That's The Ticket

As I sat there at my desk, watching the time tick away on the lower right hand corner of my screen, I busied myself with a game of Freecell solitaire. I tried to keep my attention on the descending red and black order without clicking away to the window just behind the game where the Ticketmaster site lay. Taunting me. There were still three minutes left until Bruce Springsteen tickets would go on sale, and I was exercising all the restraint I had over my obsessive compulsive disorder by not refreshing every few seconds. What if the clock at Ticketmaster was just a few seconds, or even a minute, off of my own?
This was my line. There was no one to my left or right with whom to commiserate. Just me and that screen. No one to talk to about the achingly slow process of waiting. No one to share stories about shows I've seen or lines in which I had waited. Lonely. And focused.
When ten o'clock arrived, I refreshed one more time and hit the newly appeared "find tickets" button. As the whirly graphic attempted to hypnotize me into believing that they would return in "less than three minutes" with my requested three tickets. And whirled. And whirled. Until at last there was a new screen that asked me to type in a confirmation of the swirled letters that appeared in a box. Back in the olden Select-A-Seat days we sometimes had to wait while a person rejiggered their printer or reconnected to their computers, but you could watch them do that from just across the counter. Here I was typing in a secret code that made me wait yet again, just at the moment when all seemed right with the world. Suddenly, the clouds parted and there they were: three seats, near the back, in the upper level. Three hundred and forty-eight dollars with convenience charges. The convenience of sitting in front of my home computer and anxiously awaiting this moment. I clicked on "confirm." Then another round of confirmation processes, and finally an e-mail was sent, telling me of the fifteen minute experience I had just shared with their severs and how in seven to ten days this virtual would become real in my mailbox. And so I wait.

Sweet

Care for a little light reading? Why not check out the most recent issue of the scientific journal Nature? Aside from the usual discussions of coral reefs and the pharmacological landscape and therapeutic potential of serine hydrolases, this is where you'll find out the truth: Sugar is bad for you. According to the researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, it is so bad for you that it should be regulated as strictly as alcohol by governments worldwide. These clever science-types propose regulations such as taxing all foods and drinks that include added sugar, banning sales in or near schools and placing age limits on purchases. Yes, one day you may be asked for I.D. before you buy a Twinkie.
At least that's what the unsweetened minds at UCSF would like us to do. In the United States, more than two-thirds of the population is overweight, and half of them are obese. About eighty percent of those who are obese will have diabetes or metabolic disorders and will have shortened lives, according to the UCSF authors of the commentary, led by Robert Lustig. And about seventy-five percent of U.S. health-care dollars are spent on diet-related diseases.
Oh sure, now you're going to bring statistics into it? How am I supposed to enjoy my American lifestyle without all the things that make it so sweet? I know. Carrots are good. Raisins are nature's candy. But I want my high fructose corn syrup, thank you very much.
But in moderation. More than a decade ago, they came for the soda machine in our teachers' lounge. At the time there was a great hue and cry: How can we possibly get through the day without boosted levels of sugar and caffeine? Couldn't we have some nice juices or Sierra Mist, just to ween us off the hard stuff? Nope. If the kids can't have it, neither can we. This prohibition hasn't kept teachers from sneaking in the occasional Coca-Cola in their lunch bags, but for the most part we're doing fine in a sugar free environment. Of course about once a week I have to shake down some kid who has smuggled a Hershey bar on campus, and while I put off my thoughts of longing, I toss the partially melted remnants into the trash. No candy at school.
Sigh.
Because I also serve as the PE teacher one day a week, I have to remember that sugar, in the wrong hands, is evil. Pixie Sticks, for example. Once we win the war on drugs, we can get to work on the next frontier. Good luck.

Super Star Wars

I remember the first time I cared about the Super Bowl. It was the year of the Orange Crush. It was the year of Red Miller. It was the year that the Denver Broncos finally made it to the last game of the season. It was also the football season that came directly in the wake of the first Star Wars movie: "A New Hope. " What better vision to take into this contest, with the scrappy underbroncs battling the Evil Dallas Empire. What shot did we really have against Darth Staubach and the rest of the Texas Stormtroopers. At that point we hadn't even found our Luke: John Elway. It was difficult to sit and watch the hopes and dreams come to such an ignominious end.
Young John Skywalker led the team to three Super Bowls in four years, redefining the margin of loss with each appearance. Sometimes the Force needs a little bit of help. A Wookie. Or a running game. Something. Between those three defeats, I began to catch the zeitgeist of the Super Bowl. The spectacle wasn't wasted on me. I began to watch games that didn't include the Denver Broncos. Imagine my surprise when, after I had moved to California, the Jedi managed to put together a win. Then they slapped another one right on the back of that one just in case anyone wasn't watching the year before. In the meantime, I watched them all. I still feel for the Buffalo Bills, who have been so close. The same goes for the Minnesota Vikings. I find myself pulling for the underdog most of the time, purely out of habit.
Lately, the games have become much more competitive. That's good news for me, who watches the game, and good news for the television networks that sell the ads that pay for Bruce Springsteen and The Who and Madonna to show up in the middle of all those very expensive commercials to connect with a demographic that doesn't really care about them. I suppose in this analogy, that would make Madonna Sy Snoodles.
I'll be the guy on the couch.

For What It's Worth

You read a lot of whining here about how tough it is to be the parent of a teenager. I am that designated whiner. I can relate to all those parents who struggle with the ups and downs of the roller coaster of adolescence. It's a tough ride, but even the highest peaks and lowest lows have some bearing on the finished product: an adult that you can look at and say, "Well, that was all worth it." I know this because these are the words my mother uses to describe the years we spent, periodically, going head-to-head. Looking back, I wish that I could have been a better son. I wish that I could take back some of the things I did and said. But now that it's all over, it seems as though it was all worth it.
Which brings us to the sad case of the fifteen year old who killed his parents. It's not the first time something like this has happened, nor will it be the last. It is the first time that we knew the kid and his parents. Not our best friends, and it had been some years since we had crossed paths: middle school and high school came along and our paths diverged. Still, we found ourselves around the dinner table remembering when. We remembered when we took this kid along to the movies. We remembered how, even at the end of elementary school, this kid was very clear about what it was going to take to be popular. We remembered how his parents had let him play video games rated "M" for "Mature." We tried to make sense of what had happened. Along with the rest of the people who had any connection to the family, we tried to make sense.
How could this have happened? Did they make the right choices? Was there anything that could have changed this sad story? Why do bad things happen to good people? We went to bed that night with a quandary that outshone the worries about a math grade. We woke up with the lingering effects of a restless night's sleep. We woke up with fresh perspective. We went back to the work of raising our son. Sometimes it's difficult, but it's worth it.

Roots And Wings

My son is interested in getting into the movie business. His cousin has a friend who has written a short film and wants to cast him as the funny-but-wise buddy of the guy who is falling in love. Not the lead, but an important role. My son chatted up his potential director about the screenplays he had been working on. "Man," said the twenty-three year old director to my fourteen year old son, "If you keep that up, by the time you're my age, you'll be a beast."
These were very heady words for my son, who has been lurking around the edges of show business for most of his life. His parents write: short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, this blog. For many years his mother and I have worried that our son would grow into the engineer he had always imagined himself to be without ever stopping to smell the roses of the liberal arts. When he drew, he drew pictures of cars and machinery. Getting him to write was an assignment, and even then it took a good deal of coercion to move him off of his minimalist stance. Until now. Where we once had to admonish him from staying up late, poring over books full of schematics and specifications of various makes and models of automobiles, we were now having to go in and take away his laptop. "Aww, just five more minutes," he pleads.
He is writing. And now we find ourselves in an amusing parental conundrum: Where he was once on a straight and narrow path to a lucrative career as a designer of electric vehicles or Lego models, he is now teetering on the edge of a life in the arts. What does the responsible parent do? In our case, we back up and give him room. Like the time that he thought he might tie balloons to his arms so that he could fly. We were there to cut the strings off before they cut off the circulation completely, but not before he had given himself a chance to take to the air. And later we can write about it.

Occupy The Shark Tank

They guy on the radio had it right. He was grumbling that the Occupy Oakland movement had "jumped the shark." If you're not familiar with this term, it comes from a syndrome in which a situation comedy has used up all its ideas and has put on water skis in order to jump a pool of man-eating fish with the hope of revitalizing its tired storyline. A leather jacket helps. In the case of the Occupy Oakland brain trust, they seem to be stuck in a mode where confronting the police is their best trick, combined with a liberal amount of vandalism and property damage. The shark tank this past weekend turned out to be Oakland's City Hall.
The protest march swarmed around the downtown area, and besides trashing City Hall, the mob attempted to trash the YMCA as well as trying to take over the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center with the intention of turning it into a homeless shelter. Somewhere in all that chaos is the seed of a good idea: Turning unoccupied buildings in to shelter for those in need. If you stop on the way to spray paint public property and burn flags in the lobby of City Hall, you might not get the kind of support a more relaxed gathering would engender.
It is important to note that the Occupiers in Oakland are one of the very few slivers of the movement that refused to embrace non-violence in their platform. Consequently there have been plenty of special guest agitators who have shown up in this city by the bay to get their anarchist ya-yas out. Meanwhile, Oakland continues to sink further into debt and an overtaxed police department continues to be stretched beyond their means. The ninety-nine percent will continue to repair, clean up, and go back to work and eventually pay a disproportionate amount of the tax dollars to fund those reparations. Meanwhile, Fonzie dons his face-covering bandanna and heads out for another evening of mischief, high above the shark tank.

Crash Test Dummy

It will be several months before the Costa Concordia will be moved from its rocky resting place off the coast of Italy. And so there it sits, a reminder of just how wrong things can go when you try and put a hotel out to sea.
Maybe I should be more forgiving. I have suffered my share of vehicular collisions. They occurred predominantly in my youth and were my fault. I dropped a truck off the side of a mountain road. I pulled my Vega out of a parking space in front of an oncoming car. I merged the front end of my Volkswagen bug with a tree. I walked away from all of these wrecks. The cars I drove were not so universally lucky. Totaled the truck. The Vega had to be towed away for multiple repairs. I pulled the fender off the front wheel of the Volkswagen and drove it home. Between myself and the insurance company, I took care of my messes.
Years later, when I was employed by an office furniture company, I was periodically called upon to drive much larger vehicles. This included a twenty foot long Mack truck. A big diesel monster with air brakes. I did what I could to maneuver myself out of the driver's seat whenever I could, but every so often there was nobody else to go and move the truck. Or take it down to the recycling center to drop off all the debris we had generated from this or that installation. Or drive it back to the warehouse in rush hour traffic. And here's the frightening part: No one ever asked about my driving record. I would have been happy to confess my prior impacts and my relative level of embarrassment as a result.
Nothing bad ever happened. The next time I heard a crash was when another car leaped from the curb and insinuated itself into my passenger door. I was on my way home from working at the book warehouse. This was another job, a different state and years later. This one was not my fault. At first I didn't know how to react. My instinct was to apologize, but that went away abruptly when I felt a wave of indignation sweeping over me. Where did this moron get his driver's license from? K-Mart? What was going through his head besides air? Who was going to pay for this?
Which brings me back to the captain of the Costa Concordia. I wonder if anybody asked about his prior driving record. I wonder if his insurance is going to cover the salvage operation. At this point, I'm guessing he wishes he would have stayed on board. Or handed the keys to the First Mate.