What's Your Beef?

Some things I feared when I was working at Arby's: Getting stuck on "maintenance" for the third week in a row. "Maintenance" was a catch-all job that required the employee involved to scrub down the entire back room, a kitchen/walk-in freezer/office combo, and washing all the dishes from the day's beef preparations as well as being on call at a moment's notice to show up at the front counter with a smile on to help any sort of customer rush that might occur. Another thing that we all learned to have great and abiding respect for was the razor sharp circular blade of the meat slicer. It could slice a sponge in two with just a whisper of pressure. My wedding ring covers the scar I carry from the one moment I forgot to respect the blade. The last thing that I truly feared while working at Arby's were the words "tour bus." On semi-frequent occasions, a great diesel-powered machine would roll into our parking lot and disgorge its contents of teen choir members or junior soccer players. Dozens of them. All at once. Into our lobby that had just been cleaned and suddenly that slow time after the lunch rush that was going to be used to catch up on all the prep work and maybe even get an early start on maintenance was gone. We took two to three customers at a time and got them served in two to three minutes, as our roast beef Jedi training had taught us. Until it was over. And then we went scurrying about, trying to catch up to the point where we were when there was no tour bus in our parking lot.
The list I just gave you did not include "having a police officer come into the restaurant." If anything, that would have been a relief. As a matter of fact, having an older brother in law enforcement allowed me to serve my share of officers, on duty an off. If you work fast food long enough, you welcome the periodic appearance of someone with a badge, since it tends to limit the possibility that your store will be robbed during that transaction. There was a story about a manager from the Arby's on the other end of town, run by the same owners, who was working late one night when her crew was held up. Jo Ellen, a legend already in the company because of her dedication to all things roast beef, came out of the back room to witness the beginning of the crime and, legend has it, she talked the guy out of robbing the store and since he had obviously fallen on hard times, maybe he wouldn't mind taking an application with him as he left. Jo Ellen didn't need a cop. Her husband worked in a dynamite factory. She had no fear. The rest of us, however, were happy to have the company in blue.
Which makes me wonder why the drive-thru crew down in Florida would take the chance of offending anyone who might come to their aid. The comment made about "not serving police officers" was "just a joke," according to the beefy powers that be down in Pembroke Pines. The furor set off by such a prank caused the national office to issue the following apology: "We take this isolated matter very seriously as we respect and support police officers in our local communities. As soon as the issue was brought to our attention, our CEO spoke with the Police Chief who expressed his gratitude for our quick action and indicated the case is closed. We will be following up with our team members to be sure that our policy of inclusion is understood and adhered to. Further, we will be following through with disciplinary action up to and including termination of the employees involved, as appropriate." And this reminds me of yet another piece of my Arby's lore. We used to number our punchlines so that we wouldn't get into trouble for saying anything off-color in front of our ravenous public. Instead of saying "that's what she said," we would just sing out, "three." We didn't have a number for "we don't serve police officers." Maybe because it wasn't funny. 

Letting The Air Out

Justice grinds slow for some. It took three years to find James Holmes guilty of the murders he committed in that movie theater in Aurora. For many, the six months it took to determine if deflated balls were the reason Tom Brady should be kept out of professional football was six months too long. There are a few who believe that life in prison for Holmes was a rush to judgement. There are probably just as many or more who believe that Tom's deflated balls should have kept him off the field for at least four games instead of the zero which he was eventually sentenced. Let the punishment fit the crime. Letting air out of footballs is a crime punishable by an extraordinary amount of media attention followed by a collective sigh as the show that is the National Football League is reassured that it must go on.
Which is kind of the way it turns out that a plea of "no contest" will be held against someone if they beat their four year old son until they are bloody. Adrian Peterson missed an entire season of playing football, along with the four thousand dollar fine and eighty hours of community service. That was a year ago. Now Adrian is back and, if you can believe the pre-season hype, he's better than ever. This was, by the way, an unpaid leave of absence from his job as a professional football player. Even though he only got to play in one game in the 2014 season, fans voted him one of the hundred best players last year. I guess character isn't the thing that attracts a lot of attention for some.
Third degree aggravated assault on your fiancee will potentially get you five years in jail and a fine of fifteen thousand dollars. If you happen to be Ray Rice, you won't do any jail time, and after a seemingly protracted debate that took place in the court of public opinion and TMZ, Mister Rice was awarded three million dollars and change in a settlement with his former employer: The NFL. What will Ray be doing this year? If you read the sports pages, he's just the guy to fill in when your star running back goes down with an injury. Or if he beats on their child or fiancee. Or if he deflates balls. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so it follows that ridiculous times call for ridiculous measures. Justice is blind, but who knew she had such a short memory?

Heaven And Hell

The nature of our reality sometimes rests on a very thin edge. Sometimes we think that we are making choices that will change the course of our lives and those around us. Sometimes we feel like those choices will make a difference to the course of human history. It's the personal version of the Butterfly Effect. In this model, the decisions we all make are the flapping of the butterfly's wings and the rest of the planet is the hurricane fast approaching. Can one person's flapping really change the course of that cataclysmic storm bearing down upon us?

Or, if you were to take a more spiritual view of things, would you believe that by denying gay couples wedding licenses in your official capacity as a county clerk, could you stem the tide of this nutty old world on its course to fiery Armageddon? That is what Kim Davis believes. She invoked "God's Authority" when she defied numerous court orders when she turned yet another gay couple down when they came to the offices in Rowan County to prepare for their nuptials. Kentucky? That sort of makes sense, but now it's a law upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States and all.  Her attorney, Mat Staver who is founder of the Christian law firm Liberty Counsel and is representing Ms. Davis in her bid to refuse marriage licenses said, "She has found herself in a situation she never envisioned." Never? Well, maybe not back before she was born again, and all that authority that she was suddenly granted because she and God have this understanding now seems pretty clear. For her, "It is a heaven or hell decision." For whom, exactly, is not completely clear, but it could be interpreted that by denying gay couples the opportunity to wed, she is keeping us all safe from damnation. Or is it just her?

Just down the road a piece in Tennessee, a seventy-six year old man killed his wife in a disagreement over church tithe money. Norman McKinney shot and killed his wife because he was certain that she had hidden the money he had planned to give to his church. Apparently he had not read the whole set of Ten Commandments, or maybe he just skipped one since he felt he was operating with "God's Authority." According to authorities, there was no hidden wad of cash. Just a whole lot of confusion and bad feelings. 

Keep flapping, little butterfly. 

Date And Time

Somebody get me a calendar! This is 2015, right? We are living in the twenty-first century and we have devices in our pockets that allow us to connect with others across the globe at a moment's notice, providing they have paid their bill. We fly from one continent to the next with contempt for the fact that we can't use those cellular devices while we do so. 2015, and we have a twenty-four hour view of the world that keeps us up on all the world's events, including who got bumped from Iron Chef. We drive around in hybrid cars, smug in the way we are saving the planet, and then cheer when gas prices fall below three dollars a gallon so we can drive more. We have the technology to create longer-lasting batteries that could power any number of life-saving devices and we insist that they put them in those cellular devices that we can't use on the giant sky bird in which we fly to other continents using fuel that we should have given up decades ago.
2015.
Right here on this blog, I complain bitterly when Americans shoot one another. Sometimes by the dozen. I try and understand what sort of madness would possibly feed the beast that makes such horrible things happen. When innocent victims are killed for standing near someone when they go off and create another tragedy for the United States. And wonder why the media won't let it go when I can't shake it myself.
2015.
This past weekend, Boko Haram gunmen on horseback galloped into three villages in northeast Nigeria. Sixty-eight people were killed in Borno state Friday night and another eleven were shot in two other villages on Saturday and Sunday. Not by the dozen here in Nigeria. By the score. Nearly four score, if you need an easy American conversion. Boko Haram, if you are unfamiliar, is an Islamist extremist group operating in Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and their home base of Nigeria. Maybe they're not getting the press that some of those other flashy Islamist extremist groups, but they're out there, wreaking havoc like you might expect an Islamist extremist group to do. On horseback. In 2015. Welcome to the future. Where everything is the same. Only worse.

Don't Fall Asleep!

If he wasn't in the horror film business, it would have been a shame, but that's what Wes Craven chose to do. He did it like a champ right up until this past weekend when he passed away. Brain cancer got him, which begins to make me wonder about the nature of horror and horror movies. What is more horrifying: A horribly scarred ex-janitor with knives for fingers or having your own cells turning into vicious killers attacking you from the inside.
Inside your brain.
Kind of like the dreams that attacked the teenagers in Wes Craven's Nightmare On Elm Street series. More than thirty years ago, he decided to unleash Freddy Krueger on our collective unconscious. For three decades, moviegoers like myself knew that they were safe as long as they didn't fall asleep. Sure, it became a little more difficult over the years to devise new and different ways to chop teenagers up in to tiny bits, but that didn't slow him down. For that matter, each time Freddy was put through the mill or turned into dust, he popped back up again. Because of the gross. Not just the ticket sales, but because of the gross.
Wes started out in 1972 with a cult classic Last House On The Left. This is where he began working his not-so-subtle vision on the world. Along with Tobe Hooper a couple years later, Wes was pioneering a genre that would eventually become "the slasher film." Eventually, Mister Craven became so immersed and familiar with this brand of gore that he turned the camera back on itself and produced the Scream series. Once you knew and understood the rules, it was possible for teenagers to grow up and star in yet another series of films created by this master of splatter.
I always admired his work, at least for the first couple movies in a row, but then the formula would grow tired. To me. Wes didn't care. He knew there was always another kid waiting to see his first scary movie, and that was the ticket he wanted to sell.
I'll miss Wes Craven this Halloween, not just for the movies that he made, but for the number of Freddy Kruegers and Ghostface masks that haunt our playground year after year. Timeless. Aloha, Wes Craven, you really stomped on the Terra(fy).

Permit Required

We were out to dinner, my family and I, and the conversation turned to college. This makes a lot of sense, since I know a kid who is about to head off to college. That would be my son. At some point, if we are together for more than twenty minutes, the talk will turn to tuition, or study time or parking permits. We have a couple weeks left to get every piece of advice and a bucket full of helpful hints out of our heads and into his. The clock is ticking. We can all feel it.
Still, when the smoke cleared and there was a pause in the action, we didn't stray too far from the topic at hand. For the first time that I can remember, my son asked his parents, "What did you major in?" This is coming from a kid who is about to unpack his bags in a school where he will be majoring in theater arts, essentially keeping his parents' liberal arts dream alive. My wife went into some great detail describing her own created major: Myth and the Western Mind. Her senior project was a comic book. Her journey through academia was as winding and circuitous as many I have encountered, including my own. When my son turned and asked me, "What did you major in, dad? Creative writing, right?"
He was right. Though the path to that eventual Bachelor's degree was not as direct as those two words would suggest: "Creative Writing." For the record, I didn't make that one up. It was the way out of school when I had spent nearly six years there. If I didn't graduate then, I might be there still. As a freshman, I enrolled at Colorado College as a studio art major. My faculty adviser was my Basic Studio professor. I took that class, and a whole bunch of Art History because somewhere in my mind I had a vision of going to work for Disney Studios.
That never happened. Before I finished off my freshman year, I had given up that particular dream and was leaning toward literature as a new focus. I moved on up the road to the University of Colorado, where things came in semesters instead of blocks, and I became one of thousands of undergraduates searching for direction. After a few years and a bunch of film classes, lit courses and creative writing workshops, I made m way to an academic adviser's office. He looked over my credits and told me that if I had an interest in graduating, I should stop taking film classes and lit courses and creative writing workshops. I needed a music theory class and some science to round out the scattered mess I had created. Then I could graduate with an English degree, with an emphasis on creative writing.
But first, I had to take a short detour by jumping out of a swing, postponing my summer school while I recovered from knee surgery and eventually crutched my way into the Fall semester where I took those two classes, passed them, and in December 1986 I commenced out of there with a diploma. You are currently reading the most apparent product of my degree. Writing. Creatively.
What awaits my son as he plunges into the waves of higher education? Time will tell. Hopefully, as the guy who is paying for the parking permit, it won't be too much time.

Misspent Youth

I truly felt for my son. He was sitting on the back deck at our house with his friends, the ones with whom he will be very soon making the leap to the hyperspace that is college. They had spent an afternoon hanging around in the living room, dusting off Nintendo classics like Smash Bros. and Wii Sports. When I showed up, after a hard day of elementary school kid wrangling, it was refreshing to see a knot of teenagers hanging out together in a spirited but low-key fashion. I took a turn myself on Guitar Hero, reliving my own glory days on medium. Part of me wanted to play on, and hang with the kids in the living room, but I knew that my wife had just finished making dinner for everyone and I didn't want to be the one who kept us all from eating. I got a plate and headed to the deck, where there was no TV and it was ten degrees cooler than the video game hot zone.
Eventually, my son and his pals finished off their virtual manipulations of reality and got their own chicken, pasta and broccoli. They made their way outside to join my wife and I in a very pleasant and familiar way. It felt good to be sharing a meal with this group of kids we had seen grow up and graduate together, on the verge of the next great adventure.
At some point during the meal, conversation drifted from Wii to current events. Suddenly I was in the midst of a full blown, emerging adult discussion of the upcoming and ongoing presidential race. Somewhere in the flurry of opinions espoused by these incipient voters, one voice began to ring out against the generally left leaning views of the rest of the group. One of my son's friends, whether through commitment to the ideas or simply playing devil's advocate, was taking a modified libertarian stance. With courage and conviction, since his girlfriend was sitting squarely on the opposite side of the ideological fence, he worked himself and the rest of the group into a mildly tumultuous frenzy.
That is when my son's wheels fell off. It was reminiscent of many years gone by, at birthday parties where his fabulous plans for gatherings of his friends turned into the chaos that childhood allows. He could feel his job as cruise director slipping away. "Can't we all just go back inside and play Mario Kart?" Try as he might, there was no way for him to break through the rhetoric being tossed about our back yard that evening. He was stuck with these opinionated, newly-minted adults. Play time would have to wait until gun control and the Republican nomination strategy could be ironed out. My son finally retreated by himself to the living room where he took solace in the brightly colored images of his youth. Eventually, his proto-libertarian friend came and joined him, while the other two ideologues remained outside to hammer out the direction of their generation's plans for world reclamation.
I look forward to hearing stories about my son's first late-night bull session where he and his suite mates hammer out their feelings bout global warming and dorm food, but I hope there's a place he can go: a retreat. Something with lights and sound that reminds him of days gone by.