Beware!

The Food and Drug Administration is gearing up yet another version of warning labels and advertisements to try and encourage people to stop smoking. Polite assertions such as "Cigarettes are addictive," and "Tobacco smoke can harm your children" are taking over where the Surgeon General's urging left off. Back in the 1960's it used to be enough to simply remind folks that "Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health." Just like playing hopscotch in a minefield may be a bad idea as well.
It is interesting to me that after all these years we still feel compelled to save ourselves from our worst impulses. "Caution: Do Not Ingest." What about the people who forgot to bring their thesauruses and fail the synonym test. "Oh, I don't ingest nothin'. I just hold the smoke in my mouth." And there are plenty of hardened nihilists that tell you that breathing will kill most of us soon enough, so why not toss a little nicotine and menthol in on top of your daily oxygen intake while you're at it? Scary pictures and dire warnings are good for people who believe them, but if you're sixteen and invulnerable, you don't stand a big chance of getting through with a bunch of x-rays of shriveled lungs.
I suspect that you could make the entire package a warning label that said, "This will kill you," and you could still sell them for five dollars a pack. This is coming from a guy who enjoys a cheeseburger and a Coke on a fairly regular basis, and who has been known on occasion to make a cellular telephone call. The list of things that are bad for you has long since gone past my full understanding. It keeps growing every day. But the fact that I have never bothered to have a cup of coffee or a cigarette in my life makes me think that it might be possible to live forever. Then I could start to fear all those smokers using their last breaths to come and do me in out of spite. It's always something.

The Power Of The Radio

Perhaps if I started with the dream: I had chosen a small crawlspace for my path to the back porch where the soda was stored. I had even gone so far as to open the latch to the door when my father stopped me. He said that if I were to go back there I might disturb the crash site. The plane crash site. It was a disturbing enough moment, since it was my father warning me away from the wreckage of someone else's downed aircraft, or maybe it was his. It was a dream, after all.
When I awoke, I was suddenly reminded of a song. As far as I know, I only heard it once on the clock radio that sat beside my bed in my room at my parent's house. Two round dials, one for tuning and one to tell the time. There was a knob just below the clock face that you could twist to the right to get an hour of radio as you drifted off to sleep. I did this most every night, falling to sleep to the hits on KIMN. On one particular night, I heard a song that made it hard for me to sleep. Impossible. It described a bloody plane crash in some detail, and afterward I called for my father, whose bedroom was just down the hall. He came directly, the light from the hallway following him in. He sat on the edge of my bed and listened patiently as I described my torment. He seemed a little skeptical, but stayed and listened to another three or four songs. "They're all about three minutes long," he consoled me. "You'll probably be asleep in just a few more."
So he sat there, and listened as the sounds of seventies AM radio filled the dark room. Sure enough, somewhere in there I dropped off, just like he said I would. The next night, I stared at that knob a long time before giving it a twist. I didn't know what might come out.
I have spent a good portion of my life since laying awake. I never heard that song again, but it was stuck somewhere deep in my cerebral cortex. I tried to describe it to a number of different acquaintances, who were able to remember plenty of teen tragedy songs, but none that featured airplanes.
The morning after my crawlspace dream, I asked the only person who knows everything: Al Gore. After a few minutes of pointed searching, I came up with "DOA" by Bloodrock. It includes lyrics about blood flowing and hitting something in the air. Speaking of hit, the song made it all the way to number thirty-six back in 1971, which explains how it found its way onto my radio that dark and stormy night. Twenty-five years later my father died in a plane crash. It was nice of him to comfort me way back when, and to show back up now to help me unravel this knot of insomnia.

Listen, And You Shall Hear

Sarah Palin's summer vacation continues: "He who warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and, um, making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that, uh, we were going to be secure and we were going to be free." This is how she chose to describe Paul Revere's ride during her stop in Boston. Perhaps Longfellow was not required reading at any of the five universities she attended. Perhaps reading was not required at any of the five universities she attended.
This could be part of the reason her vision of American history is so skewed, or it could be that she hadn't looked into the truth of the matter: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" nearly one hundred years after the event. It was written as the United States stood on the brink of civil war. It doesn't have anything to say about the midnight ride of William Dawes, who made the ride to Lexington as well, taking a slightly different route. And there was Samuel Prescott, who managed to complete his ride without being captured by the British, as Mister Revere was. Alas, both Prescott and Dawes lacked the necessary meter and scansion.
Now here we are, a hundred and fifty years after the publication of Longfellow's myth, and Silly Sarah is still unclear about both fact and fiction. How is it that she continues to be considered anything but a font of comedic straight lines? Her grasp of our national and international scene continues to be tenuous at best, and she continues to string us all along about whether or not we should take her seriously as a candidate. If she's running for President of the Historical Society, she'll have to work a little harder to get my vote. In the meantime, brace yourselves for another flurry of blaming the "lame-stream" media for twisting her words and making her appear foolish. I don't thing even Longfellow could save this one.

Big Wheel Keeps On Turnin'

A co-worker helpfully pointed out last week that I had "missed" National Bike To Work Day. I suspect what this person meant was that I didn't make a big deal about it. There was no parade. There was no fanfare. On the morning of May 20, I got on my bike and rode to school. At the end of the day, I got on my bike and rode home. There was no parade. There was no fanfare. It was just the way I got to work.
The part of the crisis in education that has gone unreported until now is this: If I were to change jobs, I might have to change my commute. Sure, I know there are plenty of alternatives, but this is the way that I have always done it. When I became a teacher, I started biking to work. Fourteen years, one hundred and eighty days a year, two miles there and two miles back. If you don't have your calculator handy, that comes out to be about ten thousand miles. Even if you take out the occasional day when things needed to be hauled or jury duty or other interruptions to that string, I would still add back in the days I taught summer school and weekends when I came in to do a little clean-up. If the circumference of the Earth is just about four thousand miles, and there was a bike path on the equator, I would be around two and a half times by now.
As another Bike To Work Year draws to a close, I have to admit that there have been days when I wished for a cushioned ride in climate-controlled comfort. But that doesn't keep me from being pleased about the low-cost, low-stress way I have made my way to work over the past decade and a half. I don't know if all that smug keeps me from being classified low-emission.

Nice Ink

Jim Tressel quit his job on Monday. Things must be pretty tough around his office if he picked the next to last day of the month, a holiday no less, to give his resignation. It must be doubly bad considering the unemployment rate around the country, especially in the Midwest. The now ex-coach of the Ohio State Buckeye football team must not have been too shy about the publicity, since he picked a day in sports just after the Indianapolis 500 and just before the NBA finals were scheduled to begin. I guess he figured things couldn't get much worse.
He of the dapper sweater vest/tie combination has decided that it's best to get out of the way, rather than being swallowed up by the ugly storm that is about to drop on his football program. Well, it's not actually his, anymore, is it? If he had acted in his own best interest once upon a time, he might not have lied about his part in Tattoogate. His players received cash and discounted tattoos from a local establishment, and he knew about it. Then he lied about knowing about it. Then the e-mails that described what he knew surfaced and he went on vacation. When he came back, he typed up his resignation.
It could have been the very same keyboard on which he once authored his book, "The Winner's Manual: For The Game Of Life." With chapters entitled Faith, Responsibility, Discipline, and Excellence, it should give him some excellent opportunities to reflect, especially the chapter about Handling Adversity and Success.
The proud image of Ohio State football is now sullied by this tawdry scandal. Of course this is the same program that gave us the legendary Woody Hayes. And maybe Jim will use this time to go shopping for some different color sweater vests, kind of like Pete Carroll did when he got out from under the USC axe just before it fell and landed a job in the NFL. Or at least get that Brutus Buckeye tattoo removed.

Buzz Kill

A group of American doctors urge kids and teens to avoid energy drinks and only consume sports drinks in limited amount. How many electrolytes does one actually need, anyway? "Children never need energy drinks," said Doctor Holly Benjamin, of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who worked on this new report. "They contain caffeine and other stimulant substances that aren't nutritional, so you don't need them."
Need them? Since when was "need" the concern? I thought the whole idea of being a teenager was to see what the limits of your mind and body are, then push just a little harder. It is certain that the makers of these drinks are not targeting the thirty-year-old demographic with their Monster and Rock Star beverages. They are after the kids who can sleep until noon the next day after a binge. Doctor Holly recently saw a fifteen-year-old boy with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who came into the hospital with a seizure after having drunk two twenty-four-ounce bottles of Mountain Dew. When I was a kid, the ad campaign featured hillbillies insisting that this recipe that resembled Prestone in color would "tickle your innards." It was the drink of choice of my high school marching band because it had been determined that the caffeine level was higher than Pepsi or Coca-Cola. If we had access to Red Bull back in those days, we would have insisted that the vendor put an additional button on the machine to give us one more choice: More Red Bull.
Jolt Cola on the other had, was something that I was able to find in great abundance during my college years. It brought me up while Miller Lite brought me down. It was self-medication in its purest form. What do the doctors say? They say that water is still the best way to quench your thirst. But what's the best way to cram an entire semester's worth of American History in your head over the course of one night? If you have to ask, you're too old, man.

Whisper Words Of Wisdom

Of course I'm nervous about my son entering into the fast-paced hurly-burly world of dating. I am bound by sacred oath to the Secret Society of Parental Semantics not to call it that: dating. Just like I am honor bound never to speak of my son's after school activities as "playdates." I know that fourteen is far too young for anyone to begin the odyssey that will last a significant chunk of his or her lifetime. The confusion, strategies and heartbreak that await him in wave after wave could wait another year, at the very least.
I waited until the end of my ninth grade year for my first date. Convention stated, in those days, that junior high school was grades seven through nine, and as a line of demarcation, the ninth graders were encouraged to go to the final dance of the year, which was called "Prom." Never mind that we had to get our parents, or in my case my older brother, to drive us from place to place. Never mind the fact that we had only recently been given the real truth about male-female relationships in health class only months before. We were ready. Or at least that's what we thought.
I had never been to a dance at my junior high prior to that night. I had heard stories. I had never been to a party outside of the neighborhood birthday cake and balloon fests that had been the staple of my youth. But I had heard stories. Couples were formed at these events. Making out was done. I had no tangible notion of these concepts, save for what I had heard in the hallways, but I was certain that it was the next stage of my development.
And so my mother took me out to buy a new shirt. A very shiny polyester garment with plenty of multi-colored stripes. I eschewed the traditional sport coat in favor of my older brother's black leather jacket. It fit a little like Tony Stark's first model armor, and made sound like a saddle. It was the look I was after.
There were six of us in the station wagon: three couples who had been friends for the past three years, and now we were carefully paired off in hopes that romance would naturally ensue. Or at least that is what the young gentlemen assumed. I know now that the emotional weight that I had put into play after spending a nine happily platonic years with the girl down the street made every moment a struggle, even without my brother's bulletproof jacket.
Here's the truth: Even without any prior experience, I simply assumed that something magical would occur. Throughout the giddy dinner at the local Italian restaurant to the horribly awkward moments upon arrival at the gymnasium when it suddenly became apparent that we were expected to dance at the ninth grade dance, prom or not. In the years since that night, I have become much more relaxed about expressing myself in this mode, but I was in no way prepared to trip anything close the light fantastic. Like a tiny child clinging to the edge of the swimming pool, I watched as others dived right in as I hung in the shadows, waiting for my moment to come.
I had heard so much about these dances, and how they always ended with "Stairway To Heaven," I felt as though I could bide my time and take my cue from the mighty Led Zeppelin. But that didn't happen. Instead, it was announced that the last dance would be "Let It Be." I had waited long enough. I don't remember now what clever way I used to ask my friend who just happened to be a girl out onto the dance floor. I know she felt a similar obligation, but neither one of us could give voice to just how clumsy this all felt. And so we found a spot, somewhere away from the swirling crowd and began to sway rhythmically to Paul McCartney imploring us over and over to "Let It Be." I didn't get the irony back then. Subtext was not my thing at the time. I had this amazing friendship that I was pushing to its logical extreme, and I could feel myself sweating and all the while I never could quite open my hands. They stayed clenched in tight fists as we gamboled about the gym floor. When the song was over, I stood up straight and the lights came up. It was time to go home.
My brother was waiting for us outside, and we dropped off the others in girl-boy order until it was just the three of us. Me in the back seat of the station wagon with the girl I had known all through grade school and junior high, and now it felt like we were on the edge of a cliff, with high school waiting below in the abyss.
And at this moment I choked, perhaps both literally and figuratively, but I know that I did not manage to walk her to the door and get that magical goodnight kiss. The moment came and went without me doing anything about it. There was no music cue, no hidden director in the bushes feeding me lines.
I spent the rest of the summer trying to sort out my feelings and manufacturing a way to make it work. It never did. We stayed friends. We still are. She was the one who pinned my boutonniere on before I went out and married my wife, who started off as a very good friend of mine. And now my son is heading out into these same waters, with his mother and me watching from the shore. Bon Voyage, and don't be afraid to Let It Be.