since my last hobby has literally gone up in smoke, I'm thinking about starting to drink irresponsibly again.

For Patti

2007-06-15T06:57:00.000-04:00

To The JEP Report's newest reader who, in addition to being Canadian, is an avid (though tragically misguided) football fan:

My wife took all four kids shopping a few days ago and, as is certain to happen when you have a litter that large, she lost one. Now, I would have put money on the missing people larvae to be one of the boys but as luck would have it, it turned out to be my oldest daughter. After a short spell of looking through the aisles, my wife found her, rather distraught by a rack of little girl cheerleading uniforms. Apparently, Wal Mart had arranged the outfits so that the Michigan State ones were in the front, covering up the University of Michigan outfits that were hidden on the back of the rack. My daughter was desperately trying to undo the injustice and near tears in the process, not only at the gross incompetence of the employee that arranged the outfits, but also at the fact that she knew she would be in trouble for escaping my wife's clutches in a crowded store. Still, she took her punishment with pride, knowing full well that her action had performed a greater good for the rest of humanity.

My daughter is by far the biggest football fanatic I know. Either that or else she has developed a rather early manifestation of Obssesive Compulsive Disorder.

Latest Picture of The Pack

Imparting Fatherly Wisdom and Encouragement

2007-05-17T22:11:00.000-04:00

This morning, my daughter tells me she's learning sign language. She holds up her index finger and asks me, "What does this mean?" I tell her it means "one". She then holds up her middle finger and asks me what that means. I tell her "Use your freakin' turn signal, asshole."

Wow. That could be my shortest post ever.

Welcome Fairen Nicole!

2007-05-15T22:40:00.000-04:00

My daughter was born today at 1:30! Her name is Fairen Nicole, she weighed in at 10 pounds, 1 ounce, was 23 inches long and looks like a cross between her big sister and sumo-wrestling super phenomonon Akebono! She totally rocks and has already survived her first natural disaster, as a line of tornados ripped through the area seven hours after she was born. We spent an hour and a half in the hospital hallway while the carnage unfolded. Luckily, none touched down in our immediate vicinity, though there were a lot of BIG downed branches I had to drive around on the way home. Now everyone is doing great and there have been no complications.

Me, Fairen and her big sister

My oldest daughter is particularly tickled. She's wanted a sister forever and finally got one. My oldest son seemed more concerned about trying to get my wife in the room with the lazer beam. My youngest son still has no idea what's going on. He just knows that there are Bob the Builder trucks at the hospital.

And Sacto Ritch, send me an e-mail. Once again, I forgot to program your number into my cell phone last time I talked to you!

D-Day Approaches

2007-05-14T21:55:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, at 1:30, I will be a father yet again. I have been trying to come up with something to top what I did when my last one was born, but have come up with a severe case of writer's block. I need mojo, not for the baby since I am absolutely sure everything will go all right there, but for my writer's block to go away before its time to write up the announcement.

Mojo, announcement ideas, tips for screwing with my wife's head while she's on drugs are all welcome in this thread. I wish you guys luck. You'll need it for the chaos that is about to be inflicted upon each and every one of you once my next-born learns how to type.

Lip Service

2007-05-10T21:59:00.000-04:00

So, me and my wife are sitting on the couch watching TV. I am on one side reclined, and my wife is on the other also reclined so if I tip my head slightly to the left, all I can see is the middle section of our couch. Now, we all know women have absolutely no respect for men’s television time and always feel the biological need to strike up a conversation when the show is getting good so it was no surprise to me when she wanted to talk about something at a time that I really did not want to listen to it. As a man, I have the supernatural ability to give my wife solid, believable responses to what she has said with having only the vaguest idea about what it is she was talking about. I’m pretty good at this and have had half hour long, deep conversations where I have no idea what was discussed though I can recite play-by-play the three 45 yard football drives that occurred during it.

So tonight’s conversation went something like this:

Her: So, what are doing? Packing?

Now, my wife is scheduled to give birth next Tuesday so I’m used to many of the hormonally illogical things that slip out of her mouth. With this in mind I answer:

Me: No, I’m not packing. I’m not going anywhere. I’m sleeping here to watch the kids while you’re in the hospital.

Her: Are you bringing a camera? And the stuff for the swingset?

Me: Why are you going to want the stuff for the swingset at the hospital? Are you talking in your sleep or something? Besides, your mother has wood stain at her house that she’s bringing up.

Her: You know, I have to get blood work done Monday at the hospital. If you’re here in time, you can go with me and see where everything is at.

Me: I’ve been there four times and pass it every day on the way to work. I know where the hospital is at. I told you, Monday is my last day at work for a while so I have a lot of stuff to do. I can’t go.

Her: I can be there anytime between 6:30 and 4:30.

Me: Sorry honey, but I can’t.

Her: (something mumbled and unintelligible)

Me: What? I can’t hear you.

Her: (something more mumbled and unintelligible)

Me: I still can’t hear you.

Her: (again, something mumbled and unintelligible)

Me: Look, if you want me to hear you, either speak up or turn the television down.

Her: Excuse me for a second, Mom.

She then leans forward, entering fully into my field of vision and I see the phone that she has pressed to her ear. She then says, “You know, it’s irritating enough when you don’t listen to what I’m saying and give me answers you won’t remember when I AM talking to you. It’s even more irritating when you do it when I’m NOT talking to you. Can you pay me some lip service in a different room please?”

Apparently, I’m not as good at watching sports through her as I thought.

When You're Home Alone With A Broken Television Set

2007-04-15T22:01:00.000-04:00

Well, it’s been busy and in all likelihood will remain that way for quite some time. Work has grown truly insane, I have another baby on the way who’s due to arrive on May 15th, I’m writing a book and I’m flirting with the idea of quitting smoking, which blows my concentration all to hell. In short, I really do not see myself posting with any regularity in the foreseeable future.

So meanwhile, here is something to keep you all busy in the meantime. It is strangely addicting. You just type your name in the blank, hit SUBMIT, and it spits out a cool, catchy advertising slogan about you. I spent about an hour on it earlier and came up with:

The Jep Sign Means Happy Motoring

The JEP sign is better known as THE BIRD.

Simple Impartial Jep

Right, I have no bias. Whatsover.

You've Got Questions. We've Got Jep.

Indeed. I am omnipotent and all-knowing.

Don't be an Amber Jep.

True. Amber Jep's are boring. Amber Alerts are where it's at.

Full Of Eastern Jep.

From 1991 to 1994, many Asian women were.

It's a Beautiful Jep.

Indeed.

Stimulation for Body and Jep.

Must be midget porn.

You Too Can Have A Jep Like Mine.

OH NO YOU CAN'T!!!

Lipsmackin' Thirstquenchin' Acetastin' Motivatin' Goodbuzzin' Cooltalkin' Highwalkin' Fastlivin' Evergivin' Coolfizzin' Jep.

That would be Ghetto Jep.

Jep Born and Bred.

At least four little savages were.

An Army of Jep.

More like a navy...

Turn Loose The Jep.

Actually, that usually results in an instant arrest.

Feel the Jep.

Often and with enthusiasm.

Promise Her Anything, But Give Her Jep.

Yep, I last longer than diamonds baby!

Devon Knows How They Make Jep So Creamy.

Unless Devon looks like Anne Hathaway without teeth, I highly doubt it.

3-in-1 Protection for your Jep.

And you'll need it too with all the places I have been.

Have a Jep and Smile.

...or a rohphynol hangover and a raging case of the clap.

You Can Really Taste The Jep!

I won't go there.

Do You Have The Jep Inside?

Dammit! Now my computer's asking that question too?!?!

Countdown to St. Patrick's Day

2007-03-10T08:23:00.000-05:00

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches I, like many Americans, am once again swept up in my annual longing for the Emerald Isle. In my mind, it is a place of unnatural beauty populated by a mystical folk that, despite all of the misery heaped upon them by history, still pursue happiness and gaiety as if it were their only means of salvation. Tearing through Hibernia on a two week Guinness bender is still at the very top of my list of things to accomplish before I die. If I am ever suddenly stricken with a sudden debilitating pain in my chest, I am not going to the hospital. I am going into the ambulance heavily armed and with every intention of forcing the paramedics to drive me to the airport.

Why I feel this way about a place that I have never even been to is a huge mystery to me. My paternal grandparents were from Londonderry but only one of them was actually Irish. My grandfather was of English parentage. Listening to them describe the place did not exactly paint a very flattering picture either. They described Londonderry as an industrial wasteland where a man had to show up early on the docks to get a day’s work in, if there was any work to be had. In his experience, Ireland was much more grey than green and if I considered the people he described to me from there, it was filled with shiftless drunks, ill-tempered and morose who entertained one another through random acts of callous thuggery and cruelty. Actually, Londonderry sounded a lot like my grandparents’ house in Detroit at Christmas time.

Anyway, neither of my grandparents spent much time there. They married very, and likely illegally, young and with one being Protestant and one being Catholic, they somehow wormed their way aboard the first potato boat to New York before anyone learned they got hitched. They arrived just in time for The Great Depression and somehow ended up in Kentucky to begin their new lives wallowing in alcoholism and domestic violence. I haven’t dealt with that side of the family in over ten years so why I identify so strongly with their heritage is beyond me.

On top of all that, I was adopted at birth so I have no biological ties to the land either. When you put it all together, I very likely have no Celtic blood in me at all. Still, St. Patrick’s Day is to me what Easter is to fundamentalist Christians and up until I had kids, I celebrated the holiday with an ecclesiastic fanaticism that one would be hard pressed to find outside of the Sunni Triangle.

Now, when I was in my early twenties, I had no moral reservations about drinking at the crack of dawn. Even now, in my late thirties, I have no real objections to the practice. Unfortunately, my employer does so I rarely get the opportunity to participate in any early morning imbibing. On St. Patrick’s Day however, I used to down two bottles of Guinness before I even bothered to brush my teeth. After I was out of the shower, I had another one with breakfast and I have had as much as three more waiting for my fellow revelers to arrive to start the day.

By the time we had reached the Olde Shileleigh, Detroit’s only authentic Irish pub (which ironically is located in Greektown and owned by an African-American), I had normally already killed more than a six-pack and waiting for the doors to open at 7:00am, possessed more of wobbly swagger than the inebriates that were forcibly ejected out of those same doors barely four hours before.

Once inside, the real carnage began. Those lined up outside before the sun dared to come out were the hardcore fanatics and they did that so that they could seize seats on the 2nd floor of the bar. This is where the authentic Irish bands were playing, those from the Gaelic motherland or at least able to fake the accent well enough to make us believe it. These musicians were typically big chaps, hardened and muscular, roughly hewn and barbarous in appearance. They were frightening looking folk and would have been very intimidating had they not been playing accordions, violins and penny-whistles, the very instruments played by kids who got beat up by those marching band ruffians in high school. Had they been American, they likely would have been on the bottom of the food chain in school but in the Olde Shileleigh, these men were GODS.

Various intoxicants work better with different types of soundtracks. Marijuana works best with punk rock or heavy metal. Hallucinogens such as LSD are most potent when done to Pink Floyd or something played by Elmo and The Sesame Street Orchestra. Pabst Blue Ribbon is best served with something by Merle Haggard. To properly enjoy a pint of Guinness in a public place however, one must be listening to an off-key version of “Wild Colonial Boy” or “Mari-Mac” sung slightly off key by a raging drunkard who looks like he would be just as at ease swinging a bar stool as he would be swinging the bow of a violin.

By nine in the morning, we are well passed the point of being pleasantly buzzed and hurtling headlong towards full blown intoxication. Our blood alcohol levels are approaching potentially lethal levels and odds are that at least one person in our party has already blown chunks all over the bathroom wall. Drinking any more at this point would be nothing more than foolishly irresponsible, so here is where we get into the Crown Royal whiskey. For those of us whose stomachs are not up to this level of abuse, we’ll cut it with Bailey’s Irish Cream and Kahlua. Then we’ll order corned beef and cabbage.

Now, I have been told that the Irish-American staple of corned beef and cabbage is virtually unheard of in Ireland. In my opinion if the Irish have any sense at all, they will keep it that way and remain blissfully ignorant. I can only assume that Dublin pubs are just like their American counterparts on a Paddy’s Day morning in that the air they contain is heavy with the stench of stale cigarettes, spilled beer, fermenting perspiration and gangrenous vomit. The Irish can take my word for it that they do not need to add the sickeningly sweet odor of copious amounts of flatulence produced by mixing Guinness and boiled cabbage as well. On many a March 18th, I have sent musk oxen running for fresher air at 200 paces and according to the wives of my Gaelic drinking companions, I am not alone in this ability. One buddy swears that he once blew a gaping hole in his underwear, scorched the sheets, shredded the mattress and left streak marks on the box spring after treating himself to a third helping of the delicacy during the celebration of 2001.

At eleven o’clock, there are few of us left standing. Some have been ejected from the premises for either groping the waitresses, passing out at the table, urinating in something other than an approved waste disposal receptacle or for fighting with the husband of a woman that they finally convinced to join them in the parking lot for a midday tryst. Those of us that remain know that our time at the Olde Shileleigh is short and realizing that the last one conscious is going to have to serve as the designated driver, we kick our consumption into overdrive. It is time to play the Limerick game.

None of us remember the origins of the Limerick game since it was likely conceived during a blackout period, but it has evolved into a standing tradition. First, the person at the head of the table picks a topic. Then, the person next to him has to make up a limerick on the subject on the spot. If he can’t he has to buy the table a round of beer. If he can, the next person has to as well, and so on until somebody screws it up. In the rare instance that everybody makes one up, the table votes on who had the best and the winner guzzles a beer bought by his friends. A typical round sounds like:

Initiator:

“Make one up about Sean’s beer mug!”

JEP:

“Though he thought the idea was quite dumb,
Sean filled up his beer mug with rum,
Then he heaved with a sigh,
And in a new way to get high,
Stuck the damn thing right up his poor bum.”

Next Guy:

“Sean…had a…uh…new…uh…way..to..g-g-g-g…Aw, fuck it. WAITRESS!!!”

Not that the next guy is always stupid, but I have an unnatural ability to come up with a Limerick while hopelessly smashed (plus my constant drooling while drunk) that has caused some to think that I am borderline autistic.

By noon we are out in the parking lot, passed out in someone’s minivan. Usually the car belongs to one of us, but as evidenced by events in 1997, that is not a hard fast rule. That was the year that we lost Mike Donnelly, who called us at four o’clock in the afternoon to tell us that, having passed out in the back of the wrong vehicle, he had been driven to the opposite side of town and needed someone to come pick him up and drive him back home.

After a quick snooze in the parking lot, we would typically leave Detroit and find a house in our neighborhood to pass out in for a few hours before embarking upon round two. It was during the second round that our girlfriends and wives would join us. They used to come along for the morning round as well but they started boycotting the early session in 1999 once our kids started being born. They guessed that one of these years the whole group of us was going to end up in jail and if that happened, someone needed to be available to take care of the children. In addition to that, nothing irritates a colossal hangover like a crying child so by 2002, the women had abandoned the ritual altogether.

I gave it up myself in 2004. I had planned to go that year but something happened that caused me to miss it. I planned to go in 2005 as well, but missed it because of something work related. In 2006, I didn’t even try. I had three kids at this point and had been neglecting my drinking for months. St. Patrick’s Day is like any other sport in that if you do not properly train for it, you are risking serious injury by participating in it. This year, in 2007, no one in the old group is going and I regretfully have to mourn the passing of the era. I will likely spend the day with the kids, doing things around the house that do not require extreme levels of intoxication nor carry the risk of severely spraining my liver. I just might get up before dawn and kill a couple of Guinnesses to toast my past life however.

Who knows, maybe I can give the wife the slip and take the older ankle-biters to the pub as well. They’ve never been to a bar before and I could sell it to the wife as a learning experience. Hell, if I fall back into old habits while we’re there, they could possibly learn how to drive that day as well.

So since I’m now forced to live vicariously through others, what kind of debauchery are you planning to honor the patron saint of the terminally alcoholic?

Mr. Mabolo and The Electric Vasectomy

2007-03-07T17:37:00.000-05:00

Though the AN/SPN-35 air traffic control radar was so old and obsolete that it was generally only assigned to technicians who, like me, did not pay a whole lot of attention in electronics school, it was a formidable beast to behold. It stood over eight feet high and had two elongated, dish-style antennae, one that moved side to side and another that moved up and down. When energized, it sounded like two hundred Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners on crack. Completely enclosed by a dome 12 feet high and 20 feet in diameter on the aft end of the ship’s island structure, its menacing appearance was reminiscent of some sort Death Ray. In fact it was often mistaken for a Top Secret Death Ray, mainly because that was what I several girls I picked up in San Diego nightclubs it was while trying to coax them to one of the few places on the ship that offered working air conditioning and privacy.

The AN/SPN-35 was as temperamental as it looked and broke fairly often. Luckily, it was usually very easy to fix and more often than not, we could bring it back up as quickly as it went down. The key word there is “could”, not that we ever did. A down air traffic control radar was normally a fantastic reason for the ship’s captain, who appeared to hate our division officer nearly as much as we did, to make Lt. Mabolo’s life a living hell.

Lt. Mabolo enlisted in the US Navy from The Philippines and spent 15 years as a cook. When he finally was granted US citizenship and could hold a security clearance, he changed his rating to DS (data systems technician) and was enrolled in his training for the specialty. During this time, the US military was pushing to get more minorities into the officer ranks and six weeks into his school, Mabolo was pulled to go to OCS. He was commissioned as an officer and then, because of his month and a half of electronics training, was made the USS Belleau Wood’s Electronic Materials Officer. Now, we did not hate Lt. Mabolo because he did not know a semi-conductor from a sledge hammer, we hated him because he did not speak English. He would issue orders that no one could understand and then punish you for not following them. As a result, the division as a whole, from the Master Chief on high to Seaman Cromwell took a personal interest in sabotaging his career.

We were on our way to Hawaii once when the SPN radar went down. I took the trouble call and inside of two minutes discovered that I had blown a crystal. It was fixed about thirty seconds after that. Ten seconds later, Lt. Mabolo called me in the radar dome. “Di doo plix da ladal let?”

“What?”

“Di doo plix da ladal let?”

“Who is this?”

“DO NAU GUD DAN WERR BU DISS ISS!”

“Lt. Mabolo? Is that you?”

“DESS!”

“What are you trying to say? Speak slowly.”

“DI! DOO! PLIX! DA! LAI! DAL! LET!”

“Could you say the third word again?”

“GAAAAH! MASSDUL CHEEP!”

There was a second’s worth of silence and then Master Chief got on the phone. “Jep, how’s the radar?”

“Fixed. How long do you want me to drag it out for?”

“A while?” Obviously, Mabolo was nearby so he could not just say, “Until the captain makes the little panty-waist cry”.

About a half hour and several unintelligible phone conversations with Mabolo later, my master chief called again and said that both he and the lieutenant were on their way down to the dome. This meant I had to make the radar look really broken, but not so much so that I could not get it back up in a couple of minutes. The best way to do this was to remove the high voltage power supply from the radar and put it on the work bench. From there, I could pop a couple of the monster capacitors and make it look like I was deep inside of a trouble shooting regimen.

Now, those monster capacitors are a bitch to work with. They carry a charge measured not in the hundreds, but in the thousands of volts. There is however, very little current involved so though the electrical forces at play there are not really deadly, but can be incredibly painful. Before you stuck your hand in there, you wanted to be absolutely certain that everything was shorted out. This was done with a copper probe that you clipped to a steel support that could act as ground. Once the probe was grounded, you stuck it to the capacitor leads and watched the sparks fly. I was just getting ready to do this when my master chief and lieutenant walked into the dome.

“Bat id da sutatees ob du ladal nauw?”

“What?”

Not wanting to be down there all day, Master Chief translated, “What is the status of the radar now?”

I knew that. In fact, after a year of dealing with the guy, we all spoke varying amounts of Mabolo-ese. It was just that none of us were willing to admit it. I launched into a little technical speech about radar theory and what I thought was wrong with the device, throwing around a lot of words like “klystron” and “thyratron” that I knew Mabolo would not understand though they had nothing to do with why the radar was down (you may think I borrowed component names from Star Trek TNG, but its actually the other way around – they often named planets after radar components). Eventually he got bored and started looking around the radar. Eventually he reached up to play with the tuning knobs below the crystals and had to be stopped. “Sir, you don’t want to play with that or else we’ll be in rather serious trouble.” It was not a lie. Playing with those would REALLY fix the radar and land the master chief and I in some pretty hot water.

Once I was satisfied that the lieutenant had no idea what was going on, I decided to go back to work. I grabbed the grounding probe and started to short out the power supply.

For what happened next to have occurred, the planets had to have been perfectly aligned. First, the probe had to have been not grounded properly. Next, I had to have been grounded somehow, which is no small feat in a space specifically designed to keep electrical ground and navy radar technicians separated since they have such a long history of not working and playing well together. Though I investigated it thoroughly over the next couple of weeks, I never did figure out how I managed to do that. Next, there had to have been an opening in the insulation covering the grounding strap (I did find that). Last, my zipper had to have been exposed.

With the Zodiac conspiring against me, the probe’s grounding strap brushed against my zipper at the exact moment I touched the lead on the biggest capacitor in the power supply. I had the instant sensation of being kicked in the crotch by a cleat-wearing Clydesdale and shot into the air and onto my back, certain that both of my testicles had exploded. Master Chief swore that I had my pants and underwear pulled down to my knees before I hit the ground, but I don’t see how this would have been possible. I will not argue that once I regained my senses, I was on my knees with my head pressed against the floor, sticking my bare ass right at Lt. Mabolo in a gesture that unintentionally conveyed to the man exactly what I thought of him. My genitals were safely covered protectively with both hands as I just laid there and exhaled for what seemed like a half hour. I thought that I smelled scorched pubic hair but that must have been just psychological.

“POOT DO GADAM PATS OAN LAIT NAUW PEDDY OPPISER JEP! LAIT NAUW! DAS UN OLDAL!” As I was contemplating the end of my sex life as I knew it, Mabolo was ordering me to get dressed. Fortunately, master chief stepped in and told him that if it would be best if he went back to the office and let him deal with the situation. It was just in time too, because if he had not gotten out of there I would have lost it and threatened to beat the living shit out of his incompetent ass, most likely in a voice reminiscent of Helium-huffing Teletubbies.

Amazingly, I suffered no permanent consequences from the accident though, due to a prolonged dating dry streak that hit at about the same time, I was not sure of that for a few months. It is however one of the reasons why any contact with certain parts of my anatomy during foreplay are guaranteed “moment-killers”. The other reason was because of a kick I took to the groin that was delivered by a midget I dated in high school. Well, she wasn’t exactly a midget. She was perfectly proportioned, just very short. I think the technical term for her is “spinner”. `

Skid Marks

2007-03-01T20:29:00.000-05:00

The weather forecasters where I live are about as trustworthy as a crack addict working as a pharmacist’s assistant. For instance last weekend, I went to bed after watching their proclamations of an imminent wintry apocalypse and woke up to find that we’d received maybe a tenth of an inch of ice. Then over Monday and Tuesday, days they had been predicting as dry, we received two inches of snow. When I woke up this morning, the news was reporting that my area was subject to a Winter Storm Warning, and the meteorologist reported that the epicenter of the icy tempest was the city that I live in.

I turned off the TV, stepped outside the house to let the dog shit on the neighbor’s lawn and discovered that though there were trace amounts of snow on my car, there was no precipitation in sight to speak of. I went back inside, turned the TV back on to listed to an obviously drug-addled and delusional weatherman frothing at the mouth pleading with me to, for the love of God, keep my speed down as I went to work. Feeling absolutely no obligation to heed the advice of someone who is either clinically paranoid or inherently dishonest, I got into my car determined to beat my record time for flying into work. Traffic and law enforcement activities permitting, I was determined to keep my speedometer buried on the sweet side of the 80-mile-an-hour mark.

Tragically, traffic was not permitting and it appeared that the majority of my fellow commuters were gullible enough to believe the meteorological propaganda that was flooding the airwaves. I was forced to follow the pussies at 45 miles an hour just because the road got a little snow, and by little I mean just enough to get the roads a wet, not enough to stick.

Eventually, I saw the flashing lights of two police cars and a tow truck up in the distance, giving me the first indication that maybe the weatherman was possibly on to something. They were located near in a bend in the expressway that, though it lacks a “Dangerous Curve” road sign, is much more convincingly identified as such by all of the white crosses, teddy bears, and holiday wreaths just off of the right shoulder. The Great Lakes State is kind of strapped for cash right now so as a cost saving measure, it appears that the Michigan Department of Transportation union has conceded to allow the state to outsource the identification of dangerous stretches of highway to the grieving relatives of interstate fatalities.

Even though I was only doing 45 miles an hour, I decided that maybe I should slow down a little. As soon as I let my foot off of the gas however, I felt the ass end of my car begin to drift.

Now, I had heard the tips a million times and had ingrained into my head the things I was supposed to do as a driver to keep control of my car during a swerve. First, I was supposed to let off of the gas. Second, I was supposed to steer into the swerve. Third, under NO circumstances was I to step on the brake.

Well, letting off of the gas was what got me swerving in the first place, so I checked that item off of my list. Now, I never understood the whole “steer into the swerve” thing. It always seemed that if the front of my car was moving to the right, turning my steering wheel to the right would only serve to accelerate losing complete control of my vehicle. Still, I decided to give the driving experts the benefit of the doubt and do what they had been telling my to do for years. Immediately after doing this however, I discovered that the driving experts behind that that little tidbit of advice probably live somewhere in the former Confederacy and still pissed about getting asses handed to them in 1865, decided to prey upon Yankees’ gullible natures and kill them en masse with bad driving advice. Before I steered into swerve, I was spinning at about the speed of a clock’s second hand. After I steered into the swerve, I was spinning like a roulette wheel.

Having lost complete control of my car now, I also lost all ability to rationally deal with the situation. Instinct took over and I found myself at the mercy of variously involuntary muscle spasms. The first thing to happen to me was that my sphincter puckered and apparently pinched a nerve controlling my right leg. I knew this because from prior experience I knew that the LAST thing you do while sliding on ice was touch your brake, yet as soon as my ass tightened up my right foot jumped up and did its best to slam that particular pedal right through the car’s floorboards.

Before that, I was spinning out of control but amazingly, maintaining the direction of the lane. After that, I was spinning out of control and heading for the center median wall. I tried several times to get my foot off of the brake but my sphincter was not cooperating and my efforts were little more than an exercise in futility. To make matters worse, the traffic behind me was gaining quickly. I had a feeling that this could possibly be the larval stages of a huge and spectacular pile-up. If I played my cards right, I might even be on TV! I started to regret not taking the time to shave before I left the house.

I am not usually a person that believes in predestined fate, but in this case there was pretty much nothing I could do about the situation so I decided to just kind of sit back and enjoy the ride. As I hit the shoulder before the median, I must have hit a mound of ice or something because instead of crashing into the concrete barrier, the car changed direction and started heading for the other side of the highway. I again crossed all lanes of traffic, and finally came to a rest on the opposite shoulder, facing the wrong way but with my car completely unscathed and no damage inflicted upon myself that couple of Long Island Iced Teas would not fix.

When it was over I dug my fingers out of the steering wheel, pulled the Green Day cd out of my radio and replaced it with something a little more mellowing, The Sundays. Somehow however, the song “Here’s Where the Story Ends”, did nothing to calm me down so I turned it off and lit up a cigarette.

I was sitting there in silence, smoking and trying to determine if I needed to go home and change clothes when the cops showed up. After making sure that I was alright, they stopped traffic and allowed me to turn the car around to continue on to work. As I was driving away, I could not help but feel a little disappointed that I was not going to make the 12 o’clock news. I considered turning on the radio to get an updated weather report but decided against it as I still don’t trust the bastards.

This Day In History

2007-02-08T21:57:00.000-05:00

Historically, February 8th has been a day of calamity. In 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded in England. In 1693, the College of William and Mary was established in Williamsburg Virginia, paving the way for future toga parties all across the United States. In 1904, the Japanese launched a surprise attack against the Russian Fleet in northern China, sparking the Russo-Japanese War. In 1915, D.W. Griffith’s cinematic ode to the Ku Klux Klan “The Birth of a Nation” premiered in Los Angeles. In 1924, gangster Gee Jon became the first person to be executed in a gas chamber in Carson City Nevada. Oh, and Anna Nichole Smith died. I’m speculating drug overdose but I guess we can wait until the body cools down enough for an autopsy before providing a final ruling.

February 8th also marks the birth of several notable hellraisers. Actor Nick Nolte was born on this day and would later make a name for himself playing disheveled anti-heroes in the 1980s. Nolte could likely be named as the most un-photogenic actor to find success in Hollywood based on several infamous police photographs. William Tecumseh Sherman was also born on February 8th and he is best known for reducing the southern United States to ashes during the Civil War. James Dean was also born on this day and is best known for starting the Tinseltown fad of celebrities killing themselves in car wrecks. Different Strokes’ actor Gary Coleman was also born on the eighth of February and would later build a career out of exclaiming, “Whachoo talkin’ ‘bout Willis?” He is now the shortest security guard in California.

And then of course I was born on February 8th, the same day that the Boy Scouts was founded. This mildly amuses me since the Boy Scouts is where I picked up most of my vices. I woke up this morning bummed that I have survived yet another year without suffering a mid-life crisis, which is kind of a shame considering I’ve been looking forward to quitting my job, moving to a hippie commune in Brazil, buying a sports car and getting a new girlfriend. Nope, this morning I woke up still very happily married with 3.5 awesome kids who tried to get me to go to work in my birthday suit, a job that still pays the bills fairly adequately and basically satisfied with my present lot in life. I would trade my beat up Pontiac Vibe for a Porsche convertible in a New York second though.

Oh well, maybe my mid-life crisis will hit me next year.

My New Thursday Routine

2007-02-01T21:46:00.000-05:00

Tonight my wife is dragging me to something especially heinous. Worse than “Swan Lake”. Worse than shoe shopping. Worse even than Lamaze classes. She’s dragging me to an alternative parenting course called “Love and Logic”.

Love and Logic is a parenting technique that stresses the application of predetermined consequences for unacceptable behavior. My parents used this as well though back then it was called “spanking”. L&L is supposed to provide “creative alternatives to corporal punishment” however. In my mind this would probably mean using cattle prods, thumbscrews, waterboarding or branding irons, which is fine since I have hurt my fingers while administering a good spanking before and am always open to new techniques that would be more comfortable to me.

Yep, apparently spanking has fallen out of vogue and is not considered an acceptable parenting tactic. In fact, there are some states where it is almost a felony on par with hunting Yorkshire Terriers out of season. On this matter my home state of Michigan is well behind the curve so from my perspective, my kids are still pretty well behaved.

My wife on the other hand begs to differ. She has attended Love and Logic two other times by herself and wants me to join her because she believes there are apparently several flaws in my parenting techniques that are causing our kids to act in an unacceptable manner. My response was that aside from the odd misadventure that is just an inherent part of childhood, I saw no real issues with our kids. In fact, I am often complimented on how well behaved and happy my kids are when we are in public and that she can not accuse me of making this up because she has been with me when it has happened.

In response, she informed me of several behavioral issues inherent to our children that I was completely unaware of. Apparently my daughter has to be told to do something several times before she will even acknowledge that my wife is talking to her. Then, she will outright refuse to do what she was told to do. She is immune to discipline because every time my wife informs her of what she privilege or toy she will lose for not obeying, she shrugs her shoulders and answers by saying she doesn’t care. How this is my fault I have no idea, since she does what I ask her to do and usually does it with a lot of enthusiasm. She gets good grades in school and her teacher reports that aside from her penchant for drawing stick figure pornography and the occasional rendition of Jimmy Buffet’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” in music class, she works hard, never acts up and is a pleasure to have in class. She has received three spankings in her six years of life, the last being well over a year ago. My rule is that I don’t spank often, but when I do I make it count.

My wife tells me that our oldest son is constantly getting into mischief and appears completely incapable of considering that there could be consequences attached to the behavior he chooses to engage in. There’s little surprise there since that is typically not one of my strong points either. She then listed off several items of trouble he had gotten into that day. None of them was something that he had ever done before and all completely original means of inspiring domestic mayhem. From my perspective, this is less a sign of misbehavior and more a symptom of ingenious creativity of biblical proportions. My son really does not have a mean bone in his body, is very popular among both the teachers and his friends at daycare and can read at almost the same level as his older sister. I think the issue here is less my son’s behavior and more my wife’s sense of humor.

My one-year-old apparently hits my wife a lot. I have been told he also kicks, pinches and pulls hair. He is prone to temper tantrums, will not sit still and judging by his determination to stick the index finger of his right hand, is considering a career in veterinary proctology. The cat will not come within twenty feet of that kid and quite frankly, I don’t blame him a bit. I will agree that our one-year-old is definitely a terror around the house, but as far as I can tell that is a one-year-old’s job. I do not recall the other two acting any differently.

So to sum it all up, my daughter will not listen to my wife, my four-year-old son keeps find new and exciting ways to get into trouble when he’s under her care and my one-year-old treats her like he’s practicing to be Mike Tyson’s understudy. According to my wife, all of it can be tied to MY faulty parenting techniques that will be rectified by attending a course called Love and Logic with her. Never mind that very little of this stuff actually occurs when I am around. I pointed out to her that she has taken this course TWICE and still has these issues. I have NEVER taken it and do not have any problems. I then asked my wife if it ever occurred to her that the folks at Love and Logic do not have the slightest clue about how to raise kids but have mastered the fine art of swindling $25 out of gullible adults every week for two months? That is pretty much why I slept on the couch last night. Its never a good idea to question the parenting skills of pregnant woman. I’m lucky I got out of there with my scrotum intact.

In the end, I do not know what pisses me off more about the whole situation: The fact that this thing is going to eventually cost me $200, the fact that I will waste 16 hours of my life listening to a group of child-rearing charlatans or the fact that by the time this thing is all over, I will have missed eight straight episodes of “My Name is Earl”.

Follow up to "When it Rains"

2007-01-27T19:57:00.000-05:00

You may remember the entry regarding my son urinating all over the bathroom. My daughter sure did, as evidenced by her writing assignment at school:

In case you need translation, It reads:

"Dad! Mason Peed all over the bathroom! Dad was very mad"

This resulted in my first unscheduled talk with my daughter's teacher.

A Bit of Fiction

2007-01-27T13:58:00.000-05:00

One of the pleasures of blogging is your audience is world-wide. Therefore, no matter where you go, you're likely to know someone in the area to down a couple of beers with. This week I did just that with someone I knew only through the internet (from Zug.com). Aside from pleasant conversation, the meeting was largely uneventful and nothing really happened that would warrant a blog entry. So I decided to just make shit up.

I was in darkest Indiana. I was tooling along a desolate stretch of nocturnal highway that was illuminated only by my Pontiac Vibe’s one working headlight. There were no stars in the sky above, no houselights showing from across the snow covered corn fields, not even the hint of a headlamp betraying the presence of oncoming traffic somewhere in the distance before me. I was in Hoosier Hell, the kind of place where werewolves probably roamed the countryside and cannibals could probably be found lurking beneath those secluded covered bridges that were so picturesque when the sun was shining. I was in a place that where one could go to find great barbecue, marry a close relative, learn to square dance or descend headlong into irreversible insanity to a soundtrack mercilessly provided by John Cougar Mellencamp.

I knew nothing good could come from where I was going or what I was trying to do, yet I could not bring myself to turn back. I had to go on. There was an entity lying in wait for me up that road that I had to face, and with it, a new experience to be crossed off of my “Things to do Before I Die” list. I was going to meet an internet stranger for the first time.

Having never done something like this before, I was a little apprehensive about the etiquette of meeting someone I only knew over the realm of cyberspace. I didn’t know if you were supposed to introduce yourself before clubbing your new acquaintance over the head and stuffing them into the trunk of your car or not. I had no idea if licking was a faux pas among internet social circles or if it was expected. I didn’t even know which side of me was the most camera friendly in case my evening was destined to end with an unexpected appearance on Dateline: To Catch a Predator. I was just too new at this and without any guide to reference, I was going to have to wing it. The person I was about to meet however, was not going to have to wing it.

Hammerhead had been a fixture on computer message boards longer than I have even been on the world wide web. He had claimed to have met several internet acquaintances. I say claimed since there are few on the message board we both frequent who have either owned up to this or have survived to tell the tale. Unable to learn from the first hand accounts of others, I was forced to assume the worst and had to get him before he got me.

I arrived at our rendezvous point at just after seven and surveyed the parking lot in an attempt to garner some clues as to what kind of maniac could be readying himself to pounce upon me once I walked inside. I found nothing so I peered inside the bar to size up the natives. There were six men in the bar area, two in the restaurant portion, and another half dozen staff members, mostly female, scurrying about the various tables.

So who was my mark? It was unclear. According to Hammerhead’s profile, he was a huge hulking man with a thick neck and a buzz cut and there was absolutely no one in the establishment who matched that description. This was no surprise though, since everyone lies about their appearance on the internet. If I had to guess, in reality Hammerhead would be a petit and shapely blond haired woman, standing no more than 5 foot one inch and weighing no more than 98 pounds. One of the waitresses fit that profile perfectly. Since I had spoken with Hammerhead by phone, all I had to do was confirm that she had an awfully deep voice for such a little woman.

At first glance, the waitress appeared fairly harmless but looks can be deceiving. I went back to my car to properly equip myself for my encounter. Before I walked into the door of the bar, I had stuffed my pockets with a tazer, duct tape, four tablets of a popular date rape drug, an electric carving knife, a set of furry handcuffs (I’m not weird or anything, but do you have any idea how expensive the unfurry ones are?), a .44 magnum tucked into my sock (note to the ladies: I have VERY big feet….in case you ever wanted to ask me to dance with you or anything) and a breath mint. Walking with a stride of complete self-confidence that only the sufficiently armed possess, I strode into the bar ready to engage my opponent.

When I stepped up to the waitress, she was talking to a customer so I hung back for a minute so that I did not interrupt her. Then I looked at the customer she was speaking with, a huge hulking man with a thick neck. If he had had his hair done up in a 1960’s vintage Ku Klux Klan buzz cut, he would have been a dead ringer for the internet Hammerhead. Then I heard him say “Jep?” in the voice that I recognized on the phone and my heart sank.

I was quite disappointed. Not only was he nowhere as cute as the little waitress I had first mistaken as him, the man was very large. It was going to be an awful lot of work trying to get him into the trunk of my car. All I could do now was hope that our meeting would not come to that. Little did I know that back on the message board where we had met each other, he had already started an auction and was taking bids on my car, clothes and dismembered body parts. Subliminally, I must have picked something up that betrayed this because as we were shaking mits, I slipped my free hand into my pocket and set the tazer from “stun” to “fry his deviant ass until his left testicle pops like a kernel of corn stuck in a microwave”.

After exchanging pleasantries, we took our seats at a high table opposite the bar. I then tried to order a Labatt’s, but for the seventh time since I entered Hoosier Hell, was told that the bar did not carry any. I should not have been surprised since I have visited several primitive societies in my lifetime and none of them ever had a bottle of Labatt’s set aside on ice, patiently waiting for me to discover their tribe and claim my prize. There was no reason that the natives of Indiana should have been any different than the Limbezi tribe of the Solomon Islands in this respect. Granted, the indigenous people here traded their grass skirts for polyester leisure suits and their bongo sets for cassette tapes of “Little Pink Houses”, but when it came to beer, I was unmistakably among savages. I settled for a Sam Adams.

As soon as our libations were laid out before us, we toasted Zug and embarked upon the usual small talk two people who do not know each other banter on about upon first meeting. Stuff like “Where are you from?”, “What brought you to Zug?”, “What’s your Social Security Number?” and “How long do you think it would be before anyone noticed that you went missing?”

At some point I was fidgeting with my lighter (we were in a non-smoking restaurant) when I dropped it on the ground and bent over to pick it up. When I got back into my seat, I noticed that my beer was suddenly bubbling over the mouth of the bottle, spewing a white frothy foam all over the table. From the exhaustive research I had done before leaving my house I knew this to be a signal among the internet stalking community that was equivalent to the sports phrase, “Game on”.

As Hammerhead raised his bottle and offered up a toast, I feigned clumsiness and knocked my beer over as I reached for it, spilling the tainted brew all over my host. As he was distracted by the mess I had made all over him, I grabbed the GHB I had stuffed in my pocket and threw them into his drink. It was a freshmen move, and Hammerhead picked it up right away, bumping the table with his gut while he wiped himself off. I was quite disappointed as I watched his drink fall to its side and then roll off of the table. Round One then came to its anti-climatic conclusion.

Round Two did not begin until the waitress had replenished our libations. As we were talking, Hammerhead’s breathing appeared to grow more difficult and labored. He then started complaining about his asthma and pulled out an inhaler. As he slipped it into his mouth, I noticed that there was a hole in the back of it that was aimed directly at my jugular. I shifted to my right just as Hammerhead squeezed the device, which sent a blast of air and a little dart out heading right for me.

Right behind me, a line of the restaurant’s staff was parading down the aisle behind a girl holding a small birthday dessert, clapping in unison to some neo-nazi birthday chant. The dart from Hammerhead’s inhaler whistled past my right ear and imbedded itself into the ass of the cake-bearer, dropping her like a stone face-first into plate of hot fudge brownie before she was trampled to death by the line of people marching behind her.

The stakes had now been raised, so I reached into my pocket for the tazer, which was stuck behind the roll of duct tape. As I tried to wrench it out however, the bitch went off, striking me in the left thigh. As I faded into unconsciousness, I dreamt that I had fallen into a giant bug zapper, which made my left testicle burst like a piece of popcorn.

When I came to, I found myself naked and tied to the fender of a rusty old Ford pickup truck with two tree branches stuck in my ears. We were pulled over on the side of the road and Hammerhead was having a conversation with a local police officer. I was very cold and noticed that my nipples had grown very pointed which kind of fascinated me. As a man, I am usually fascinated by female nipples, but my own seem to suffice finely if I have nothing better to do. As I faded back into darkness, I heard the officer say something along the lines of, “THAT is the ugliest deer I have ever…Oh God! No! No! Aaaaaghhhh….”

The next thing I knew I was in a dark damp basement. Hammerhead was hovering over me wearing a miner’s hard hat with a lamp attached to the front of it while he shaved my chest. Muffled by the trunk he was trapped in, I could make out the cries of the police officer, pleading to be set free. After noticing that I was awake, Hammerhead said, “Why hello there! You’re not supposed to be awake yet!” He then pressed a handkerchief filled with ether over my mouth and sent me back to sleep.

When I woke up next I was back outside, still naked and fascinated by my own pointy nipples. There was a note tattooed on my chest that read, “You might have gotten the drop on me if you hadn’t tazered yourself. You have real promise Jep. Better luck next time! Give me a call when you’re in town. By the way, I picked up the bar tab. Drinks are on you next time. - Hammerhead”.

The trip home was long. As I said before, Indiana is a primitive society and sexual equality is somewhat of a vague notion. If I had been a naked woman trying to hitchhike home in the dead of winter, I’m sure I would have been picked up in no time. As a tall, bald, beer-bellied man however, nobody bothered to even slow down. They just laid on the horn, rolled down the window and yelled, “Get outta the road ya #&%!@ pervert! And quit playin wif yer man-boobs!”

When Grannies Attack II: This Time It's Personal.

2007-01-08T20:41:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I had to go to Wal-Mart to get two items for this morning’s breakfast: eggs and bread for French toast. That was it. Just eggs and bread. Having three kids, I am basically required to go to Wal-Mart virtually every day for milk, so I knew precisely where the eggs and the bread were. At most, I expected to spend no more than five minutes in the store. Run in, grab my loot, burn through the check out line, goose the greeter on my way out and then peel out of my parking spot while trying to hit the pimply kid corralling the carts who hit my car a couple of weeks ago. It could be done. In fact, I’ve done it three million and one times before.

Unfortunately, Sunday nights however are absolutely packed at Wal-Mart. In fact the lines at the speed lane at the side of the store were so long that I opted to hike all the way to the other side to see if they were any better. As luck would have it, the lines at the self-checkout were even longer, BUT, the lone speed lane on that side only had one person being waited on. Before anyone else caught on, I shuffled my way over there and took my place behind a woman that I would guess to be in her late forties and though she was in one of those complimentary electric shopping carts for the infirm, I was unable to discern anything physically wrong with her. Inside of thirty seconds however, I was able to determine that she was psychologically fucked. And now, having committed to take my place in line right behind her, so was I.

Murphy’s Law of shopping states that the more of a hurry you are in, the more mathematically challenged, financially desperate and socially retarded the people in front of you in the check-out line will be. I was in a pretty big hurry. If I didn’t get out of there soon so that I could eat dinner and help the kids finish homework, I was going to miss The Simpsons. As expected, the lady in front of me was trying to mentally add (out loud) every item rung up so that the clerk had to move at the speed of a retarded garden snail debilitated by an industrial accident, barter every canned good as if she were grocery shopping in an Egyptian bazaar and speak with about the same amount of courtesy as a Department of Motor Vehicles beurocrat on a bad acid trip. As the long lines at the self-checkout next to me started moving with almost German efficiency, I began to feel my blood boil.

The breaking point came as the clerk rang up the last item. The green price tag on the can of vegetables was a little crumpled so the lady thought the price was $0.69 instead of its actual $0.89. This set off a wave of indignation in the lady, who threatened to refuse to pay for the can out of principle. The clerk and the customer than went head-to-head over the can of vegetables while me and the several other people who had by then jumped into this line began rolling our eyes at each other.

Finally, the witch relented. She pulled out her purse while lecturing the clerk on false advertising then debated the total price before finally writing out the check. Heavily agitated, she threw her purse towards the cart in front of her buggy but missed. Instead she hit the handlebars, or rather, the controls on the handlebars that power the cart she was riding.

Now, I had seen her throw her purse down but immediately afterwards had ceased paying attention. I did not realize that she had accidentally thrown her cart into reverse and sent it rolling right for me. I was not clued into this until I was startled by the rear bumper guard striking me in the left foot.

Now, I had had a run-in with one of these contraptions before, so I knew how dangerous they could be. Luckily, I was not hurt. Un-luckily, I was startled and as anyone with the smallest iota of common sense can tell you, it is not a good idea to startle someone who is much taller than you are. Especially if he is holding onto a dozen eggs.

All it took was an involuntary squeeze. The lid of the carton sprung open and a single egg was launched just high enough to clear the edge of the packaging. Trying to save it, I violently lurched my arm with the carton forward to catch it. I did save that particular egg but in the process, launched four others much, much higher than the original.

One egg glanced off of the woman’s arm and fell harmlessly, but messily, to the floor. That was the only one that missed. One broke off of her other shoulder, one hit her in the nape of her neck, spilling yolk down the back of her shirt while the last disappeared somewhere down in front of her. I did not see it hit, but I heard it break somewhere out of sight.

At that point, everything went still. However much I had fantacized about egging an ornery shopper in what was essentially a wheelchair, never in my life would I have ever mustered up the gumption to actually do it while stone sober. All I could do was stare at her in horror while she slowly turned her head around to see who had just turned her into an invalid omoulette. Expecting her to start screaming for security, I was preparing to flee when she looked up at me and meekly said, “I am so sorry.”

Flush with relief, I apologized profusely back at her while everyone else in line stifled spasms of laughter. I even offered to help her clean up, but she waved me off and said she had something in her purse to wipe it up with. As she spoke to me, she stuck her hand inside and found what was left of the fourth egg. The contents of her bag had taken a direct hit. That pushed me right to the edge, but I did not bust up myself until I got back into the car (with a fresh dozen eggs). It was there, while trying not to laugh so hard I had a heart attack, that I realized the spiritual significance of this event. I had a religious experience.

I do not go to church very often. In fact, I avoid it by all means possible. Still, it has become blatantly obvious that not only is there a God, he loves the hell out of me and enjoys my sense of humor. How else would I not only have gotten away with egging an ornory invalid in a crowded grocery store, but got my victim to apologize to me after I had finished?

I am now thinking about starting a cult.

A Little Religion for The Holidays

2006-12-23T13:28:00.000-05:00

It just wouldn't be Christmas without a little religion, so here is a little sermon for you that could take the edge out of church.

Yeah, my sense of humor is a little juvenile.....so sue me.

Tis the Season.....

2006-12-22T16:59:00.000-05:00

To wish all of you the best Christmas that you have ever had! Doubt I'll be posting much over the next couple of weeks (keeping up my 2006 trend). So, to Sacto Ritch, Caretaker Matt, Mother Mayhem, Lob, GMT Man, Brody, and the faithful mystery readers from Boeing in Chicago, Halliburton in Texas, Somebody Near Lambeth England, Dianada, The Person Near Peabody Massachusetts, and that guy from Germany who read damn near this entire blog from start to finish last week, may you have an awesome Holiday Season and an even better New Year.

Those of you that I haven't mentioned, all the best for you too. Check in and leave a comment and let me know that you're still here or that you even exist.

Until 2007,

JEP

Today my one-year-old ate....

2006-12-22T16:57:00.000-05:00

...Some Dinty Moore Chicken Pasta Soup.

Some toast.

Some petit sausages.

Some Goldfish Crackers.

Some Fruit Snacks.

Basically, I could have cared less too, and in fact would have been blissfully ignorant of this since I was not home at lunch time but I just spent the last half hour cleaning the stuff out of my shirt before taking a shower to keep it from drying in my chest hair and making my winter-nipples itchier than they already were. Of course, I came awfully close to breaking out in Technicolor laughter myself while trying to clean this stuff up, but so far have managed to keep my lunch down.

You would think that after three kids and a solid sixteen years of power drinking that I would be used to getting thrown up on by now.

Create your own South Park character

2006-12-09T10:00:00.000-05:00

The link above is strangely fascinating. I've been playing with it all morning and if I was a character in South Park, I would apparently look something like this:

Thanks to Ditdah on ZUG for turning me on to this.

When It Rains, It Pours

2006-12-02T09:31:00.000-05:00

An earlier potty misadventure

So, I'm trying to make the kids breakfast this morning when my daughter runs downstairs laughing saying that her younger brother is peeing in the bathroom.

"That's where he is supposed to be peeing, honey."

"No Dad! He's peeing all over the bathroom!"

Now my son is four and, being already able to read, I assume that he is fairly intelligent for his age. I was sure that my daughter was exagerating. I walked upstairs to see what it was he was up to.

When I opened the bathroom door, I found my son standing there butt-naked, the lid to the toilet seat down and urine all over the floor, the rug, the walls and the bathtub. Naturally, I exploded. "WHAT IN THE WORLD DO YOU THINK THAT YOU ARE DOING?!?!"

Having been put on the spot, Mason stammered for an answer. "But...ah..I ...was...buuuuh...guuuh...do.." Realizing that he was in serious trouble, he then just started a line of pathetic whimpering.

"WHY ARE YOU PEEING ALL OVER THE BATHROOM?!?!?"

He covered his naked posterior with his hands, knowing very well that when I was done with him, he was going to end up with an ass that would make him the the biggest sex symbol that babboon world had ever seen. Bursting into tears, he cried, "IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!"

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT WAS AN ACCIDENT?!?!? WERE YOU PLAYING WITH YOUR PEE-PEE WHEN IT SUDDENLY WENT OFF?!? WHAT POSSESSED YOU TO TRY TO PEE ALL OVER THE WALLS?!?"

"I WASN"T TRYING TO PEE ON THE WALLS!"

"DON'T LIE TO ME!!! IF YOU WEREN'T TRYING TO PEE ON THE WALLS, THEN WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO PEE ON?!?!"

With a gut wrenching, soul searing wail, Mason then cried, "I WAS TRYING TO PEE ON THE CEILLLLLLIIIIINNNGG!"

So I guess that technically, he wasn't lying and it really was an accident. That doesn't mean he will survive the day, though.

The sad part is, I can see this kid growing up to be my favorite.

The Citrus Threat

2006-11-30T21:27:00.000-05:00

I have been crossing the US / Canadian border daily to go to work for about a year and half. Going into Canada is relatively painless and since I cross so often, the border guards have mostly come to recognize me and at this point, barely bother to look up from their newspapers before waiving me through.

Going into the US is a whole different story and even though I am an American, I get grilled ad nauseam a couple times a week. I have had my car tossed, bags gone through, computer opened and turned on and once was even pulled from my vehicle so that a German Shepherd could stick his nose in my crotch, making me realize just how high of an octave my voice could hit while asking the question, “He doesn’t bite, right?”

However inconvenient the process is, I always tell myself that these men and women are doing these things to keep our country and our people safe. I always thought that these minor nuisances were just things that we had to deal with to protect our nation and our loved ones from the evil that existed beyond our borders, evils like terrorism, narcotics, white slavers and Hispanic celery pickers. While crossing the frontier this afternoon however, I discovered that the Department of Homeland Security is the first line of defense against another scourge that is just as perilous as al Qaeda, though much publicized. That threat is the non-Floridian navel orange.

By the time I reached the American customs booth this afternoon, I had already missed the meeting I was scheduled to attend due to the tunnel being shut down for traffic and choosing a line to drive into that passed one car to every six that the next slowest lane was passing. This is not an exaggeration. I was trapped in my car with nothing on the radio so I counted them to relieve the boredom. Then, after spending forty minutes in this one line, I was three cars from the station when some bimbo cut in front of me. Needless to say, by the time I actually got to the front of the line I was fuming and, seeing as how I was forced to converse with a man carrying a gun, doing my best to conceal it. As I handed the agent my passport and work visa, I forced a smile onto face and bid him a good afternoon.

“Citizenship?” he asked.

“US.”

“What were you doing in Canada?”

“Working.”

“What do you do there?”

“I’m a quality rep at the _____ _______ Plant.”

“What do you do?”

“Take the heat every time my company forgets how to build car parts. I’m sort of a corporate whipping boy. Basically, I get screwed a lot.” After a brief pause I added, “But not in the sex trade kind of way.” Prostitution is legal in Canada. I did not want him getting the wrong idea.

The guard shot me a look of minor annoyance to show that he did not think I was that funny (which I don’t blame him for since my last comment was not that good of a joke) then asked me if I had anything to declare.

Now, right above the customs booth is a large sign that reads “Avoid fines and delays DECLARE any meats, fruits, vegetables, plants, seeds, animals, and plant and animal products.” Below this writing is a cartoon picture of and orange, a steak, a couple of vegetables and fine print informing border crossers of the penalties for not doing so. Frustrated that I had endured as much delay as I could possibly handle, I said, “I have an orange in my lunchbox.”

I kid you not, the agent’s eyes widened, he took a step away from my car and turned his body to project a smaller profile to my vehicle as if it might explode at any moment. For a second it looked as if his hand was inching towards his gun. “You have WHAT?!?”

A bit rattled by his overreaction and thinking that he must have misunderstood me, I stammered, “I got a-a-an orange! I-i-i-t’s in my cooler!”

“Where’d you get it?!?”

I thought for second, suspecting that this could be a trick question. I felt myself starting to come apart psychologically and struggled to pull myself back together. After all, it was not like I had never been interrogated by an armed person in a uniform before, but admittedly this was the first time that I was being interrogated without me at least having some idea as to why. Against all of my better instincts and past experiences with law enforcement, I decided to tell him the truth. “In a grocery store?”

“WHICH ONE?! WHERE?!? WHAT COUNTRY?!?”

“KROGER! NO! WAL-MART! IN THE GREAT NATION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!” I was kind of sweating at this point and after I answered I remembered that since the union-backed Democrats were voted into power earlier in the month, the anti-Wal-Mart rhetoric in congress was growing increasingly belligerent. I found myself wondering if I had missed the news item about the US launching a trade embargo against the retail chain that I had missed. Granted there were a lot of people there when I was grocery shopping but the more I thought about it, most of them were Mexican and since our immigration, tax, and Social Security fraud laws do not seem to apply to them, I doubted that our embargo laws did either. I wondered if I might have been better off if I had told him that I got it from a bazaar kiosk in some obscure suburb of Tehran.

“Are you sure?” he asked suspiciously.

“Does it really matter?” I asked. At this point the guard was speaking with such gravity that I was staring to believe that he had to be joking with me.

“Yes it matters.” he snarled, indicating that he, indeed, was NOT joking. “Canada does not grow oranges. They import them from places like South Africa, South America, India and even Cuba.”

Feigning an exaggerated sense of outrage, I looked him right in the eye and said, “Those. Pagan. Bastards.” It was one of those statements that I knew I was going to regret even before I uttered it but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop myself from saying it.

With a scowl, the agent leaned closer to me and growled, “Does it say on the orange where it is from?”

“Like is it etched with ‘Made in Taiwan’ or something? I don’t think so.” I was not trying to be witty there. I honestly did not know what there could possibly be on a piece of food that would tell me where it came from.

“Show. Me. The. Orange.”

As I rummaged passed my computer bag into my lunchbox, the agent gave me the run down on the hazards of foreign citrus fruit. Apparently, US fruit is grown with certain controls that prevent disease to both the citrus crops and people and these controls are absent in other places that oranges are grown. There are bugs, microbes, bacteria, viruses and, if I understood him correctly, even some sort of citric cancer that could be imported with unauthorized fruit.

After finding my orange, I noticed an ovular white sticker on it. I read it and then straightened up to look at him with a wide, smug smile on my face, interrupting his harangue by saying, “It’s from Florida.”

Clearly disappointed and correctly surmising that I was not taking him the least bit seriously, he stepped towards my window and said, “You understand now why we don’t allow oranges to be imported into the US.”

“Sure. They’re grown by terrorists and communists as instruments of biological warfare to be used against us. By the way, has anyone told Hans Blix about this?” Again, it was one of those statements that I knew I was going to regret even before I said it, but I just could not stop.

The agent’s face flushed red and I sensed that I was getting dangerously close to a full fisted cavity search. I tried to preempt his outburst with one of my own. “Look officer, I live in Michigan with a house full of kids. In my refrigerator is a stash of apples, oranges, peaches, pears and grapes that never seems to end. I work in Canada. I don’t live there so I have no need to buy oranges there, especially since that in the U.S. I have fruit coming out of my ass!” Having broken border decorum by using mild profanity during the course of discussion with a customs agent, I decided against closing my argument with, “And I’m here to tell you that starfruit can be PRI-teeeee rough on the ol’ sphincter there!”

“I’m just trying to tell you why we don’t allow oranges into the US from Canada.”

“This isn’t a Canadian orange.”

“I know but…”

“Look, if you want the orange, just take the orange. It cost me 40 cents. You can have it.”

“I don’t want the orange. It’s not contraband.”

“THEN WHY ARE WE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION?!?!?”

“I’m just trying…”

“…To tell me why you don’t allow oranges into the US from Canada. OK. I get it. And I solemnly swear to you right now that I will do my duty as an American citizen to not prop up the regimes of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez or any other unfriendly African or Asian dictator, allow dangerous germs to cross our borders to ravage our people or our agriculture, financially ruining our economy and wreaking biblical unemployment upon illegal immigrants all across the American Sun Belt by buying citrus fruit in Canada. Hell, I’ll even tell the people I know in Canada that they’re risking the fall of civilization as we know it by eating their heathen cuisine. I swear on the lives of my children that if our nation is destroyed by a renegade orange from Canada, it will not have been me that brought it here!”

“I just want you to know why we take smuggling this sort of contraband across the border seriously.”

“Smuggling?!? It’s a freakin’ orange!!! If I was going to take the risk of smuggling something across the border, don’t you think I would pick something that would be worth my while?” I held the orange up to the window again. “Do you have any idea what the street value of this thing is?”

“I just don’t get the feeling that you’re taking this seriously.”

“IT’S SERIOUS! By God our country MUST protect itself from the citrus scourge! Rest assured, I WILL be writing my congressman and demanding that he do something to save us!”

The agent opened his mouth as if he was going to retort, but stopped himself. I suspect he realized that our exchange had long ago taken on surreal qualities and pursuing it would be nothing but painful for the both of us. Stepping away from the car, he said, “Let’s start over. Do you have anything to declare?”

“An orange.”

“In what country did you buy it?”

“The United States.”

He handed me my passport, then his mouth said, “Have a nice day.” The expression on his face said, “Fuck off.”

The exchange I have documented is abbreviated. The actual event took over 10 minutes. I drove away fuming, wondering how this particular agent ever convinced anyone that he was psychologically equipped to be issued a firearm by the United States government. I also wondered if the government’s delusional paranoia over the threat posed by a single orange from Canada was an inarguable sign that the terrorists have really already won?

Some might say that such scrutiny is a sign of healthy security and I should sleep soundly knowing that our government is exercising so much vigilance on our northern border. Frankly, I don’t see it that way at all and I’ll be lying in my bed wide awake all night having come to the shocking realization of how screwed we all really are.

Electile Dysfunction

2006-11-08T07:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday in the US was Election Day, a day that seems to slap most Americans with a sense of utter bewilderment (as it also does many Japanese people since they have tendency to pronounce their “L”s like “R”s). Like many of my fellow countrymen, I have been subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of political advertising since the end of summer promising the dawning of a new era of peace and prosperity if we vote for one candidate and warning of chaos, debauchery, irresponsibility and an imminent apocalypse if we vote for the other. Generally, I prefer to cast my vote for the latter since in my travels I have discovered that there is nothing like civil war, insurrection and economic collapse to bring out the party animal in people. The problem is that with the US’s two party system, we only have two candidates and either one could be the candidate guaranteeing political doom, depending upon which special interest group funded the commercial you are forced to watch.

Historically, I have always voted Republican but this year I was fed up and refused to vote among party lines. So instead of coloring in the box next to the line that said “Vote Straight Republican Ticket”, I went through the ballot and vowed to pick who I believed to be the best candidate for each office, regardless of party affiliation and vowed that I would vote for at least one Democrat to consummate my new status as an Independent voter. After leaving the “Straight Party” portion of my ballot unchecked, I scrolled down to the top portion to choose who I wanted to be Michigan’s next governor. It was a decision I have been wrestling with for weeks and even as I sat down to cast my vote, I had yet to make up my mind.

The incumbent governor, Democrat Jennifer Granholm, has presided over what has probably been the biggest hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs in this state since The Great Depression. Our economy is in the dump, as manufacturing is the lifeblood of the state that I reside in, and having gone through several layoffs in my company over the past four years as our jobs relocate to the Far East, I have seen how difficult it has been for my former colleagues to find comparable employment. Granted, I can not blame all of this on the current governor but we need a super-governor to turn this situation around and it is painfully obvious that she is just not that. Her opponent, Republican Dick DeVos, is not either and as the head of Amway (a company whose name makes my skin crawl) he has added to the problem by outsourcing jobs to China. Electing him in my opinion is putting the proverbial wolf in charge of guarding the henhouse. So in this, the greatest issue influencing my gubernatorial vote, I have two greatly different candidates from greatly different parties with different ideologies promising to tackle the issue with two different strategies. Tragically, my gut tells me that both will end up with the same result. After ten minutes, I eventually voted for the Republican because he “promised” to institute limits on receiving welfare benefits, which the current governor vetoed. I’m all for stopping checks to able-bodied people who choose not to work. We’re going to need the money for the unemployment benefits we’ll be dishing out to those who got laid off.

Next I chose my congressman. I voted Republican again. We’re at war and I have still heard nothing from the Democratic side on how they propose to win it. I will concede that the Republican strategy has been a miserable failure but at least they are trying. When the DNC decides to quit undermining the military and intelligence services and starts exploring alternative solutions that do not consist of surrender, I will take them seriously on the national stage. When they come around, I have a vote waiting for them.

After that came a bunch of people running for local offices that you have probably never heard of. I know I certainly had not and I actually follow politics. I ended up voting Republican again in all these, since there were a couple of proposals on the ballot that I was in favor of that I knew Democratic legislators would never get behind.

I finally voted for my first Democrat when it came to the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. I can’t for the life of me remember who it was but I do know that her name sounded really hot. Heaven help her if she messes up my favorite football team.

Finally came the proposals. These were much easier since I had done a lot of research on them. I voted for keeping conservation and recreation money dedicated to conservation. Anything to keep the trees standing since I need them for cover when I’m shooting animals. I voted for repealing affirmative action programs in Michigan. People should be accepted for employment based solely upon their qualifications and character, not gender, race or religion. After thirty years of special considerations, government programs and reverse discrimination, if a candidate lacks qualifications and character, its their problem, not his potential employer’s. I also voted for hunting mourning doves. Mainly because they have a habit of shitting on my car.

When I woke up this morning, I found that nothing I voted for, with the exception of the affirmative action repeal, actually won. Strangely, I was not very upset about it. Republicans lost the house and my gut is telling me that they’ll probably lose the Senate. Frankly, they deserved to so it’s hard to be bothered by it. Unfortunately, the Democrats do not deserve to win it and I am bothered by that. I think I am going to change the direction of The JEP Report back to political commentary as a result and focus upon exposing the incompetent arrogance of incumbent politicians and supporting those politicians using common sense in legislation. Besides it would give me more things to write about.

Anyway, hope you all had a good election and got what you wanted. I pray that next year we’ll have candidates that we want to vote FOR instead of being stuck with two choices that leave a taste in our mouths reminiscent of a midnight snack liberated from the cat’s litter box.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about how the election went in your part of the country, or, if you are not from the US, what your thoughts are on how things went.

So Anyway.....

2006-10-24T21:16:00.000-04:00

....I'm driving back from a meeting I had in Indiana, tooling up Interstate 69 and rocking out to the Carpenters (rural Indianan radio is a bit behind the times) when understandably, I start getting REALLY sleepy. I rolled down the windows, started chain smoking and cranked up some religious talk show on AM radio so that I could be assured of a one way trip to Hell if I voted in favor of stem cell research while I tried to keep from passing out. Finally I came across a rest area, pulled into a parking spot, put my seat back and tried to take a little nap.

No sooner had I fallen asleep when I heard the passenger side door of my car suddenly open. Just as I managed to pry my right eye open to see what was going on, I saw a young woman plop herself down on the seat next to me. She then turned towards me, opened her eyes wider than they had probably ever been opened before and then let out an ear-piercing, blood-curdling scream that scared the living shit out of me. I jumped, smashed my knees into my steering wheel and shot straight up while I watched her run back full bore towards the rest rooms.

My guess is that she just got into the wrong car. It is either that or I need to come to the realization that I have a face that not even a rest stop hooker could love. To keep my self esteem from plummeting to new depths, I was going to check to see if there was another car in the parking lot that looked like mine but decided it would be best to just get out there as quickly as possible before I became an unwitting participant in some sort of Amber Alert. The only way that could have looked worse to passers by would have been if she had run screaming not out of my passenger side door, but the trunk.

Album Wars

2006-10-11T22:20:00.000-04:00

Deja Vu. I swear I witnessed a similar event in a second hand record store in Waukegan Illinois immediately after returning from a Grateful Dead concert once.

Head Start?

2006-10-10T19:22:00.000-04:00

Trying to give my four-year-old son a head start, I am currently trying to teach him how to read. I made up flash cards with "sight words" on them and together, we sat down at the dinner table to try to memorize them. Mason got stuck on the word "of". Sounding it out, he kept pronouncing it like "off".

I explained to him that the word "off" had two fs, the word "of" just one. Finally, we got it and moved on to the next word which was "as". I explained to him that like the word "of", "as" was pronounced differently than it sounded out. It was pronounced "az". He then explained to me that if you added an extra "s" to it, it made the word "ass".

What could I do? He was right. The only course of action left for me was to ask him to use it in sentance.

To the Marines......

2006-10-10T06:45:00.000-04:00

This letter was written by a Marine office in Iraq and according to Time, is circulating in some generals' inboxes. It's not fall down funny, but it covers some of the lighter sides of war, as well as some of the dark. It's a great read and I would like to thank Daisypie of Zug.com for turning me on to it.

GO BLUE!!!

2006-10-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

Well, I was actually going to write a post today, but the University of Michigan Wolverines play the Michigan State Spartans today at 4:30 EST. Me and my kids will be doing going nuts, namely by jumping on the furniture and eating Doritos in the living room since their mother isn't home. Hopefully I will be updating again tomorrow.

Pillow Talk

2006-09-14T18:51:00.000-04:00

Forgive me in advance for a lame post but I am exhausted to the point of hallucination. I could have sworn that, at some point during my 70 mile drive home, that I saw one of those Mexican goat sucker things on the side of the expressway playing a game of hopscotch with Rush Limbaugh.

Tragically, it was not an epic bout of binge-drinking nor a full eight hours of wild monkey lovin’ that kept me up all night. It was the ear infections of two of my kids. It seemed like as soon as we got one settled down and back asleep, the other would wake up in tears. By two in the morning my four-year-old was in our bed, pressing his feet against my side and flexing his toes, tickling the living hell out of me. Unfortunately, this even happens rather routinely even when he is not sick, hence the reason I call him “Midnight Mason and his Big Toe of Doom” after 9pm. We also end up having quality conversations in the middle the night that go something like:

Mason (at a volume that could drive a wooly mammoth to the brink of incontinence): “Dad! My ear hurts!”

Me: “Mkjumph ingu phunk duuuuuuuuu………What?”

Mason (even louder): “My ear hurts!”

Me (louder than Mason): “I’M SURE YELLING AT ME AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS WILL MAKE IT FEEL MUCH BETTER!”

Mason: Starts to whimper.

Wife: “What’s the matter with you! You’re going to wake up the baby!”

Me: “Well he started it!”

Wife: “I don’t care! Act like an adult! Act like a father!”

Me: “Fine. Mason! Go to your room!”

Wife: “You’re an ass.”

Mason: “Yeah Dad, you’re an ass!”

At this point I’m savoring the moment since my wife often chastises me for adding more color to the children’s vocabulary. I rolled out of bed, turned to my wife and said. “Great. That’s some really classy language to be teaching the kids.”

Wife (fuming and ignoring me because she knows I’m right): “Come up here Mason and rest with us until your ear feels better.”

Mason: Crawls into bed with a wide smile directed right at me which is his equivalent of flipping me “the bird”.

Me (not willing to let this swearing thing go yet): “Mason, that’s a bad word. That’s one of those ones that you’re not allowed to say.”

Mason: “Like ‘Bucket’?”

Wife: “Bucket? Bucket’s not a bad word.”

Mason: “Dad said it was.”

Me (wracking my memory): “When did I say that?”

Mason: “In the car. You said it and then told me not to say it.”

I then remembered being in the car with Mason. We were going to pick up dinner and I got distracted by a phone call from work. After hanging up, he was being so quiet in back that I just momentarily forgot that he was there. Then the moron in front of me slammed on her breaks for absolutely no reason that I could discern. There were no streets, lights, signs, cops or any other cars on the road other than me. The only thing I could think of was that maybe she saw the goat sucker thing too. Marveling at her stupidity and angered by the fact that the bimbo forced me to lock up my breaks as well, I let out an impromptu expletive before remembering that my son was in the backseat.

Me: “Oh. I didn’t say ‘Bucket’. I said fu……”

I was interrupted by my wife instantly shooting upright in bed with her eyes opened so wide that they had reached inhuman, squid-like proportions. I knew right there that if I stayed in that room, the next couple of hours would have been spent receiving a verbal bludgeoning and the only hope I had of getting back to sleep was to go somewhere else. I ripped my pillow off of my bed and just before trudging off downstairs to living room couch, I said, “Ahhhhh, Buck-et!”

Could We Have Hoped for Anything Different?

2006-09-12T19:37:00.000-04:00

The Detroit Lions have a new coaching staff. They have a new quarterback. They have cut some dead weight by letting go a high profile problem receiver with Rastafarian aspirations. They are finished with fluffy practices and have vowed to play tough. True, the Detroit Lions still have a the same general manager that has lead them through five straight disastrous seasons (leading many to speculate on what weird acts of sexual perversion he is performing on various Ford family members in order to hold on to his job) but overall, hopes are high that our NFL franchise will have a better season this year than they have the past half decade. Statistically speaking, we can’t imagine how they can get any worse.

Then news broke last week that Joe Cullen, the Lions’ defensive line coach was arrested on Aug 24th driving nude through the drive-thru window of a local fast food restaurant. The Lions organization reported that “alcohol was involved”, which is kind of disappointing since it would have been far more interesting if the organization would have added, “so were three midgets in spandex, a monkey, a gerbil, masking tape and copious amounts of cherry flavored intimate lubricating ointments”. It may not have been true, but it would have been entertaining.

Eight days later on September 1st, Cullen was again arrested for driving drunk and reportedly had a blood alcohol level of .12. In Michigan this is considered driving while intoxicated, but I am personally going to give Coach Cullen a pass on that one. I am willing to bet that if Joe Cullen is as experienced as an inebriate as I think he is, since ordering takeout while driving drunk AND naked is beyond the capabilities of your average amateur, I am betting that few people would even have noticed that he had been drinking if his BAC was only .12. Hell, I’m betting that he probably needs a BAC of .15 just to keep the shakes at bay and he could probably still perform open heart surgery at .20 (not that I’m volunteering to test that little theory). I’d even wager that at .25 the officer administering the field sobriety tests would still be reluctant to break out the breathalyzer.

Despite my levity, there really is no excuse for Joe Cullen’s behavior. He is the DEFENSIVE line coach and overall, the Lion’s defense is the only thing the team has going for them so he really has little reason to hit the bottle that hard this early in the season. If we were talking about the OFFENSIVE line coach Larry Beightol on the other hand, I might be able to muster up a little more sympathy.

In the end though, the defensive line coach was suspended for multiple alcohol offenses and last Sunday, the team played one of the most spectacular defensive games I have ever watched. The offensive line coach, a respectably decent, sober chap from what I have heard, got into no trouble and his boys, in typical Lions fashion, could not keep the Seahawks on their side of the scrimmage line to save their lives. Maybe I should just get off of Joe Cullen’s back and suggest that maybe Larry Beightol go out, lush it up and booze his way to Burger King in the buff.

Seattle 9 Detroit 6

2006-09-10T16:05:00.000-04:00

Well, it's football season again. Yesterday I spent the day at The Big House in Ann Arbor, taking my two oldest to their first University of Michigan game (We won against CMU 41 to 17). I can honestly tell you that this was the funnest four hours I have ever spent with my kids. Between all the yelling, screaming, waves, cheerleaders and general mayhem, we had more fun than should be legal.......even with the Wolverines' first recorded weather delay.

Today, we watched the Lions. As is usual, our offence looked lousy and we lost. Still, we held our own against the 2005 NFC champions which was more than we possibly could have asked for, and due largely to some spectacular defensive football thar held Seattle to 3 field goals. I fully expected a crushing bloodbath. At one point, the Lions actually had the chance to win the game but, of course, we blew it. In retrospect it's probably a good thing. Had they actually won, the following lack of bowel and bladder control might have sent my kids into therapy.

It was not a total loss however, as I am once again able to enjoy, for the first time this year, the food staple that will be my lunch from today to Superbowl Sunday:

Homemade "Loaded Baked Potato Soup"

and

Buffalo Wings with Stuffed Potato Skins

As I sit here behind my computer, feeling my arteries harden while my blood pressure rises to level that will soon bring me to the brink of unconsciousness, I can't but welcome my favorite part of year back into my life. I've got three months of football, salmon fishing, comfort food and Thanksgiving dinner to look forward to before Christmas shopping season begins.

The Path to 9/11

2006-09-08T22:33:00.000-04:00

After a fairly long hiatus on the topic, and because I’ve been far too sober over the past few months to have done anything of note, I am returning The JEP Report into the political fold…at least until I have a better idea.

As the 5-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks approaches, ABC is airing a two part television mini-series called “The Path to 9/11”, based in large part upon the report issued by the congressional committee formed to investigate the series of events that allowed this terrorist act to succeed. Here in the US, two days before the show is set to air, various officials from the administration of former president Bill Clinton have launched a public campaign to have this program either edited, declared a fictional dramatization of events or outright pulled from being shown. As is usual when this type of thing occurs, the publicity these protests generated has advertised this show far more effectively than ABC’s marketing campaign and brought this series to the attention of many Americans who, like me, do not watch a whole lot of television. As a result, those of us who probably would not have even known about this program without the extra publicity considered it something that we just did not want to miss. At least until ABC buckled under DNC pressure and agreed to edit it in response to the Clinton officials’ outrage. Now I’m probably just going to try to find a football game on somewhere.

Clinton officials have been loudly complaining that this mini-series inaccurately portrays them of basically ignoring the terrorist threat posed by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. To be blunt, it was his fault. It was also the fault of the first President Bush, Ronald Reagan before him and Jimmy Carter before him. The present President Bush can also shoulder his fair share of the blame but I will cut him a little slack since he is the first president since the rise of radical Islam in the 1970’s to actually act on the problem, though I will say that if 9/11 had succeeded, I doubt that he would have acted much differently than his predecessors.

The truth is that when it comes to Islamic terrorism, no administration can take a monopoly on the blame, as none can claim immunity from it either as the Clinton administration is trying to do. Jimmy Carter had the means and the public backing in 1979 to stop the rise of Islamic fundamentalism when it first reared his head, but he lacked the will to do anything about it. As a result, he gave the Iranian radicals their first taste of victory by allowing them to storm or embassy and hold our hostages without any fear of meaningful retribution. The Ronald Reagan administration presided over a global heyday of Islamic terrorism and, though he did muzzle Libya, he backed down from confronting the threat in Lebanon, Iran, Syria and the PLO and even paid the Iranian backers of Hezbollah in arms to get our hostages in Lebanon back. The first President Bush underestimated the threat and did not pay it much attention. Instead he concentrated on bungling the first Iraq war so that eleven years later we would have to go back and finish the job.

President Clinton, like his three predecessors, also underestimated the threat but in addition to traditional executive inaction, he spent his eight years in office systematically dismantling the American intelligence apparatus so that when we were finally struck by enemies who had been publicly vowing to attack us for years, we lacked the means of knowing what the enemy was up to. Nine months after President Clinton left office, the intelligence services were still relying on electronic espionage which told us that something was brewing but not exactly what it was. Five years ago, this mind-numbingly negligent lack of human intelligence allowed George W. Bush to usher in the era of American history that we now refer to as “post-9/11”.

It is impossible to grade the current President of the United States in his battle against Islamic terrorism on the same scale of his predecessors. Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton all had the opportunity combat the scourge but decided not to act. Bush II, thanks to the lack of initiative on the issue from his four predecessors, was not afforded the luxury of having that choice. The attacks of September 11th were so horrific he had no alternative course of action other than confronting this threat head on and it will be years before we see whether or not seeds of his policies grow to bear fruit or rot where they were sown.

In retrospect however, previous administrations’ refusal to tackle the threat of Islamic terrorism has done nothing but encourage it. Prior to the Iranian revolution, there were no Islamic terrorist attacks recorded in which Americans or Westerners were specifically targeted (I found this hard to believe but my research came up completely empty. If any of you out there read this and want to enlighten me on something I missed, I would be happy to hear from you). After President Carter’s political impotence was exposed by Iranian militants however, the United States has was considered fair game as terrorists learned that their causes could gain monumental publicity for their causes by attacking American interests and citizens and would suffer few consequences as a result of their actions.

After the Iranian hostage crisis subsided, it did not take long for the Middle East’s other malcontents to launch their own attacks to violently focus the world’s attention upon their grievances. In short, the United States had 22 years to declare war on terrorism after the US was declared fair game, yet refused to do so. After the Iranians had their way with us, the US and President Carter in particular looked about as threatening to Middle Eastern militants as a three legged bunny rabbit with cerebral palsy.

Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush did a little better but still did not take advantage of the no less than ten opportunities various Middle Eastern terrorists gave us to respond to them in a manner that should have sent them sniveling back to their dismal homelands in search of an easier target to pick on. On April 18 1983 Hezbollah, operating under the generic moniker “Islamic Jihad” ushered in the fad of suicide bombing when it obliterated the US Embassy in Beirut killing 63 people. Six months later, on October 23rd, they quadrupled the embassy body count by sending a truck bomb into the US Marine barracks, killing 241 Americans. Then they kidnapped and killed Beirut’s CIA station chief, William Buckl ey, in March the following year and a US sailor on a hijacked TWA flight in 1985. The Reagan response to these Hezbollah attacks was to withdraw from Lebanon and then give arms to Iran, who financed the militants, in exchange for several other hostages they took. Now the terrorists saw that committing violent acts against Americans not only gave them publicity without meaningful retribution, it was also proving fairly lucrative.

In October 1985, the Palestinians decided to get in on the act, with the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front. After killing an American Jew named Leon Klinghoffer, the terrorists were essentially freed by US “ally” Egypt and granted safe passage to Tunisia. US warplanes intercepted them en route to their safe haven and forced their plane to land in Italy. In hindsight, we probably should not have bothered for the Italian authorities were even softer on terrorism the US was. By 1991, all but one of the hijackers were free.

Just after Christmas of that same year, the Palestinians went on a shooting spree in Rome and Vienna, killing 13. Four months after that, they bombed TWA flight 840 in Athens, killing four Americans. Three days later, on April 5th 1986, the Libyans bombed a Berlin discotheque killing three US servicemen. Up until this point, Arab terrorists acting on the cause of the Palestinian movement had killed 327 people, mostly Americans. The Libyans were relative newcomers to the game yet after killing less than 1% of the people the Palestinians had, Reagan ordered the US Navy to bomb the tar out of Tripoli and Benghazi in response to the attack. Still, the Reagan administration kept their hands off of militant Palestinian groups. As with most other bombing campaigns, the American strike against Libya did little to deter them from terrorism and on December 21 1988, Libyan operatives blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland, killing 259 people, most of them Americans.

Not to say that the Reagan administration was wrong to attack Libya. On the contrary, it was the first concrete action the US took against Middle Eastern extremism after seven years of being a victim of it. Like actions before and after it however, it did not go far enough. Taking the bombing of the La Belle discotheque seriously and launching a sustained military campaign designed to bring the regime of Mohmar Qaddafi to its knees could have prevented the tragedy in Scotland over two and a half years later.

Another thing that occurred during the Reagan administration was the transformation of Middle Eastern militants from secular combatants battling for territory around Israel to religious fanatics fighting to spread their theological ideology. In order to combat Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the Reagan administration encouraged the Muslim world to view the conflict as a holy war against God-less Communist aggression and after the April 14th 1988 car bombing of a USO club in Italy and the Lockerbie explosion, terrorist attacks against the US ceased being acts claimed to further Palestinian self-determination and started becoming expressions of Islamic outrage.

The first President Bush was inaugurated shortly after the Lockerbie bombing and surprisingly, he made it through his entire term without a major terrorist incident involving Muslim militants targeting American citizens. There are several reasons this might have happened. First off, Bush proved early on in his presidency that crackpot Third World dictators could not work to undermine the US with impunity by invading Panama. Second, the first Palestinian intifada against Israel erupted in 1987, likely turning the attention of various PLO terrorist factions back towards the lands that launched the dispute and away from the international stage. Third, with the collapse of European communism in 1989, these extremist organizations likely lost a good deal of their financial backing. Fourth, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the worldwide response to it directed the resources of state terrorism sponsors towards a different theater of conflict. Finally, the US and Soviet Union disengaged with the conflict in Afghanistan, leaving a large pool of the Islamic world’s disaffected to wantonly kill each other off without Western interference.

It might have been luck or it might have been intimidation, but the scourge of international terrorism was just not on the first President Bush’s, or anyone else’s, radar screen between 1989 and 2003. With the fall of Communism, the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe and the myriad of other global changes going on at the time, international terrorism just did not seem to fit into what the president called “The New World Order”. Whether by fortune or by design, President Bush I got a terrorism pass. He can shoulder the lion’s share of the blame on Iraq in another article.

Now enter President William Jefferson Clinton. A little over a year after his inauguration as president, the United States suffered its first attack by international terrorists on its own native soil when the larvae of what would eventually morph into al Qaeda exploded a truck bomb inside of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. The problem with this attack was it was not successful enough, killing only 6 people (though more than a thousand were injured). As a result, there was no retaliation launched for the attack. Two years later, two diplomats were assassinated in Karachi, Pakistan. Again, no retaliation was offered. In June 1996, the US military barracks at Khobar Towers was attacked with an exploding fuel truck, killing 19 servicemen and wounding 515. In 1997, three separate attacks by Islamic militants killed 63 people with no consequences being suffered by those who ordered the actions. Finally in 1998, al-Qaeda in the form that we now recognize it, bombed the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing a combined 301 people and wounding well over 5,000. Finally forced to respond, Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and some unoccupied training camps in Afghanistan, killing or injuring absolutely no one that mattered, if anyone at all.

Two years later, terrorists bombed the USS Cole in Yemen in their last attack on US interests before September 11th. At this point though, Clinton was on his way out of office and I doubt that he had any interest in doing anything that would jeopardize his worldwide reputation as a master statesman. He did nothing, and his presidential “legacy” brought down the World Trade Center and blew gaping holes in the Pentagon and a Pennsylvanian corn field less than a year later.

The fact of the matter is that al Qaeda, in the form that we now know it, was conceived, born, grew and flourished under Bill Clinton’s watch and as a result of his inability and unwillingness to do anything about it. I will concede that it is unreasonable to lay all of the blame for the spread of global terrorism solely upon his shoulders, but he can take the overwhelming brunt of criticism when people want to ask who allowed al Qaeda to become the beacon of Islamic fascism that it is today. Now, the same people who allowed this sore to fester are up in arms about a television mini-series that, before edited, was the first media presentation to drive this point home to the American public.

Amazingly there are still people in this country who regard President Clinton, and that poster-child for political ineptitude Jimmy Carter, as staunch stalwarts working for world peace when in reality, their wavering, weakness, and inability to commit to a tough course of action because it could offend somebody, prove unpopular or possibly hurt a non-combatant has done more to undermine global stability than further it. Now that an administration has been forced to tackle the problem, they have barred no holds in openly undermining his campaign to eradicate the threat. They call into question his dismantling of obstacles that kept government agencies from sharing intelligence with one another, they proclaim his program to eavesdrop on terrorist phone calls within the US as unconstitutional and illegal, they lament the fact that 400 of the world’s most dangerous murderers are being held in cages in Cuba without being brought to trial, they proclaim outrage at the existence of secret CIA prisons and they refuse to acknowledge that, in the midst of all of these “crimes”, the US has not suffered a single terrorist act on its soil since al Qaeda blew its wad in 2001.

Not that George Bush II should be immune from criticism. In my opinion, he has done an incredibly poor job both bringing stability to Afghanistan and fighting the war in Iraq. In addition to that, I see him bungling the nuclear situation in Iran and doing nothing meaningful at all to reverse the catastrophe Clinton created in North Korea. I am sure that there is someone out there who could do a much better job, but when you look out over the past 25 years of terrorism, what he has done is far and away much better than anything accomplished by any of his predecessors.

I have honestly grown very disillusioned with the Republican Party over the past couple of years and am dying for a new choice to emerge on the American political landscape. Unfortunately, we only have two real choices at present and when terrorism and the security of the United States are the issues I am most concerned about, I am going to back the party working tirelessly to undermine our enemies, not the party working tirelessly to undermine those undermining our enemies.

So how do I react to ABC buckling under Clinton pressure to censor its programming so that their incompetence, policies of appeasement and unintentional collaboration with our enemies are not exposed? Easy. I write over 2,800 words voicing my displeasure and trying to present hard facts that back up my views. I then add another arguing point to my list of evidence that the mainstream media is to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to the GOP. Then I will crack open a beer and do my best to avoid watching channels affiliated with ABC for a while. Luckily, this usually does not prove all that difficult since there is little on the network that I typically would want to watch anyway. Truth be told, “The Path to 9/11” is the first thing on ABC to grab my attention in ages.

Farewell "Crikey" Dude

2006-09-06T19:00:00.000-04:00

Steve Irwin was an idiot. No one but a certified moron would jump into a murky body of water to climb onto the back of 15 foot crocodile and try to wrestle it into a muzzle so that he could play with it in front of a television camera. I saw him once grab a ten-foot-long king cobra in the most dangerous manner imaginable (which is anywhere other than right behind the head) and then tell his audience how incredibly deadly its venom was while dancing around the road to avoid being bitten by the serpent. After catching this little spectacle on television, I wondered how could keep from drooling all over himself with so little cranial capacity.

Basically, The Crocodile Hunter made a career out of molesting the more lethal members of the animal kingdom for little more than the sheer fun of it, and had the luck that some television producer saw the entertainment value in what he did, allowing him a significant measure of fame and fortune. In my opinion, that makes him an idiot…….and a kindred spirit.

I would have loved to have made a career out of doing what he did. Unfortunately, if I find myself waist deep in murky water with a fifteen foot crocodile, my bladder and bowels would be making it far murkier. Personally, I think watching some average Joe leave a giant streak mark across the Amazon basin after coming face-to-face with a giant reptile while hysterically clawing his way back to the Rio bar district would make great television, but I bet the FCC has a far different sense of humor than I.

Even though I did not watch The Crocodile Hunter often, I think that the world is a far poorer place without him and that opinion has nothing to do with what he has done to further the cause of conservation. It has to do with the enthusiasm with which he approached his work. Steve Irwin was obviously giddily passionate about what he did and I think as a result of this, wildly succeeded at it. He was a man who loved nature and the outdoors and by little more than pursuing his interests with abandon, he managed to educate people across the entire world about the things that he cared about. He lived his life endlessly pursuing his pleasures, and ended it the same way. There are very few people that could make that same claim.

Though I would have liked to have seen Steve Irwin around much, much longer I am quite relieved that he died in the manner that he did. He was an animal enthusiast without parallel and being killed by one of the creatures he adored kind of puts him on a pedestal that is unattainable by those following in his footsteps. This is a dignity he probably would not have been afforded had he expired on the toilet from a brain aneurism like Elvis Presley did.

In other news, I would like to try to prevent any awkward silences to those readers of The JEP Report that I occasionally talk to in person by telling them here that congratulations are no longer necessary on the fourth JEP baby. We lost it a couple of days after I posted here that we were having it. Everyone’s OK here about it now, so there’s no need to offer any condolences or anything like that either. I was going to post something sooner, but it’s something you really just do not know how to talk about.

Anyway, for those of you still checking in, I hope you all had a great summer! Once again, sorry for the sporadic (at best) posting but things have just been insane around here. I hope I do better than once a month in the future, but to be honest I’m running at a tempo that barely allows me to read, let alone write. I thank you guys for occasionally checking in here still though!

Once Monthly Column

2006-08-02T21:58:00.000-04:00

Aaaaahhhhh, The JEP Report is languishing once again. It's been a month since my last update, and about a month since I've had time to write anything. So, what has happened in the last 32 days? Well, I've worked a hell of a lot. I've drank a hell of a little. I've chased kids and tried unsuccessfully to grow grass (I have managed to grow clover, dandelions and other weeds with spectacular success however). At the moment, I am also planning my bi-annual salmon fishing trip below is a picture of us who went in 2004, just before I created The JEP Report (I'm the one who got skunked):

So, what else has happened? Well, my wife informed me last week that I am about to become a father again for the fourth time! I have GOT to figure out where these things are coming from. A buddy of mine said I could find out rather easily on the internet how babies are made and after tons of research, I have deduced that the act of procreating has something to do with a couple of midgets, stilletto heels, bad music and livestock. Will keep you posted on my wife's growing psychosis over the next eight months.

Scud Soda

2006-06-14T19:05:00.000-04:00

When I came to I was on the ground, leaning against the back of my house sticky and soaking wet. There was the unmistakable taste of blood in my mouth and I could feel it running down the back of my throat as well as flowing unchecked out of both nostrils. My right hand was throbbing painfully. I had a dull ache in my right knee and an excruciating spell of agony in my lower stomach of an intensity I had not felt since I was kicked in the crotch by a midget I once dated in high school.

My neighborhood was strangely silent, as it should have been well after midnight, but if there was anything to hear it would have been drowned out by the deafening ringing that filled both of my ears. As I shook my head to try to get my wits back about me, I noticed that lights were starting to go on down my block and though at that point I was still not quite sure what I had done, I had woken up in similar circumstances before and if history was any judge, the police would likely be on the scene in short order. I needed to pick myself up off of the ground and get back inside before anyone spotted me at the scene of the disturbance.

I had just ducked into the garage when my thoughts turned to the dog. I was too disoriented at the time to remember if I had brought him outside with me or not, but as he could normally be found at my side every time I stepped out of my back door, the odds were that he was on my heels when the incident occurred. When I was in the army the elite Ranger unit, which my dog was named after, had a saying that went, “No one gets left behind”. Fortunately for me, I was not a Ranger. Not only was I content to leave the mutt outside to fend for himself, I would be spending the rest of the night trying to think of ways that I could blame the calamity that occurred in my backyard on him if he survived.

When I finally made it indoors, I was greeted by the sound of the hysterical crying of my children upstairs, who no doubt had been rudely rousted out of sleep by the explosion outside. I rushed up the stairs to calm them down but my appearance was not exactly the soothing apparition they needed. I told them that nothing had happened and that there was nothing going on that they needed to worry about. My feeble attempt at reassurance obviously lacked credibility though, judging by the look of sheer terror that remained on their faces. I am sure my efforts were severely undermined by the fact that I was still drenched and had large amounts of blood still rushing out of my face. Falling to my stomach and crawling away from the window when I thought I saw a police cruiser pass by my front yard did not do much to support my believability either.

Eventually, I did get the kids settled down though and ran a hot bath to soak my aches and injuries. Once undressed and in the tub, I tried to piece together what on earth I had done to myself.

I remembered that it had started off with a case of writer’s block and boredom. The JEP Report had been quite neglected and I was at a loss to come up with anything to put in it. I was on the verge of unleashing my usual cure for The Block, namely a handful of Ex-Lax and a bottle of tequila, when I remembered something I had heard on the radio earlier in the day.

I have a rather long commute to get from work to my house every day, 67 miles one way. During my drive in the evening I often listen, and regularly call in to, the Deminsky and Doyle Show on WKRK 97.1 Free FM in Detroit. On this particular day, they were discussing an experiment they had seen performed by Bill Nye The Science Guy where he dropped a Mentos breath freshener into a large bottle of Diet Coca-Cola. Doing this produced a chemical reaction that resulted in a large geyser of soda erupting from the neck of the bottle. The two DJs reproduced the experiment on the air with apparently impressive results.

Thanks to my youngest son’s approaching birthday party and my local gas station’s failure to keep an adequate stock of Eclipse Winterfrost breath mints in stock, I just happened to have both a 2-liter bottle of Coke and a roll of Mentos on hand. I wondered if I could somehow figure out a way to turn the bottle upside down before unleashing the breath mints, would I be able to turn Bill Nye’s experiment into some sort of carbonated rocket, a device that would surely come in extremely handy if the right use could be found for it, such as making my backyard a “no-fly zone” to the swarms of Canadian Geese that periodically touch down there to over-fertilize my lawn. It might also come in handy if those frogs ever attack again.

My plan, cooked up in barely five minutes, was to tape a couple of the mints to the cap of the bottle, screw it on and take it to my launch pad, a large granite rock at the back edge of my property. Once there, I would loosen the cap until it was barely on, turn the bottle upside down and see how close I could come to sending the contraption into orbit.

Taping the mints to the bottle cap turned out to be far trickier than I thought. The radio show only used one, but as I was aiming for maximum power as well as moving waterfowl prone to attacks of Montezuma’s Revenge, I used three. I discovered early on that the middle one kept falling out so instead of identifying this as the cause of a potential misfire and expending some additional effort into figuring out a way to secure it in place, I opted instead to just keep trying to “stack” it onto the tape with the other two. Eventually, it worked and my device was armed.

For a moment after I had finished putting the thing together, I just sat there and marveled at my invention. If everything had worked as planned, I had transformed a soft drink and a breath mint into a formidable missile, an unholy weapon that could spark a neighborhood arms race and strike terror into the hearts of incontinent poultry all the world over. I trembled at the thought of what would happen once the thing went off, and trembled harder at the thought of what would happen if the thing went off in my kitchen. In a rare moment of lucidity, I decided that it would probably be in my best interests if I took my Soda Scud out to the garage before I ended up cleaning far more of the house than I first intended to that night.

Once safely outside, I did something that is usually not in my nature. I took a moment to put some thought into whether or not what I was about to do was really such a good idea. I tried to figure out what could go wrong once I turned the Soda Scud upside down and passed the point where I could reverse my course of action. In all honesty, I could not imagine all that much. I was setting it off in a clump of trees so even if it worked far beyond my wildest expectations, the lack of a clear line of fire would prevent it from traveling far enough to cause any real damage. If I was doing this in the middle of the day, it might have been able to take out a couple of pedestrians in the parking lot of the dentist office behind me but in the town that I live in, there are very few folks who are out getting their teeth cleaned in the middle of the night. There would likely be no one outside at that late hour and if there were, and they had any semblance of intelligent reasoning, they would surely have tried to stop me.

Even though I could not think of anything that could go seriously wrong, I could not think of anything that could really go right either. My Soda Scud was an inherently evil device full of bad intentions. There was simply no foreseeable constructive use for the contraption. No good could possibly come from setting it off. Basically it was the perfect plaything for someone to liven up what had otherwise been a fairly dull Saturday night. Almost giddy with excitement, I whispered, “McGyver’s a fag” to myself, grabbed the bottle and hurried out into the darkness to my backyard launch pad.

I do not remember much after that.

My last clear recollection of the event was walking along the side of my garage towards the back yard. The next thing I knew, I was on my back having lost a significant amount of bodily fluids and a family pet. I am not entirely sure what exactly had happened. I do not know whether I dropped the bottle and launched it right into me or if the damn thing just outright exploded. Either way, it knocked the living tar out of me and, at 36 years old, a typical man my age should be able to find better things to do with his down time than invent improvised munitions out of carbonated soft drinks.

In the end, I eventually cleaned myself up and by the morning had deduced that I did not have any serious injuries that required a trip to the hospital. I found the dog underneath the dining room table with his tail between his legs. He had not been outside with me but had probably watched the whole thing unfold from the back door wall, close enough to the action to have suffered a slight lapse in bladder control and developed a nervous facial tick.

The following morning, as I was spraying down my garage, my neighbor asked me if I had heard the commotion the night before. I told him I had heard something in my sleep but found a decent mess in my backyard that had to be attended to when I woke up. I attributed it to bored teenagers and launched into a minor tirade about the sorry state of today’s youth. Obviously, I could not figure out a way to blame it on the dog.

I am a person that believes there are no mistakes in life, just learning experiences and my foray into Mentos missilery taught me quite a bit. I learned that Springer Spaniel / Border Collie crossbreeds would likely make lousy hunting dogs due to their predisposition to gun-shyness. I learned that my neighbors are light sleepers, which will undoubtedly come in handy if I try to sneak into one of their swimming pools later this summer. I also have a new and unique insight into what an Iraqi truck mechanic must have felt like when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi brought his F-150 in to get his tires rotated. Additionally, I learned that as long as I have some Diet Coke and Mentos on hand, I can always find a source of entertainment for myself when I am home alone and the computer is on the fritz. Finally, I learned that there is no shortage of people willing to risk a broken nose, a mangled hand or testicular disfigurement for a cheap thrill, as evidenced by witnessing three engineers I work with trying to create Diet Coke geysers behind a party store next door to where I work less than three hours after I told them this very story.

They’re not alone either. Diet Coke / Mentos geysers have become a trend in the last couple of months. This week, Moneyline did a piece on the phenomenon and just yesterday, it was a featured story on the Yahoo! home page. It has been on the evening news broadcasts all over the country and, according to the Yahoo! piece mentioned above, has resulting in over $10,000,000 of free advertising for Diet Coke and Mentos. Upon learning this, I did a little research and found that the internet is full of hundreds of videos documenting this activity. It is quickly becoming a trend, and based upon the amount of fun that I had with it, I would not be surprised if it bloomed into a full blown movement. It has endless possibilities, not least of which is its use as a counter-protest tool.

Say you are hanging around on the front porch of your ranch in Crawford, Texas when some vegan chick named Cindy Sheehan and a bunch of other pseudo-hippies sets up camp on your front lawn completely uninvited. At first you try to ignore them but when they start interrupting your sleep by singing “Kumbaya” at three in the morning, you know it is time for them to go. You could easily call in some National Guard troops to disperse them with rubber bullets or call in the Crawford Fire Department to turn the hoses on the deviants, but you know that the press would call you a heavy-handed tyrant and canonize the trespassers as oppressed victims of a fascist regime. If you break out the RPBs (Rocket Propelled Beverages) however, you solve the problem with no fallout whatsoever. Imagine the look of paralyzing terror swoop across Cindy Sheehan’s face as she looks up and sees fifty plastic Diet Coke containers come sweeping across fence, bearing down on her little personal Woodstock in attack formation. Imagine the chaos that ensues as the missiles hit their targets, ricocheting off of unwashed tie-dyed shirts and unshaved legs, creating total pandemonium and confusion as the protesters trip over themselves in a futile attempt to extract themselves from the fray. Imagine the collective look of righteous indignation of the group as they find themselves drenched in processed corn syrup as the press corps covering the incident rolls around on the ground in the fetal position, trying to inhale through violent bursts of side splitting laughter while staving off incontinence. Then imagine the headline of the Washington Post the following morning: “Cindy Sheehan Gets Punk’d by Prez!”. You’re suddenly made out to be the fun-loving and resourceful leader of the free world while the protesters are made out to be the sniveling boobs who sought out infamy but wound up becoming the punch line to the opening routine of every late night talk show host across the entire nation.

The fact that Scud Sodas have suddenly become the latest internet craze kind of fills me with pride. I was attempting to blow myself up a full month before the rest of the country caught on making me feel like a sort of accidental trend setter, though I can not claim any credit whatsoever for inventing the fad (Do I look like Al Gore?). I believe that dubious honor goes to Bill Nye The Science Guy. So here’s a toast to Bill for turning me onto flying fizz via Deminski and Doyle:

Bill Nye is the best of smart lads,
And the starter of dangerous fads,
He showed this poor guy,
A Coke bottle could fly,
Break his nose and lay waste to his ‘nads.

Apparently, I'm On Hiatus

2006-06-11T09:15:00.000-04:00

It has been about a month and a half since my last post. As I logged on this morning and found several e-mails reminding me of this, I thought I would drop everyone a quick line and let them know that I have not abandoned The JEP Report, I have just been operating on an extreme time deficit the past couple of months. I usually write my articles on my lunch hour at work, but truth be told, I haven't eaten lunch at work for months. On the home front, most of my free time lately has been spent building this monstrocity:

For most people, this would probably only have been a weekend project, but it took me a couple of months. Higher primates, such as humans, are typically distinguished from their lesser relatives by their problem-solving abilities and their ability to use tools. If a couple of chimpanzees had watched me try to put this thing together, they probably would have shaken their heads in disgust and lamented the tragedy of why evolution had wasted a good pair of opposable thumbs on me. I would surely have gotten a lot more use out of a prehensile tail. Anyway, I finally finished it two weeks ago and ever since, my kids have enjoyed countless hours playing in the five cardboard boxes the playset was delivered in. In addition to putting together the playscape, I have spent a significant amount of time trying to grow grass in my yard. By grass, I mean Poa Pratensis, not that Cannabis Sativa stuff that you can make brownies out of.

Another item in my life at the moment that is taking up a huge block of writing time for me is my kids. Trying to write with three midget demolition experts roaming around the house is next to impossible unless you have been able to pull the proper governmental permits required to keep a tranquilzer gun and a cattleprod in your home. My one-year-old in particular, is very prone to interrupting a good literary flow, usually by pounding on the keyboard while I am typing or turning the computer's powerstrip off before I have saved my work. Today, he learned how to climb up into his big brother's booster chair:

Unfortunately for him, he hasn't learned to climb down yet and unless he does so within the next hour or so, I may actually be able to finish this post.

The other two do not help the situation much. They are well versed in the art of interior terrorism, so much so in fact that I was beginning to suspect that their daycare was run by Islamic fundamentalists rather than the Lutheran ones who sent us the flier. These suspicions were confirmed after seeing pictures of a recent field trip that they had embarked upon:

Mine are the two in front. I can only assume that the little girl in back is one of Osama bin Laden's evil minions. She has that kind of look in her eye that only a true fanatic could have.

Anyway, I hope to get back into the swing of things sooner rather than later. This month is still going to be brutal for me, but I hope that things will start slowing down in July. I have two weeks vacation coming up, one which will be spent in Ludington Michigan with this crowd:

That's usually good for a couple of dozen anacdotes about alcoholic excess. Ask Sacto Ritch. He was at my bachelor party.

After Ludington, I have another week home with the kids, and then a week in the main office where I can write during lunch again. I've got three articles on the burner, the one explaining my accident in April, one describing a good deed gone horribly awry and a current events piece on immigration, the death of Zarqawi, and my prediction on the devastating beating that I am expecting the Republican Party to take at the polls this November unless the Bush administration comes up with Osama bin Laden's severed testicles on a platter the day before the election.

I would also like to take a second to send a HUGE congratulations to Sacto Ritch, the earliest reader of The JEP Report and close personal friend, on the birth of his brand new baby daughter a couple of weeks ago. I'd love to post her picture right below here if he gives me his blessing (I guess I'm asking your permission here, buddy). Fortunately, she has her mother's looks so her elementary school life will not be as difficult as we all feared.

Finally, for those of you who still kept checking in here during this literary drought, I apologize for not having anything better for you but hope to be posting regularly again sometime in the near future. I appreciate (and am actually rather concerned by) your loyalty and hope to be eventually back into a regular posting routine in the near future. And for the European and South American readers out there, I hope you team does much better for you in the World Cup than the Detroit Lions have done for me.

Ciao guys,

JEP

Stay Tuned...

2006-04-28T23:56:00.000-04:00

I have had a drought of article ideas of late, but about a half hour ago, I did something while trying to overcome a case of writer's block that may just result in my best article EVER!

In the process of my experiment, I may have broken my nose and my right pinky finger. The kids were jolted out of bed terrified but I have since gotten them calmed down and back in their rooms. I have no idea where the dog is but I'm hoping he made it. The cops are riding around the neighborhood trying to figure out what happened as are a couple of the neighbors. Now, I need to to lay low for the rest of the night, take a bath to get all this gunk off of me, come up with something to tell the doctor if I have to go to the hospital tomorrow and make up something to explain all of this to the wife if she finds out about it. I also have to figure out how to write it all down.

I think this could turn out to be my major opus! I think this is going to be a case of spectacular stupidity resulting in pure genius!

An Ode to Cyn McKinney

2006-04-25T22:52:00.000-04:00

Here's a little ditty about the politician I just love to hate these days, Cynthia McKinney. I've been suffering a huge case of writer's block (as well as time defecit) of late and figured I need to post something soon.

When the devil went down to Georgia,
He was looking for a soul to catch,
But while seeking this, things went amiss,
And he nearly met his match.

It was Cynthia McKinney,
He ran into by some chance.
And on seeing her he gagged and choked,
And nearly wet his pants.

Her hair sprang far out from her head,
Like an angry clownish fool,
Who’d been punked and dunked then finally flunked,
From electrician school.

Her eyes shown bright and evil
With great malice they were dancin’
Possessed with animosity,
Like those of Charlie Manson.

Her mouth was always open,
Quiet only for to eat,
Or when she needed somewhere wet and warm,
To stick her putrid feet.

Her words were filled with vitriol,
A propaganda feast,
Her breath was rank and often stank,

Of rancid wildebeest.

Then Satan felt some pity,

For this creature and her pains,

Forced to walk the earth disfigured,

And devoid of any brains.

So he took a step right towards her,

Just to give a pity hug,

But before he’d moved four inches,

She had punched him in the mug.

He got beaten ‘bove his shoulders,

In the chest and on both butts,

She cracked his teeth then stomped his feet,

And kicked him in the nuts.

Immobile and quite paralyzed,

The devil could not scat,

He screamed, “Sister stop your beating!”

“I’m a freakin’ Democrat!”

With that McKinney up and froze,

Bells in her head then rung,

She then leaned down,

kissed Satan’s crown,

And tried to slip him tongue.

This far worse than any beating,

Satan jumped right up and fled,

Back home to retch and gargle,

With the blood of rotting dead.

French Government Caves to Student Protests

2006-04-10T18:03:00.000-04:00

After several weeks of rioting by students over a controversial law that would make it easier for French companies to fire young employees, France’s president, Jacques Chirac has reversed his stance and withdrawn the legislation at the center of the controversy.

“Victory is ours!” proclaimed Sophie Mestre, one of the activists that had spent days in the streets protesting the proposed law. “The government really had no choice. We were about to unleash the nuclear option. Beginning next Wednesday, we were about to start egging the police.”

An egging attack would no doubt have been devastating to police and military units in the area, who have been routed into humiliating retreat by less. “Of course we would not have asked our officers to advance in the face of an egg barrage, “ stated a local gendarme commander, Louis Hommelet. “Have you people not heard of the bird flu?”

Jacques Chirac could not be reached for comment on the reversal and little has been heard of the president except for occasional appearances at his office window to yell at protesting students to get off of the lawn. Rumors that have been floating around Paris declaring that the French president has been hiding beneath his desk were unofficially confirmed when one of the cleaning ladies leaving Chirac’s office was overheard telling another, “Yez, he eez steel een there and zee offeece has become quite deesgusteeng. Next time, I am voteeng for a prezeedent who ees at least housebroken.”

The protests and rioting sparked by the controversial measure have taxed France’s police and gendarme units, entities that are not used to open confrontation and are still stung by their devastating defeat by seven rioting Muslim women last year. Responding to criticism about the police being unable to step up to security challenges, one local commander quipped, “You have no idea what we were up against out there! Let me tell you something about the French. You can invade us, and we will blow you kisses. You can force us to convert to Islam and we will do so joyfully as long as we can get a waiver from the caliphate to keep drinking wine. Molest our women and we will making a fortune selling the movies on the internet. Threaten us with getting fired for not doing our jobs though and we’ll burn your f****** tents down. Look at the casualties we sustained!”

Police casualties were indeed high. Four officers were hospitalized for various broken bones, three for concussions, two for respiratory trauma sustained by standing too close to college student that had not bathed for several weeks and one had a heart attack after being set upon by three kindergarten girls who attacked him with their “Hello Kitty” back packs. The original casualty count was three but was corrected after discovering that the missing officers, all male, had left the scene of the melee and checked into the hospital not because of injuries sustained while carrying out their duties, but because they did not want to miss their previously scheduled pap smear appointments.

On A Serious Note

2006-04-05T18:56:00.000-04:00

The father of the three children killed in Venezuela was a good friend of a work buddy of mine. The devastation this unfolding event brought upon him, and no doubt the family of the victims, is immeasurable. It was heartbreaking to witness him getting the news. This post is really out of character, but my thoughts and prayers go out to the Faddoul family along with the hope that the animals that committed this horrible act receive the grisly punishment they so truly deserve.

Amphibious Assault

2006-04-03T15:02:00.000-04:00

After Sacto Ritch left my new house following a brief visit last fall, he asked me what was up with all the frogs. Apparently, as he and his son were making their way back to the Detroit area, a fierce storm opened up on him and before he knew it, the road was covered by a herd of frogs that appeared to be fleeing the commotion. Now, I would never doubt Ritch’s word but it is not like he (nor I for that matter) is immune to paranoid hallucinations brought on in large part to certain chemical liberties taken with his mental makeup during his libertine youth. This morning though, I discovered that either the area I moved to was prone to unnatural amphibian invasions or my psyche is uncomfortably akin to Sacto Ritch’s, making me prone to the exact same hallucinations.

It started as I was filling up my car on the way to work. I was at a gas station across the street from a wooded depression that fills with water after large rainstorms. Though normally devoid of sound except for that of passing traffic, this morning the wood was full of noise. It was so loud that I could barely hear the noise of cars coming in from the street. At first I thought it was kind of cool. Being a child of an urban environment, it was not something I was very familiar with. Sure, I had heard frogs before in the springtime but never anything on this scale.

As I pulled away and started making my way towards the expressway, I glanced at the ditches on the side of the road and sure enough, spotted a couple of frogs jumping around on the shoulder. I then thought of how spring was just around the corner and grinned as I thought about the reptilian orgy that was probably going to be taking place in the area’s wetlands over the next couple of weeks. When my eyes returned to the road however, I saw that a couple of the critters had strayed into the highway. I swerved to miss them, then saw that there were a few more up ahead, followed by even more further up, and a bit further than that, a virtual swarm of the savage bastards.

Now, seeing one frog is kind of amusing. Seeing five together is kind of cool. Seeing ten together reminds me of dinner in my favorite seafood restaurant. Seeing fifty together fills me with the feeling that I am witnessing some freak wonder of nature. Seeing one hundred together is a little disconcerting. Seeing a thousand together, well, that’s just the fifth friggin’ plague of Egypt and your first reaction is to turn tail and flee lest the four horsemen of the apocalypse swoop down out of the sky to put the smack down on your ass. Unfortunately, there was a long line of cars behind me so throwing the car in reverse was not really an option if I wanted to keep my automotive insurance rates manageable.

All I could do was drive through the poor bastards and try to imagine what expression was on all those hapless frog faces as they caught sight of several hundred pounds of Pontiac Vibe bearing down on them. I tried to ease my conscience by imagining that they were all militant vegan, pint-sized PETA activists, reincarnated into suicidal pond life and sentenced to a lifetime of eating bugs as punishment for denying their rightful place on the planet’s food chain. This only worked for a couple of seconds worth of entertainment though before the carnage beneath my tires started to become depressing. When it was over, I had sent at least fifty fellow vertebrates to frog heaven which, Sacto Ritch pointed out to me once during a particularly deep philosophical conversation, was probably located somewhere near fly hell, an observation worthy of Socrates had he not been too snobbish to contemplate the spirituality of lower life forms.

The massacre seemed such a waste but it got me thinking about the purpose of life. Not so much the purpose of my life, but of the amphibians’. I wondered what it would be like to exist in a state with no higher calling, no mission or purpose. You just hatch, try to avoid becoming an appetizer until you can grow legs and gorge yourself on mosquitoes until you get pureed by a Pontiac while trying to cross the street to get your froggy freak on with some hot mama on the other side. Then I got to wondering just really how far removed we are from the lower species, mainly because I remembered how I almost got myself pulverized in high school because I had not bothered to look both ways before crossing the street on my way to a smokin’ hot date. I’m sure there are probably thousands of other men out there that almost did the same thing. I guess the main difference between us and the frogs was that we didn’t all do it at the exact same time in the exact same place. I would also think that if we had, traffic would most likely have stopped for us, unless we were in New York City or something.

I really would have liked to have stopped for those frogs though, and all morning I wondered how many mosquitoes were spared their rightful and deserved doom on the end of an amphibian’s tongue because I did not want to be late for work. I then tried to think of something the state could do to divert the frogs away from or around main commuter thoroughfares. I had heard of places putting tunnels beneath roadways to give the frogs a safer route to their mating areas but I thought that would probably be a gargantuan waste of money. After all, how would they find the tunnels? Seeing as how I do not hear the amphibian community bragging much about their stellar literacy rate, I can not imagine road signs would be of much use. The only other thing I could think of would be to line the roads with something resembling their natural enemies, such as herons, pike, college students in search of cheap hallucinogens or garlic and butter to scare them away from traffic.

Regardless, something must be done to combat this menace. This migration is a huge risk to the physical, mental and economic health of the community and must be controlled somehow. Now I am not implying that anyone is in danger of being mauled by a horny herd of bull frogs, but I could see how someone could kill themselves after their car skids on a slippery sheen of frog guts and into the path of an oncoming tanker truck. Seeing so many mutilated animals littering the road can not be good for anyone’s emotional well being either and economically speaking, I can not fathom anyone’s boss buying an excuse for being late to work that involves a couple thousand frogs meeting an untimely end at the hands of a set of Firestone All-Weather tires.

God knows mine didn’t.

My Apologies

2006-04-01T22:32:00.000-05:00

...I'm sorry I haven't post much lately. I'm also sorry I haven't had time to answer comments. And I am REALLY sorry for posting this:

Into Voyeurism? Try German Politics!

2006-03-28T18:45:00.000-05:00

Berlin – Authorities in Berlin announced today that a security camera mounted on Berlin’s Pergamon Museum was able to monitor the apartment of German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a period spanning several years.

A German police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said authorities were alerted to the situation when pictures of Chancellor Merkel wearing nothing but a pair of lavender granny panties and gratuitous amounts of whipped cream were found on a website run by Armin Meiwes, the cannibal whose sensational trial made headlines across the globe.

“This situation has proved very embarrassing to the Chancellor,” said another anonymous official. “But it gave a very unique insight into the private life of a public official to those of us closely involved with the investigation.” When asked what, besides her penchant for dairy based lingerie, officials learned about the German chancellor the official replied, “Well for starters, we know that when she is not working diligently to secure peace and stability across the globe, she likes to unwind with a couple bottles of bottles of Riesling wine and watch midget pornography with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. We also found that she is quite fond of karaoke parties and actively participates. Apparently, she sounds a lot like Celine Dion, which has really been upsetting her neighbors.”

“She does,” confirmed another official who was not anonymous but was christened with a name that this reporter just could not for the life of him remember. “Her singing is quite horrible. (French Prime Minister) Jacques Chirac on the other hand, is actually quite a gifted singer. With the help of a helium balloon, he sounds just like Cyndi Lauper. You should hear him do ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’. It’s a scream!”

The security camera was shut down immediately after authorities discovered its surveillance potential. “It was a matter of common sense. We did not want Merkel-Kam uncovering any state secrets or, even worse, inadvertently publishing on the internet yet another tape of a celebrity in the throes of passion, particularly one who is, *ahem*, just a little past her prime. This type of activity is best left to professionals like Tommy Lee and Kid Rock.”

A Letter to Kraft

2006-03-15T06:41:00.000-05:00

Here's a letter I sent to the people at Kraft Foods regarding A-1 Steak Sauce yesterday:

Dear Kraft:

My wife is generally an excellent cook, but she makes this meat loaf that is unlike anything I have ever tasted before. I am not sure what exactly is in it but if I had to discern the ingredients based upon taste, I would guess that it includes something like coagulated ox blood, waste of swine, the sun-bloated and decomposing carcass of a slow moving groundhog slaughtered by a speeding Chevrolet and fermented fish entrails. It is a concoction so vile that, and Lord knows that I have tried, I can not even get the dog to eat it which is no small feat considering that I have seen him liberate midnight snacks from the cat’s litterbox (which I have considered doing myself on meatloaf nights).

Recently however, I have learned how to neutralize the lethality of this particular product of Hell’s Kitchen by dousing the entrée in copious amounts of Kraft’s A-1 Steak Sauce. Not only does this take the excruciation out of eating my wife’s meat loaf, it makes it palatable enough to brave going back for seconds. In fact, sometimes it so palatable that I even find myself returning for thirds.

In this world, there are so many companies that claim to take the forefront in combating human misery. As far as I can tell Kraft, the makers of A-1 Steak Sauce, is the only one that has made any progress. I can not begin to tell you how grateful I am that a corporation exists that can turn such a cataclysmic tragedy as my wife’s meat loaf into a product that can serve as the very definition of carnivorous ecstasy. No longer must my stomach rebel when I see that horrible entity gracing the table in my family’s dining room. No longer must I cringe when I see my wife breaking out the bread crumbs. No longer am I reluctant to buy a pound of hamburger at the local grocery store for fear of the culinary catastrophe my wife could possibly turn it in to. No longer do I fear the loaf. I have learned to love it.

I salute you Kraft, and the people that you employ who work so diligently to make A-1 Steak Sauce the pinnacle of greatness that it is. It is because of you that I do not have to fill myself up with convenience store hot dogs before I arrive home on meat loaf nights in order to avoid caving in to my urges to join Fido at the late night drive through window of Café Kitty Katt for a round of feline-furters. You have my sincere undying gratitude.

Best Regards,

J.E.P.
Grand Blanc, MI

P.S. You guys have anything that can take the edge off of broccoli?

Ritch Ratt

2006-03-05T11:07:00.000-05:00

Still working on the new strip (plus Chapter 3 of my novel Acid Pulaski). Here is the latest character, Ritch Ratt, who I will play off as sort of a Bono figure. Obviously modeled after The JEP Report's own Sacto Ritch (though much sexier than the real life version).