Lost in Boston

Sometimes, very strange things happen to people who don't deserve the punishment.

Late, late, late on Saturday night, little brother calls me on his cell phone. He's lost, somewhere outside Boston, in the rain, in the dark, trying to get back to Rhode Island.

I have never been to Boston, never been anywhere near it.

But somehow he assumes I can help him. Or at least comfort him until he runs out of gas.

I pull out the only thing of use that State Farm Insurance ever gave me, a well-worn Atlas of the US.

We spend the next 45 minutes trying to figure out where on the map he is, then getting him off the toll road he drifted onto, when he somehow missed the I-95 interchange. Repeatedly, he has to be convinced not to take various side roads.

He finally makes it back to the freeway and I wearily hang up. Two hours later, the phone rings again, just as I have finally managed to get back to sleep. Another side road has been taken and he is lost again.

Out comes the atlas again and he is once more directed back onto the proper road.

I have a family reputation as a great navigator. It's a survival skill, developed growing up in a military family where my world changed completely every three years.

I am -- justifiably, I think -- quite proud that I successfully managed, with only an atlas to assist me, to help brother safely find his way from somewhere I've never been to somewhere else I've never been either, in the middle of the night.

It's not that's he's brain-dead. He's a smart boy. He makes five times as much money as I do, at a very prestigious job. He's just not a navigator, I suppose. He came to maturity after dad had retired, and so he didn't have to handle such upsets.

As for me, today I am very, very tired. Which makes Monday even more horrible than it usually is.

People who can't spell shouldn't post signs.

People who can't spell shouldn't post signs.

Because people with chronic editor-itis like me can't stand to see your sloppiness shoved into the public eye.

Somebody today was either trying to put a building on the market or publicly announce the gift of it to his lover/mother/sister/female companion.

What else am I supposed to think about a 'For Sal' sign?

Yes, I realize grammar and spelling, unlike science, are absolutely arbitrary -- mere human conventions. But if you're human, you should probably observe a few human conventions.

Learn when to write its, as opposed to it's. Your and you're.

And I won't have to restrain myself so hard from ripping your sign down to relieve my agony.

Bemoaning the Big Bans

She stood outside the bar, talking with a friend. I sat in my car, counting down the minutes until I needed to head across the street for a certain freelance interview.

After a moment’s passing, she reached in her bag and withdrew a cigarette. My pulse quickened. I am a capnolagniac, as those who’ve suffered through my blogs know quite well. I love to see a woman enjoy a cigarette.

Suddenly, I didn’t care anymore what time it was. I put away my copy of Ovid, in which a thirty page introduction by some smarty professor was driving me crazy, since I speak about as much Latin as your average Sherpa and the dude sprinkled it joyfully and liberally amongst his already over-my-head prosery.

A click of her lighter and she had her cigarette a-burning. Then she exhaled a great stream of smoke so thick and creamy that I could see it all the way across the parking lot where I was.

In a heartbeat, the breeze battered and blew it away.

Such a sight is so rare these days, and viciously maligned when it does occur. An inhale that intense, to launch such a celestial stream of smoke, had to deliver a mighty jolt of pleasure. And it had to be summoned by a woman who did more than dabble in the fine art of fumery.

In the days before The Big Bans, she might have been allowed to smoke inside, not exiled to a seedy parking lot to satisfy her need. Thank heavens she had that burly-looking friend with her.

Some guys, seated beside her in that bar in those more relaxed days, would have moved away in an angry huff if those sweet lips had turned his way and bathed him in such a beautiful exhalation.

Needless profanity might have been uttered. Foolish hands would have waved it away.

Chances are, that woman might go a lifetime without ever meeting the sort of fellow who, greeted with such a misty salutation, would find his heart thumping; his respiration quickening in hopes of capturing said smoky greeting; his soul melting; and his voice, if he dared utter a word, squeaking like a scrawny teen suddenly French-kissed by the school Homecoming Queen as she passed him in the hallway.
But we do exist. Ladies, we do exist. And we’d hitchhike across the world in the hellstorm of Armageddon and ride to Kandahar in a dune buggy with three functioning wheels and a broken clutch, driven by a terrorist with a blood alcohol level five times the legal limit, and punch out Bin Laden himself if he had the world’s last cigarette hidden in his cave and you were craving it.

Blog ruminations

So I've done this blog thing for a couple months now -- and find it to be both frustrating and yet satisfying.

I'm a writer, cursed from childhood with the urge to scribble my thoughts, whether the world gives a damn or not.

I have written my thoughts in little notebooks about virtually every book I have read in the last ten years, like some stupid kid unaware that I'm out of school and don't need to do that anymore. Hello -- anyone home in there? (Sound of echo heard within empty head).

I've kept a journal for twenty years and counting, 99 percent bird poop and maybe one percent intelligent thoughts.

I've written a weekly column for a local newspaper for ten years.

I've badgered my way into writing articles for local magazines.

And still I seek more ways to punish myself.

Thus, this blog. In here, I can be almost 100 percent honest, because if I ever get crushed by a tractor trailer on some bad day, or summon the courage to pay some hotel room escort to blow her cigarette smoke at me until I die in ecstasy from a secondhand nicotine overdose, no one who knows me will ever know this blog even exists. They'll have to satisfy themselves with only the far less juicy scribblings in my journal.

But a blog is work. Some bloggers seem satisfied to just write and write and never get any comments from anyone. They don't even care to reply to the few that trickle in by chance.

Me, I crave comments. I open this blog everyday hoping for the Christmas present of a response. Sometimes, Santa forgets to stop by my computer.

You see, a blogger has to work for his or her responses. There are tens of thousands of blogs out there and who in hell has the time to sift through them all, the dross and the gold?

So you have to visit other blogs and actually read them and make comments and hope that someone will eventually become curious enough about their commentator (commentor?) to follow you back to your blog.

And then, if you keep working on the blog-to-blog relationship, you find a friend. And then you have to be careful, because in the cyberworld, nobody can see you smile. Or wink. A little joke can seem an insult. And that friendship can die in a splat of miscommunication, as quickly as a bug on a windshield.

P.S. This post is dedicated to Lance (toughmindwarmheart) and Adena, (ilovesquishingants) the first two enablers of my blog addiction. Smart folk the both of them. Blogs worth your reading.

Obedience School for your inner Genius

Some Roman once wrote of the poet Ovid:

"He would have been a better poet if he had controlled his genius instead of letting his genius control him."

I have pondered and pondered that sentence but it still makes no sense to me.

Any thoughts?

Winner of the best response gets a certificate for ten days free obedience training for his/her inner genius.

Do you feel like a man?

I should not ever listen to Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and that song of theirs about domestic violence:

"Do you feel like a man, when you push her around?"

Because it makes me want to hunt down the kind of guy that actually does feel that way and deprive him painfully, with whatever instrument or object I can find at hand, of his manhood. Or maybe just beat him senseless.

Which is, of course, two wrongs trying to make a right. Violence begetting violence.

So instead, I will simply advise any so-called man out there who believes he has any right whatsoever to dictate any demand to a woman; to blame her for his bad moods; or to lay one finger upon her with the intent to cause pain:

You are a pathetic loser, the weakest of the weaklings. Get help. Get it fast. I don't care if you saw your daddy hurt your mother, or your boss at work is mean to you, or your IQ is too low for you to come up with better options for your free time. If you were a real man, you'd go punch a grain sack to get your anger out or just take a long walk.

My father had a rotten childhood with a chronically angry father who was no role model whatsoever for him. My father is a real man. He's put that behind him, broken the cycle, and he does not abuse my mother. He treats her like the gold that she is. If he can do it, you can do it. Stop making excuses.

Because eventually you will go too far. Little bruises will become big bruises and you will go to jail, where you belong, God willing, and you will be very badly hurt or maybe killed in there and no one will feel sorry for you.