THERE'S THAT GUY ...

I always hated when old folks would dispense their idiot wisdom or offer their unsolicited advice with the odious introduction "when I was a kid..."

But now that I've reached the tender age of decrepitude I think I too have earned the right to be tiresome.

  And so ...

When I was a kid people read the newspapers. Damn it - children read the newspapers! They read books, played games, got dirty and if they watched television they watched it with their families.

They even watched The News.

People knew what was going on in the world.

Now in the alleged "information age" nobody knows squat.

Let me rephrase that.

It's precisely "squat" that they do know about - so long as it's some starlet or pop music putz that's doing the squatting.

My grandkids think Luxembourg is a kind of stinky cheese, they can't name a single Supreme Court justice and they don't even understand why the designated hitter rule is such a shamefully deplorable perversion.

There is, however, a silver lining.

They don't believe in god and they have no idea who this guy is:

 

HOW TO VISIT #NEW YORK

When I was a kid back somewhere near the gut of the last century, we didn't get trophies for perfect attendance. If you won, great - if you lost, shut up, don't cry and go home. If you had a birthday party, an event about as common as a total solar eclipse, you invited your friends, not the whole goddamn class.

Needless to say, we didn't have video games or cell phones so at a very early age we learned how to climb trees and how to get home on the bus.

We also learned how to cuss and spit and settle our differences with our fists and our elbows. We didn't assert our position on the social food chain with cute emoticons and cryptic abbreviations typed behind the scrim of a personal computer.

And so it was with great distress that I came face to face with the dire consequences of the contemporary condition of FOMO.

For those of you who still don't laugh out loud or who think omg is a flavor enhancer found in chop suey, fomo stands for "fear of missing out." It is an anxious state of mind brought about by the involuntary impulse to join.

We were in Manhattan recently to see the kids and the wife insisted on seeing some art exhibit by this guy from Burma who hangs taxidermied goats from cantilevered bamboo joists and gives them titles like Mandalay Bambi and Baby Hazel's Hang-up. 

Apparently the critics found the work "exquisitely executed (pun intended?) and eloquently understated". The artist was seen as "an original voice from a new generation of Southeast Asian sculptural virtuosi." One writer even described it as "the most monumental foreign visitor since the Shah." (One can only speculate whether he was referring to the 1962 or the fateful 1979 visit).

In any event, we, like so many others were bullied into believing that to miss out was to be hopelessly consigned to the intellectually unwashed and so off we went like lemmings off a bluff. 

And if that weren't enough we then had to go uptown and have lunch at this new trendy Ethiopian restaurant and wait two hungry hours to get in and eat with our fingers.

My wife ordered the beef kitfo.

I had the goat.

WHY I DON'T WRITE

Long before the personal computer reduced the ink pen to the plight of the slingshot, before telephones became diminutive amanuenses and coffee shops sold coffee and served it in sturdy ceramic cups most moderately educated people knew how to marry a noun and a verb into an enduring and meaningful relationship.

Nowadays the mere garnish of an adjective evokes such undeserved awe it's as if one were witnessing a barefoot Lama levitating to the song of some invisible bamboo flute. What was once a given among the reasonably educated now seems as exotic as a Capuchin monkey riding the rear of a randy Australian dingo.

And speaking of randy dingos, no less of an authority as ol' Wally Whitman reminded us that "to have great poets there must be great audiences." If avoiding the word so at the beginning of a sentence is the measure of a great stylist then I'm afraid the great audiences might be busy somewhere else. 

Why don't I write?

Why don't you tap dance?

THE WORLD JUST WASN'T MEANT FOR ONE AS BEAUTIFUL AS BUCKLEY FRIPPS

Buckley Fripps, date unknown

I knew Buckley Fripps.

Bucky and I go way back - long before the drugs and the booze and the Cousins of Helos.

Bucky wasn't always such a mess but like lots of talented people, he couldn't handle the demands the real world exacted from its most consecrated citizens. 

We'd go fishing together at Tioughnioga Lake and Butternut Creek and nothing seemed to please him more than gnawing on a blade of Kentucky Bluegrass while watching the sun rise over the Tully valley.  

Then came the record deal and his life began to spiral out of control. I think the turning point came when the Cousins of Helos opened for Alkyd in Watkins Glen (not to be confused with the Middle Eastern band El-Khid). It was 1984 and it was easier buying a kilo of cocaine than getting your car washed. 

The rest is such a sad cliché there's no point going over the fine points of his decline. Suffice it to say that by the late 80's and the proliferation of androgynous pop groups like Duran Duran and The PetShop Boys, the public was tired of COH's earnest sound. Bucky got into one bad fight too many and ultimately disappeared into folk/rock oblivion .  

I prefer to remember my buddy Bucky for his great music, particularly the incredibly moving song Freud's Vienna.

A TALE OF TWO WAISTLINES

I might as well just come out and say it:

I'm fat.

Not irredeemably obese but not exactly the ideal guy to sit next to on a plane.

The word fat, so short and declamatory, renders an incandescent condition fixed in a gelatinous fact. It has the odor of earth and the constancy of an archive. We fatties are fallen angels, shunned for our moral lapses and ridiculed for our intemperance. Never mind that we make up this nation's flatulent majority, the way those snot noses in Hollywood would have it we're merely walk-ons in their svelte world of elegance and anorexia.  

On television we're depicted as buffoons, social outcasts, tottering invalids or at best, world-weary detectives nearing retirement. To public policy wonks we're an unnecessary drain on the health care system, a ballast on the economy and a statistic cited as an international embarrassment. (Athough I've personally put several cardiologist's kids through private school).

To me, I'm just a plus-size guy who likes to eat. 

People comfortable with moderation are usually suspicious of the senses. Not us gourmandizing jelly-bellies. We energetically pursue and unapologetically indulge in the infinite variables of gratification. If you've ever made love to a fat woman you'll know exactly what I mean.

 Who in their right mind would deny the bliss of a double bacon cheeseburger, find fault with a french fry or turn down a tiramisu or a hot fudge sunday?

Frozen yoghurt on the other hand?
That's for children and for amateurs.

WHAT'S EVERYBODY LOOKIN' AT?

Going on vacation is terribly disorienting. There is something unnatural about lying half-naked around an overly chlorinated cerulean trough with a horde of strangers drinking watery mai tais and punch. There's a reason why the Lord invented clothing and I think it has something to do with nausea.

The rare possibility of celebrating the proximity of a ripe brimful bosom is more than offset by the greater likelihood of tripping over the hairy anal crack of a hammertoed pensioner with gout.

 Southern California, I recently learned, is about as glamorous as Staten Island only five times more expensive. My travel agent assured me that the sunny shoals of Marina de Rey were abundant with the glittering fanfare of celebrity and allure. Instead the only siren song withing striking distance was the menacing din of the adjacent Los Angeles International Airport.

Between you and me, I'd just as soon stay at home. The food might not be great but it's edible and though my lawn chair doesn't appoint upon a pool at least I'm not surrounded by a quorum of preoccupied peons scrolling all day down their not so smart smartphones.

STEVE JOBS SAVED MY MARRIAGE

My wife has a rotten character. She's moody, selfish and temperamental. She's so quick to take offense that I usually find it prudent to simply nod in agreement no matter what she says.

She has no friends, or no corporeal friends to be exact since her Facebook page flashes and pings like a cash register on Black Monday. She can't cook, or won't, I forgot which, and she doesn't even eat unless you consider potato chips, gummy bears and chewing gum legitimate victuals.

Since the kids have grown our house has become a clammy mausoleum of stale, apathetic inertia. We haven't 'enjoyed' relations since the resignation of Alberto Gonzales, (I remember the date because we had CNN on at the time) and if my wife gives me so much as a peck on the cheek I nervously wonder if it signals the early advent of dementia.

And yet we remain together and our relationship is thriving in the robust, almost scintillating atmosphere of total détente.

Just a few short years ago the stew of silent resentment could be brought to a boil with the slightest provocation. The mere sight of my spouse was enough to remind me of the utter waste and futility of my life. And though resentments remain constant and while they continue to ferment into a particularly rancid stout, they are nonetheless muffled by the deluge of technological mediators. The fusillade of lap-top-hand-held doohickies are the thumb in our collective mouths and they keep the peace and quash contentiousness like an arbitrator with a fist full of Ativan.

Thank you Steve Jobs for your reasonably priced, well-designed and easy-to-use gadgets that help keep my romance alive.

Divorce can be so expensive.