Dead Celebrities

To my credit, I did wait two years. After I figured that the wounds had begun to heal, I tried this one out at a party I was throwing: "What do you suppose John Lennon would be doing if he were alive today? Maybe finishing up another album with Yoko, or even getting back together with the lads?" Then a beat. "Or maybe he would be scratching frantically at the lid of his coffin." From across the room, a rather large young man with many beers in him got up and bumped his rather impressive chest against mine. Though I was hosting the party, I had no idea who this person was who was telling me, "Hey man, that's not funny."
There was a lot of hemming and hawing and I ended up making some vague apology before I slithered off to the bathroom to savor the fact that I hadn't just joined John in Heaven. Imagine that. Actually, when I reflected on it, I assumed that if any person, famous or not, would appreciate that joke, it would be "the smart Beatle." As a result, I have made it a practice over the years to make that same joke about a great many stars who have left our material plane. I consider it, in my own snotty way, a tribute.
That's why, when I read that Michael Jackson earned two hundred and seventy-five million dollars this year, I wondered if passing on wouldn't be the best possible career advice. It also gave much more credence to the notion that someone might fake their own death just to cash in. Elvis made sixty million dollars last year just for hanging around a pet store in Kalamazoo, Michigan. John Lennon showed up on the list by raking in seventeen million the year he turned seventy. That's not AARP money. That's some serious cash.
Maybe it is cruel to suggest that bankrupt artists, either financially or creatively, would fake their own deaths. Maybe it's cruel to joke about it. Or maybe it's better than imagining John, Michael and the King clawing their way out of their own graves and dancing in the moonlight. Happy Halloween.

'Tis The Season

Make no mistake: I grew up in a house that did its best to go overboard when it came to decorating for Halloween. Each year, my mother would allow each of her three boys to pick a scary candle from the selection at the local five and dime to add to the display that grew and grew each year on window ledges and other horizontal surfaces around our house. There was also a big box of autumnal colored bric a brac mixed with countless cardboard cutouts of witches, skeletons, and monsters of every stripe. Each October, it became increasingly difficult to find a spot to place and tape it all.
As a parent, I have taken this tradition and passed it along to my own little family. We have our own box of Halloween, and there is a sense of mild relief that having only one kid means that our presentation is limited by a factor of three. It does mean that my wife and I feel free to carve our own Jack-O-Lanterns to place beside the one my son dutifully creates to decorate our porch each year. We have some orange lights that roughly approximate a spider's web that we hang in one window, but our spectacle is generally limited to our front porch.
That's not the case with some of the houses in and around our neighborhood. There is one house in particular that gets my notice. It should be noted that this is a house where you will find the icicle lights for Christmas hanging from the eaves year-round. And at the end of September, their tiny yard begins to fill up with a wild assortment of ghouls and ghastlies. Not simple cardboard cut-outs, but full-sized animatronic contraptions that pull their own heads off or writhe about on the lawn in electronic agony. There are a number of faux stone tombstones, and a skeletal pirate that guards the front walk. This year they have even added an inflatable black cat that towers some eight feet over the rest of the display. The fact that they are only a hundred yards up the street from my elementary school may have something to do with their mild extravagance. They are guaranteed an audience of three hundred and fifty parading youngsters each years when we empty onto the sidewalk for our annual parade around the block.
By the next week, the zombies and headstones have all been put away again, but the icicle lights are still hanging there, waiting for the first week of December to signal the coming of winter.

Contact

Let's start with the headline: "Romo breaks his collarbone in loss to Giants." To read that, you might expect that Dallas quarterback Tony Romo threw a ball so hard that it snapped his clavicle. Or in some fit of pique, he reached up and collapsed his own shoulders around his neck, causing his collarbone to break. In reality, New York linebacker Michael Boley, all six-foot three and two hundred and twenty-three pounds of him, ran at full speed and landed on top of the Cowboys' field general. Tony Romo, according to Boley, "let out a little scream." This was how the weekend of the National Football League scrutinizing "hard hits" ended. Boley was not penalized or flagged for driving Romo into the turf. This is, after all, a contact sport.
Because, sports fans, it was a "legal hit." We watch the game to see the extraordinary physical feat: the fingertip catch, the ninety yard runback, and yes, even the occasional teeth-rattling "snot bubble." As long as it's legal. That's what made Brett Favre the man he is today, hobbling about, throwing interceptions and grimacing in pain, but still almost leading his team to victory. It is what we are paying him to do.
Of course, speaking of "hits," we aren't paying for him to hit on female employees of the NFL. This kind of contact will get you a call to the commissioner's office, and maybe a few game's suspension. Contrast this to the six to eight weeks that Tony Romo is expected to miss as a result of the on-the-field activity he found himself in, and you wonder just exactly where the priorities of our great nation have fallen. Ben Roethlisberger, quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, received a six game suspension for sexual assault. Not on him, but by him. This ruling was then backed off to just four games, because he was "contrite."
For his part, Tony Romo was contrite as well. With his arm in a sling. Michael Boley? He'll be showing up on highlight reels for the next few days.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

It happens every so often. You sit down on the couch to cheer your favorite team on, and whoops, it seems as though your favorite team didn't bother to show up. In a vague, physical sense, they are there, but they don't seem to have any kind of vested interest in what is taking place around them. Which is too bad, since there's not much I can do from my couch but sit, slack-jawed, and watch the evisceration take place. That's what happened last Sunday in Denver. The Broncos gave up three touchdowns before I had settled into my proper viewing position. They gave up those three touchdowns to the much detested and loathed Oakland Raiders. I tried, in vain, to get my family interested in sharing my pain. My son looked at the score and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "Dad, I've got better things to do." I watched it all unfold like a slow motion train wreck. How could a group of professionals show up so woefully unprepared? Were these two teams so horribly mismatched that someone should have simply thrown in the towel at halftime?
That's what I'm starting to feel about the Democrats in the upcoming elections. My team seems ill-prepared at best to do what it takes to win the game. Nothing that I have seen or heard makes me think about switching parties or crossing the line to vote Republican, but I keep wondering why it is that my party seems so ready to simply drop back five, and punt. Just two years ago, we won the Super Bowl, right? I understand that repeating that success is a tough road, but the Denver Broncos did it once upon a time. Bill Clinton too. If you're a true fan, you don't just hop on the bandwagon of another team, but maybe you wonder what is going through the coach's head, or where the quarterback might be playing next year. And while you're watching the massacre, you might find yourself wondering the relative competitiveness of the rest of the players on your team. Are they content to play out the string, or will they rise up and give it their best effort when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys. I don't know where I'll be then Rock, but I'll know about it, and I'll be happy.

Not One Of Us

One of the things that I have always taken solace in is the way certain celebrities have the ability to appear in our world as "just plain folks." The suggestion that Bruce Springsteen drives his kids to school just like any hard-working New Jersey dad helps me make sense of the world. Knowing that the guys from DEVO met in art school and used their collective nerdiness to become one-hit wonders gives me hope for my own collective nerdiness. It is my absurd wish to relate to those in the public eye that keeps me renewing my subscription to Entertainment Weekly.
Then there's the other side of the coin: Katy Perry and Russell Brand were married in a traditional ceremony last Saturday. In India. On a tiger preserve. With horses and sitars and elephants. I remember when I was planning my wedding with my soon-to-be-wife, and for a few minutes, we considered a Disney wedding. Then we realized that we were shopping in a realm that was at least a decimal place higher than we were likely to cough up. So we looked into getting a horse on which she could make her entrance. We finally settled on a Dodge convertible. We skipped the tigers and elephants, too.
Then there's the marriages that have lasted and lasted, like Mick and Keith. They've stayed together for fifty years. For his part, Mister Richards insists that he has been able to maintain his calm in the eye of the hurricane we call fame the old fashioned way: heroin. There were sitars, but there was no word on whether the Brand/Perry reception included any pharmaceuticals.

Batting Cleanup

There was a work day at my son's school this past weekend. I have lost track of all the times I have shown up at various public schools, the one at which I work and the ones my son has attended, on a weekend. Sometimes I fix things. Sometimes I clean things. Sometimes I pull weeds. Most of the time I wonder what I'm doing there.
Five days a week, your traditional work week, I roll my bike into my classroom sometime around seven thirty in the morning. I don't tend to roll it back out until after four in the afternoon. These aren't the ten and twelve hour days that I used to put in when I used to run a book warehouse way back in the twentieth century, but they're full days. Those thirty-five minutes of "duty-free lunch" provide the only quiet moments in what can be best described as a marathon. When Friday afternoon comes, most of us teachers are headed for the door and not looking back.
But not all of us. There are those, myself included, who understand that schools don't magically reconstitute themselves over the weekend. Even the most dedicated custodial staff can't keep up with all the wear and tear that buildings and grounds take over the course of a school year. It takes a little extra help to keep things up and running. That's what parents do. That's what neighborhood volunteers do. That's what teachers do. On the odd weekend when you can round up enough dedicated hands, you can put your school back together again.
That's when my wondering stops. I know why I'm there. It's a public school, and I'm part of the public. Wouldn't Horace Mann be proud.

If You Build It, They Will Come

The deaths of Barbara Billingsley and Tom Bosley marked the passage of an epoch. White America was already given notice that by 2050 they will no longer be in the majority, and now Mom and Dad are dead. Of course we're angry. Angry and afraid. All these foreigners keep showing up on our doorstep, wanting a piece of our apple pie. What little solace we might have taken from the notion that the world would end in 2012 was shattered when we found out that we weren't that good at reading a Mayan calendar after all. Now we're stuck with this ever-churning melting pot, soon to become just another minority.
And so, while the clock continues to tick, we who are Caucasian sit and stew in our own juices. Bitter and frustrated with the way that our country has become a repository of the world's huddled masses. Why should we care if they're yearning to breathe free? It was some chick who stuck that poem on the front of the statue given to us by the French that started all this touchy-feely stuff in the first place. This is our country, after all. We cleared all the Native inhabitants off pretty much all by ourselves, thank you very much and now we'd like to be able to sit around and enjoy it for a couple hundred more years without having to worry about any other languages or religions or cultures beyond the amusing and comfortable mash-up that we've all become familiar with over the years.

Angela Merkel understands. As she told a gathering of the Christian Democratic Union last week in Potsdam, "The approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other ... has failed, utterly failed." Her sentiments echoed the a study from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation that found more than thirty percent of people believed Germany was "overrun by foreigners" who had come to Germany chiefly for its social benefits. This thirty percent were probably not Germans "of color." The study also found that thirteen percent of Germans would be happy to have a new "Fuhrer" to run the country "with a firm hand." Some sixty percent of Germans would "restrict the practice of Islam," and seventeen percent think Jews have "too much influence," according to the study. The study does not mention whether or not sales of brown shirts have gone up as well.

And the Germans are not alone. Last year, the Swiss voted to ban the construction of minarets in their country. The French may have missed the boat on the whole Coalition of the Willing thing, but they have been more than happy to get on board with banning headscarves and other "conspicuous" religious symbols in their schools. I assume that means they won't be getting any visits from the Pope anytime soon. We're building a big wall on our southern border. No word on whether we will call in any German architects for consultation on that one.

In the meantime, we can sit in our bunkers, having fever dreams about the Beav's little friend from Mexico, Chuey, and how Arnold's was really owned by Mister Miyagi.