Valentine's Day--Blegh

When I was a child I used to love Valentine’s Day. My mother would bring home a box full of paper Valentines, which I would sort through and then decide which of the lovely lasses in my class would get the “best” ones. And in truth, when you get a Valentine they are all the best, unless someone sends out one that is particularly snarky.

But in the end they all wind up being a variant of “Be Mine, Valentine,” it’s just the pictures that are slightly different. And so I would plow through the box giving one to Cathy, and one to Joanne, and one to Mona. But always the first ones went to those special girls; the ones who could make you smile just by sitting at their desks or standing around on the playground.

In those early days before the girls started building their cliques in middle school, it was fun just to hand out the cards. For me, who believe it or not was rather shy, it was a simple matter of leaving them on the girls’ desks. Sometimes I didn’t even put my name on them.

But there were always a few special ones. Everyone had their own Denise K. or Kathy D. I am sure, and that’s how it was for me. Sure no one takes those things seriously when you’re in the fourth grade and it always seemed odd how the girls would count their cards, as if keeping score. The girl with the biggest stack was the winner, at least in terms of popularity.

Over the years I grew out of that sort of innocent sentimentality. Life and to some extent further education drove a bit of the sentimental expression out of me and out of my mind. I became more interested in understanding the idea behind love and not the idea of love itself. Valentine’s Day became relegated to the back lot of the holiday bin in my brain. And so it stayed for many years.

At that point something very odd happened. I was finishing up graduate school at Hollins University, working on an MA in English Writing. Jackie, my wife, and I had been dating for a few weeks, and for the first time in years it seemed like I might have a viable relationship that might make it past the three-week rule. Most men know that rule, three weeks with a girl and then you disappear.

It’s almost like a buffer. If you hang around more than three weeks, it’s like you have made some sort of tacit agreement to try to keep the relationship going. God knows we men don’t want to get caught up in a long-term relationship like that.

We started to date in January of 1987. At first it wasn’t too serious, she would tell you even today that she thought I was too short and might make a better boyfriend for one of her girlfriends. And that’s pretty much where we were when I left Roanoke for a couple weeks to attend, among other things, my brother’s wedding. So when I came back and we got together again we were approaching that three week point.

Now if you know Jackie, you would know that she loves all those holidays. Birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas are all hallowed days in her book. They are meant to be revered and celebrated. But over the years, like Scrooge, I had drawn away from those kinds of events, although I still like to celebrate St. Patty’s Day but that may be due to other influences.

Shortly after I got back from Florida that dreaded holiday rose up on the calendar. Valentine’s Day. To me that year it seemed more like Commitment Sunday at church. It was the day to commit. At first I wasn’t too sure if suicide was part of the equation, but I wrestled with the idea of not just whether I should get her a V-Day gift, but what it would mean if I did.

You wouldn’t think that something so simple would have that big of an impact. I had always been very blunt about things and could easily walk away from anything pretty much anytime I felt like it. And that was the choice I faced. If I chose to buy her a gift I felt that was pretty much committing to a relationship. If I didn’t, then I should just walk away and go find another pretty face in the crowd.

For a person who had lived most of his life alone, it was a tough decision. I labored over it, even right up until the hour before we were to meet that fateful day 27 years ago. Finally I figured out what I had to do and went to a nearby department store and picked up a pair of relatively cheap Teddy Bear earrings. She probably still has them.

Sure it wasn’t a diamond, but it was a symbol of my commitment. Remember, I was not a very sentimental person. I wish I knew whatever it was that drove me to make that decision, because as things turned out it was the best decision I had made in my life. I would have never thought our relationship, or for that matter any relationship involving me as a principle, would have turned out as well as this one did.

So to Jackie, Happy Valentine’s Day, and now you know the rest of the story.

Blogger saves Groundhog Day

Late Friday night after putting the finishing touches on my Colonial Heights vs Prince George basketball story for the Hopewell News and while readying myself for a long winter’s nap, I heard the unmistakable whine of my emergency services cell phone. I knew it was trouble, because it rang my special ring tone reserved for national emergencies.

You see, unbeknownst to many people, yours truly is often called in when those in charge are at their wits’ ends about some project or issue that is particularly cumbersome, difficult, or just plain ignorant. Let me assure you, no one is better suited to handle ignorance than me. If you don’t believe that, I offer as proof a second opinion from my wife, Jackie, who has known me for nearly 30 years.

“It’s true,” Jackie said. “When it comes to ignorance there’s no one like David.”

See, I told you so.

Anyway, here I am after midnight on a chilly Friday night when the cell goes off with my “We are the Champions” ring tone blasting. Nothing like that old Queen lullaby to let me know this is an important call and that I may be pressed into emergency duties right away. So it looks like there might be no sleep for me tonight.

Quickly, I stifle the ring tone and press the cell phone to my ear.

“Yes?” I say with a tad bit of tribulation in my voice.

“Is this you know who?” a vaguely familiar voice crackles through the speaker.

“That depends,” I state affirmatively.

“Well, this is Bob Roberts up at Gobbler’s Knob in Pennsylvania,” he said.

My mind races to put those two thoughts together. Bob Roberts? Mmmm, I think. Then it dawns on me, Gobbler’s Knob in Pennsylvania is the home of that most prestigious of prestidigitators the one and only Punxsutawney Phil. Quickly my mind spins what could be the problem? Why would Roberts be contacting me at such a late hour with dawn coming and Phil needed to perform his miracle of setting the seasons back two weeks?

“Oh and how might Phil be faring these days?” I ponder aloud.

“Well, that’s just it. Phil is in dire straits and in six hours it’s going to get pretty bad up here on the Knob if we can’t get things back in order.”

“How so?” I say.

“Well, we aren’t certain exactly what is going on, but for some reason we can’t get Phil to come out of his burrow. We are living on burrowed (sic) time ourselves right now, with the dawn getting ready to break and all. If Phil won’t come out, we will be the laughing stock of Pennsylvania,” Roberts declared. “We need your help and we need it yesterday.”

“Well, you know, I’ve been pretty busy myself. Action heroes can’t just sit around loafing the day away and waiting for that next emergency. I mean, it’s not like that hero stuff goes on every day. Most of us have to keep a day job in order to make it to the next calamity,” I explained.

“Well, I know it can be hard, especially in this economy,” he said. “But we really need you to come up here and get us out of this bind we’re in.”

Amazingly, Roberts knew exactly the right things to say to me to evoke my sense of patriotism. Something certainly had to be done. Somehow, some way we had to get Phil out of his burrow. At the time, I had no idea how we might make that happen, but I knew my services were needed and that the country, democrats, republicans, tea partiers, and Trekkies alike were in dire need.

“I’m in,” I said.

“Great, we have a chopper on the way to get you,” he said.

It’s quite a way from Colonial Heights to Punxsutawney PA, in case you didn’t know. Punxsutawney is north east of Pittsburgh. In seconds, the helicopter landed in front of my house like a medevac chopper. In no time at all, I was aboard and we are off on our way north by northeast.

No one talked as the chopper clipped along at a solid pace and we sat in our own thoughts. It seemed like it only took minutes to get to Gobbler’s Knob. We were out the door before the chopper’s skids touched down. We hadn’t much time and the vague hints of dawn were already cresting the mountain ridge to the east.

“Hi Bob,” I said. “What’s the plan for getting Phil out of his digs?”

“We were thinking we might be able to get him out by scaring him,” Bob said.

“Scaring him? Are you sure that’s the right way to go about this?” I asked

“Sure. You should see him scramble when the sun comes up. He’s nearly impossible to hold onto when he sees his shadow. If you saw that you would understand why it might mean six more weeks of winter,” Bob explained.

“Ok, so what should we do? I think some fireworks might work,” I offered.

“Oh, no nothing like that. He might get hurt and we can’t have that,” Bob said. “What we thought was that a really huge ground hog might get the job done instead.”

“Oh, so you want me to go find some gargantuan ground hog?” I said.

“Well, not exactly,” Bob said. “Step into my office.”

Inside Bob’s office I noticed a huge rug on his desk. It looked like a cross between a bear skin and a 1920’s raccoon coat. No one needed to explain anything more to me. Bob wanted me to stand in for Phil, plain and simple. Bob would hold me up and I would look around for my shadow. Great idea, I thought.

“Here put this on,” Bob said.

“But Bob, I can’t do that. It would be a forgery, it would be a lie, it would damage my reputation. It would change the psyche of the American public forever. No sir, I cannot in best conscience stand in for Phil,” I said, declining what I thought he was suggesting.

“Stand in?” Bob said. “We never thought of that at all. We just thought that if you donned that suit and walked up to Phil’s burrow the thought of you climbing in would frighten him and he would dodge out of his escape hatch and we could catch him.”

Anyway, that’s the real story behind Punxsutawney Phil declaring an early spring last Saturday.

Lost In Space

Historically speaking when most countries enter the space race their initial payloads often include monkeys, chimps, or other kinds of animals to test the viability of aircraft or whatever it is that interests them regarding their dabbling in space flight.

Russia, which took the early lead over the world in the so-called space race, got dibs on the first animal in space as they sent up a dog, called Laika, on Sputnik 2. Once the rocket landed and the Ruskies realized that no one wanted to clean the capsule most countries veered off into using monkeys or some other kind of ape-like creature in their off planet voyage experiments.

That’s what led the US into using, at first Rhesus monkeys, which reportedly are very similar to humans and are renowned as the source of the RH factor in humans that deals with positive and negative blood types. In the early days of US Rocketry there were many accidents. Dozens of these poor Rhesus monkeys died during the experimental process. Sometimes the rocket would explode, other times the monkeys had a hard time landing them and would crash, still others suffocated due to poor ventilation.

Eventually, groups like the SPCA and early predecessors of the renowned PETA organization of today stressed NASA to such an extent that they resorted to using chimpanzees. Despite reports, Cheetah, the famous movie chimp from Tarzan movies of the 50’s was not chosen to chimp one of those early capsules. Instead, NASA employed Ham and Enos for the dangerous tasks. It’s interesting to note that in this case science resorted to two Biblical names for their chimps; obviously such a thing would not be permitted in today’s society where science and religion are kept separate for much the same reason that one keeps their matter and antimatter in separate locations.

Anyway, we, that is the US, and the Ruskies started this path of sending animals out to scout out our missions before we would think of sending a human into space. But eventually, we ran out of specimens to execute and had to resort to humans. Reportedly, there is no truth to the rumor that Bonzo and his assistant, some guy named Ron Regan, were the final US representatives in the early space probes.

Russia was first to put a man in space sending Yuri Gagarin up on Vostok 1 on April 12 1961.  Not to be outdone, the US followed quickly by sending Dr. Timothy Leary into space shortly thereafter, and to one-up the Russians Dr. Leary accomplished the feat without using a rocket. That record has yet to be broken, although many dropouts have made the attempt, especially in the late ‘60s. Wikipedia, where much of the data in this article comes from, reported that a rock and roll group was the first to record an album on the far side of the moon as early as 1973. That feat was accomplished four years after John Lennon and the rest of the mop-heads made the first lunar landing in the Sea of Tranquility on July 21, 1969. Contrary to other reports, Buzz Lightyear was the first man to land, and return, from the moon.

Other countries have since attempted to get on the lunar express, as it were. Argentina entered the race in December of 1969 in a feat they called Operacion Navidad when they used a two-stage Rigel rocket to send Juan Valdez into outer space. His space vehicle only made it 60 kilometers into the air before striking an odd looking man in a red suit riding some kind of space sled. The resulting loss of oxygen sent Valdez on his way to being a coffee bean inspector for the National Federation of Coffee Growers in Columbia, where he was killed in a crossfire between Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega, at least that’s how I remember it.

Also entering the space race recently were France, Spain, India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and our neighbors to the north, Canada. It took the Canadians a long time getting there because the McKenzie brothers, long lost members of the Rhesus monkey family, flatly refused to go without a decent supply of Molson’s Ale.

As you can see, getting in on the space race is the thing to do if you are going to be seen as a credible country in this day and age. So it doesn’t come as a surprise to hear from Iran that they too have entered the race. And, as did so many of those late comers before them, they too opted to send a monkey on their first trip to the firmament. In keeping with the good political form of the United States of America let me be the first to congratulate President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and wish him a happy return.

Roast Goose: the new Scarsdale Diet

No doubt about it. Something has to be done with the proliferation of these illegal alien Canadian geese. It’s not so much their taking over the small ponds and lakes in the area as much as it is their attitude that the world, or in this case the traffic around Southpark Mall in Colonial Heights, must stop and wait for them.

They force you to stop and wait while their squadron passes in review, all grey and black with the white neck stripe, marching in lockstep. And you have to stop. If you don’t, they start attacking your car and pecking at the door panels and fender wells… err, don’t ask how I know that.

Anyway, these illegals are dining on food that would normally go to some good old American ducks, like mallards, mergansers, or cormorants. It’s appalling. They are supposed to be migratory birds, and yet they refuse to migrate. I think they are just lazy and don’t want to fly the rest of the way to Hudson Bay or some other area of the great white north. Still, you would think they ought to get some kind of green card or something in order to stay here.

So what to do about our local goose problem? Simple.

Google goose and see what happens.

Well what happens is that someone already has come up with the perfect idea. In Scarsdale, N.Y., home of the original Scarsdale Diet, they were tired of having to deal with loud, aggressive, and messy geese. So the town officials decided that sometimes the old-fashioned way of dealing with geese is the best way.

Yup that’s right, the people in Scarsdale have started a new diet fad and it revolves around geese. According to CBS News, there have been all kinds of complaints about the geese from their droppings to the fact that they have actually attacked some people. Apparently, the USDA has offered to bump off the flock and then haul the carcasses to The Food Bank for Westchester.

No question such draconian measures have riled people on both sides. A group called the Friends of Animals states that killing the geese would be both brutal and a waste of tax dollars. But some of the local inhabitants assert that knocking off the geese is the right thing to do, because they are really annoying. The story online even has a link to favorite goose recipes, so you know where the Internet comes down on this argument.

Truly, we have much the same problem right here in good old Virginia. And, it’s not just at Southpark Mall. Once while driving on Puddledock Road I was forced to stop and allow three phalanxes of the birds pass by. I am sure everyone has their own favorite place where the illegal invasion is being carried out.

For me, I kind of like the Scarsdale diet plan. In fact, with all the hungry and homeless in the Tri-Cities bolstering the local feeding programs with some nice, fresh goose meat would more than likely be welcomed by everyone.

I’m certain it wouldn’t take too much to get Colonial Heights City Council to go along with the idea. Think of how it could play out, the local bow hunters would have an opportunity to ply their trade with something other than the deer in your back yard, the local police would be able to practice shooting live targets with their handguns in and around the Wal-Mart area, and anyone else who might be interested in taking it to the Canucks would be welcome to give it a try.

In reality, it isn’t much different than the Python Round Up the state of Florida is sponsoring this month. But, in this case, we get the side benefit of feeding the hungry and the homeless.

Win-win I say. Except if you’re a goose.

But then if the geese were a bit better behaved they wouldn’t have gotten themselves into this kind of a bind. Too bad people don’t eat seagulls.

All the world's a critic...

So what’s a guy to do when his job is to be a critic? All day long, and, in all honesty, pretty much all night long, too, all I do is point out things that aren’t exactly right. It’s the downfall of being an editor (good or bad), a movie reviewer, an English professor, or anyone whose main existence revolves around pointing out deficiencies.

I have been writing for money since 1982 and over the years have developed an eye for writing that is not exactly correct. I would say that it bothers me, but it really doesn’t bother me much. In fact, all it really does is provide insight into the workings of the writer’s brain. That’s how it turns out good or bad.

I don’t really have any feelings, per se, when it comes to reviewing language and correcting an errant verb or adjective, or perhaps a comma slipping out of its appointed place. It’s just what you do. But it does make things tough at times.

When I was in college, one of my instructors told a tale about MFA student writers vs English Ph.D. candidates. The writers, who don’t like to adhere to such stilted guidelines as rules, called the Ph.D. candidates “Feds,” like Federales, or the FBI, or G men, but G men may be giving them way too much credit.

They were the writing police, the thought police, and the people who come to criticize a writer’s endeavor merely because they don’t like the construction or they spot a slipping modifier. Typically, they are accused of a lack of creativity (which is inherently true), as they lambaste someone’s creative work because a word is misspelled or due to some other unpardonable grammar sin. Such is the life of the sedentary grammatist, not grammarian.

When it comes to writing, or really any other subjective work of art, such as a painting, a play, a movie, there will always be the Siskel-and-Eberts of the world. Someone always wants to toss the first tomato or lettuce head or even just some kind of disparaging word.

The idea behind criticism is to lob your vindictive commentary not at the author, but rather at the work itself. So in essence, you can say that you are not particularly fond of the way Michelangelo created Judgment Day, the fresco that adorns the wall of the Sistine Chapel. You can say the colors are bad, or the imagery is off, or that it’s just out of balance or whatever. But can you really separate the works from the author? While we may be attempting to identify a fine line, there also may not be a line to identify.

My point is that a work of art, even at the lowest levels, is so intrinsically tied to the author that any disparagement of the work tends to land squarely on the head of the author. If the author’s vision of the world doesn’t in some way meet our vision of the world, why then we as critics don’t like it and tend to dismantle it.

It really doesn’t take much to prove that point. For instance, how much did it bother you when you were in grade school, and even to some extent college, when the teacher graded your papers with a red pen? Did you feel that the ink was in some way your own blood spilled on the paper? It’s ok, most people feel that way. It’s why, when I am forced to critique someone’s art (writing or other types of art), I veer from using red ink.

Ultimately, criticism, as applied to the world of art, is more about opinion. And opinion is about aesthetics and to some extent knowledge of the subject. In essence, it is the science of judgment and taste as it relates to that specific idiom, whether it is writing, painting, acting, film making, or any other endeavor that can be construed as art.

It really doesn’t matter what a person’s background is. Everyone develops their own sensibilities when it comes to taste, and they apply their taste to whatever they encounter in life and the result often amounts to “I like that” or “I don’t like that.” Only critics, however, take the time to try to express in words what it is they like or don’t like about a particular thing. So they go on record espousing their opinions about this or that or the other. And truly, it doesn’t make them right or wrong. An opinion cannot be nailed down like that. Opinions are personal perceptions of things in general. And for that, you can take them or leave them.

So too is criticism. It’s the opinion of someone who may or may not be an authority on a subject. You may find that the critic’s opinion is somewhat similar to your own and then you may find it is nothing like your own. Either way, you make a decision and go with that. Wait a second! If you make a decision then you yourself actually become a critic, at which point nothing we’ve been talking about really matters.

Never mind just ignore this treatise and have a nice day.