Is it weird that this made me think of puking?

While I’m fairly certain that the creators of this friendly, colorful sign did not intend to infer that we fill a bucket with our own vomit, I also don’t know what they were inferring. Are we to be filling buckets with cheerful hearts and stars? Where does one obtain these shapes? Why should we go through the effort of collecting them only to toss them into some bucket? It strikes me as a silly waste of resources.

Perhaps I dismissed the vomit intention too quickly. There is a real possibility that some chipper person created this friendly sign as a reminder to barf info a bucket every day until it is filled. While the thought is sickening, it is also uniquely memorable and would likely do much to combat our nation’s obesity epidemic. Given this meaning, the floating stars and hearts likely symbolize the awful room-spinning nausea that accompanies barfing. The smile on the bucket, meanwhile, indicates the willingness of such buckets to receive our waste as well as the sweaty relief following disgorgement.

It seems there can be no doubt as to my school’s intentions with this sign. Evidently they want buckets to be brimming with chunky, multicolored vomit every day as part of our learning environment. While I can’t say that I fully understand the merits of such a policy, I intend to carry it out vigorously. If nothing else, I am a team player. If I can best serve the school by wretching over a bucket until my morning Egg McMuffin comes surging out, then I will do so with vigor and cruelly excoriate anybody who questions me on this or who fails to fill a bucket themselves.

Glad we solved that mystery. Buckets up, everybody!

I’d spend my days savoring the sweet moments of youth, bathed in a perfect golden haze. My simple, heartwarming charms would be accompanied by a twinkling piano and the dulcet tones of a smiling, fleshy-voiced narrator.The warm nostalgia would flow so thickly that it would make Tom Bosley blast his genitals off with a shotgun (if he weren’t in the grave already).

Intercutting the images of me plucking ripe apricots would be mouthwatering close ups of savory jams being spread generously on perfectly toasted bagels. On and on, the jolly narrator would blather about natural ingredients and the tangled lineage of Old Man Smuckers while I smeared the Jelly of Life across my bare torso and thighs in sensuous slow motion. Viewers would smile warmly as I convulsed in syrupy bliss and the elderly narrator would ofter a soft chuckle at my unnatural perversion.

Then the music would swell, and in wistful ecstasy I would scream out:”SMUCKERS! I GIVE MYSELF TO YOU!”

The camera would pull out, a jar of Smuckers would appear, and in the distant, hazy background I would become one with a pile of strawberries.

That’s the perfect existence, right there. Of course, my Smuckers commercial would be assailed as an abomination against God and science, causing networks to reject the ad and driving angry, sledgehammer-wielding mobs to smash and smear every last jar of Smuckers on earth, but it’d be worth it.

Smuckers: It’s worth getting fired or divorced for.

Don’t you just want to mutilate them?

The arrogance of those people really gums up my guts. I hate how they’re constantly disparaging others and how their moist, fleshy tongues anxiously lick the spittle from their lips. I think it’s so rude the way they never really listen to other people and the way their ill-fitting shirts hang open at the bottom, exposing a hairy bowl of corpulent belly skin.

I think it’d be terrific if we could just hang those people from a bridge overpass.

Have you ever noticed that people who are arrogant and smug are also usually the same people who smother bunnies to death with American flags? What kind of sick political statement are they trying to make, anyway? I wish those people would just give us a break from their conceited snobbery and First Amendment-protected bunnysmothering.

Wouldn’t it be great if those people were paralyzed in a snowmobiling accident?

I hate how imperious and aloof those people are around the rest of us, as if being in our presence is somehow a burden. I also hate how they huff permanent markers and experience constant hallucinations that a swarm of bees is attacking them. It’s so obnoxious the way they shriek in inexpressable horror and tear away their own skin. I wish they’d give us a rest and incinerate themselves by standing behind a jet engine.

Also, in case you couldn’t tell, I’m talking about Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton.

It is the timeless story of shy, lonely girl named Jennifer trying to find love in the compromised world of high school in the early ’80s. Somehow finding herself in a tangled love web between the steady, blowdried Russ and the adventurous, blowdried Gary, Jennifer eventually learns to follow her heart and properly condition her hair. Along the way, she kisses them each on the lips and lets them touch her exposed shoulders but otherwise remains as chaste as a cross-eyed nun.

Look again at the majesty of that cover. The faraway beam in Jennifer’s eyes belies the turmoil below the surface as she wrestles with her feelings for Russ and Gary and the knowledge of her secret pimple. Meanwhile, Gary’s confident charms are evident in his ruffled cuff and the subtlety of his pelvic leaning. That one, simple image tells conveys the emotional truth of the story’s turmoil. It’s like something out of Casablanca, except with better fashion and fewer Nazis.

It goes without saying that Winifred Madison is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Her work in Dance With Me makes To Kill A Mockingbird look like a retarded person’s grocery list. The fact that Dance With Me isn’t mandatory reading for all schoolchildren and that the Lincoln Memorial hasn’t been torn down in favor of an 80-foot high statue of Winifred Madison is pathetic. We’ve got a long way to go as a country to overcome the equal sins of racism and ambivalence toward this book.

In conclusion, Dance With Me is a good book. Read it, and be racist no more.

The world is awakening on this gray morning from a night of debauched, unnatural carnality. Glittering cocktails were consumed with abandon and the taut, glistening bodies of strangers found low pleasures in one another. Snowmobiles were driven at reckless speeds into mile-deep canyons. Peoples across the globe moaned in hot-blooded celebration throughout the night only to awaken to a new year, wet snow, and malaise. The world’s adrenalized gyrations have given way to ulcerous sores and loose stools. Irony’s a bitch.

Now, in 2012, fearsome packs of feral rottweilers scavenge our neighborhoods for sustenance. Menacing vagrants prowl our streets, feeling up our dogs and vomiting into our mailboxes. Oranges that were once juicy and tart are now putrid and teeming with centipedes. Is this what you wished for when you watched the ball drop last night? Are you happy now? This miserable fate is retribution for your throbbing intemperance!

Tonight, when you are being undressed and held down by squealing, perverse trolls, I hope you think back to last night’s revelry with remorse. As their ruddy, pimpled faces spit barbaric obscenities at you, perhaps then you’ll understand what your animalistic overindulgence hath wrought. No repentance or dietary cleanse will be able to save you from your fate then. Your best bet will be to keep your mouth sealed shut, your sphincter clenched, and let the rest of your body go loose.

So happy new year, everybody. I hope the end comes swiftly for your you. Thanks for reading this blog and making judgements about me as a person based on it!

Life with two kids has definitely been an adjustment. Most moments around the house are spent comforting a crying child or having my crotch pulverized with a plastic baseball bat (by my wife, for doing this to us). There’s noticably less peace and quiet and considerably more time spent vacantly staring in the distance amidst the chaos. My wife Bridgette represents the eye of the Welle household hurricane, while the rest of us relentlessly whip around her – Alice crying, Oliver getting into mischief, and me offering unhelpful, unsolicited jokes. She is a beautiful, smart woman and an assured mother. She does a great job of putting up with my behaviors and redirecting me to clean the toilet again.

One of my favorite things about Alice joining our family has been watching Oliver enjoy being a big brother. Whether he’s poking his finger deep into her mouth or dropping to dead weight and laying on top of her, he is truly infatuated. Often as he is positioning my daughter’s feet behind her head, he turns to me and explains, “Helpful!” In those moments, I thank him for his servant’s heart and gently return her to a customary human position.

Things have changed quite a bit for me the past couple years. I eat alone at Wendy’s a lot less often these days, and I only rarely get to watch Minnesota’s fine sports teams on TV. The fact that those activities were about as good as it used to get for me demonstrates how far I’ve come. I’ll gladly trade those for my new family, even if it means that I get less sleep at night and must carefully apply various creams to my children’s anuses.

Beaten down by Christmastime worries? Not sure where the next paycheck’s coming from? Scavenging for food from a dumpster behind Perkins? A cold, tasty Michelob is the cure for what ails ya! Join me on this bean bag and imbibe!

I regularly turn to Michelob’s classic bottle shape and crisp, amber refreshment when I’m in need of a pick-me-up. Sometimes after I run down a cat with my Hyundai, I need a way to slow the adrenaline and feel the emotions of the moment. That’s when I reach for a Michelob. Cracking that bottle open, I feel like a man applying clown makeup for the first time in his life: purposeful and renewed.

In case you didn’t know, Michelob is a kind of beer.

There’s just something about Michelob (beer) that makes me want to live a vigorous life. It makes me stand up and dance – not the effeminate sort of dancing you might see on television, but a Michelob sort of dance: standing in place in front of a full length mirror and thrusting one’s pelvis while biting’s one’s bottom lip. Michelob brings out the best in me; it is the Stephen A. Douglas to my Abraham Lincoln.

Michelob is like Stephen A. Douglas in other ways, too. Both are short, squat, and advocate popular sovereignty.

Setting the issue of slavery in the territories aside, my offer of a stout, frosty Michelob still stands. Though you brusquely declined and left the room several minutes ago, I will continue my entreaty indefinitely and keep a bean bag warm for you. There’s a whole case of Michelob where this one came from! Drinking it will make our friendship blossom!

Michelob: casually racist beer for lonely men.

Unless you’ve lapsed into a egg nog-induced coma (henceforth to be referred to as “nogbrain”) you’re no doubt aware that the Christmas season is here. This is a glorious time of year in which children become ulcerous with anticipation and adults hazily reminisce about the disappointments of Christmases past.

Also, aunts are briefly spoken with.

Sadly, in recent years I have noted a general absence of tinsel. Once upon a time, tinsel was synonymous with Christmas. Its shiny brilliance signaled the splendor of the savior of the world coming to Earth and its cheap artificiality made it available to everyone from the portly plutocrat to the lowliest Irishman. Today, however, trees are rarely draped with tinsel. Instead they are debased with a smorgasbord of crafty knick-knacks and pop cultural twaddle. Our Christmas trees now look as if a Hallmark store vomited all over a Balsam Fir. We have traded the nobility of tinsel for fickle tchotchkes, like a man trading his Buick Regal for a single night with a Cambodian street woman.

Like all things true and pure, tinsel came from Germany. Emerging in the 1600s from the black forests of Bavaria, tinsel found favor as a simple, shiny distraction from the Thirty Years’ War and unspeakable Hessian godlessness. Much later, a single strand of tinsel was then brought to America by a doe-eyed orphan boy. The tinsel-bearing urchin was received at port by the corpulent President Grover Cleveland, who rewarded him with mustache-tickles and a pony. Newspaper accounts of this memorable encounter delighted Americans and popularized tinsel itself. All of this information and more is available in my new book, This is My Truth: The History of Tinsel & Everything Else.

I guess we’re left to try to somehow enjoy a Christmas without tinsel, which is like an Independence Day without hot dogs or a Columbus Day without scolding editorials. I’d say we’d all be better off nogbraining ourselves.

See you in my coma dreams!

In just a few moments, I’ll take my seat for the two hour bus ride into the deep recesses of Minnesota’s frigid wilderness, accompanied only by dozens of giggling pre-teens playfully stealing each other’s hats and babbling about Justin Bieber’s exquisite mouth. Sometime during the trip, I will demand silence from the students and deliver a 40 minute harangue about what it was like when I was a teenager: when Huey Lewis’s “Power of Love” blasted from every boom box and old Doc Brown was nothing more than a disgraced kook making side deals with Libyans. The students will likely stare back at me blankly, only escalating my agitation and forcing me to loudly, hurriedly tell them about all of my adventures through the circuits of time.

Once we arrive at the rustic retreat center, the students will get to spend the next 24 hours binging on nature. We will learn about owls and recycling and which girls have a crush on which boys. We will trudge through the woods in the bitter cold listening to some college student talk about wolves and wishing we could just go home where it’s warm and there aren’t as many wolves. Then, upon eating a breakfast of steamed eggs and gray, rubbery meat, the learning objectives of the retreat will have been accomplished. Probably the only thing worse than going on a middle school retreat would be the Bataan Death March, in which some 10,000 American and Filipino POWs died a cruel death. Aside from that though, this is the worst.

Fortunately for the students though, they don’t know that yet. Right now, they’re excited. I suppose I’m a little excited too, but mostly for the steamed eggs.

This is why I got my Master’s Degree.

This is my life.

Some of you readers may be rolling your eyes as if to say, “Hey Peter, snap out of it! You’ve got a loving wife and two beautiful children and a great job and a magnificent beard! You’ve got it all! Women love you and men want to be you!” Of course all these things are true, but they aren’t enough. What’s the point of having a hot wife and a sensible Hyundai Sonata if the Minnesota Vikings are 2-9?

To make matters worse, the Vikings will be facing Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos. Tebow, as you are no doubt aware, is the buzz of the NFL – a balanced blend of Johnny Unitas’s moxie and guile with St. Francis of Assisi’s piety and throwing motion. Tebow and the Broncos have shown a remarkable ability to defeat miserable, lethargic teams like the Vikings after lulling them and the entire viewing audience to sleep through the first three and a half quarters. Odds are, I and the other fans in attendance will be fed a steady diet of punts, Toby Gerhart runs and wildly errant passes for three hours amidst the dreary, unnatural ambiance of the Metrodome.

I’d rather have horrible diarrhea in a mall bathroom than do this.

However, since I’m going on the occasion of my dad’s birthday with he and my brothers, it seems only right that I should tag along, albeit sullenly. After all, my dad has given me so much over the years, and my brothers each attended my wedding, so I suppose I owe them something.

Seriously you guys, nothing matters.

Let us drape our bodies over one another as we lay relaxed on fine leather furniture. We will coil our appendages tightly together like two boa constrictors strangling a grizzly bear, yet the touch of our skin will remain soft and giving, like a fat man dry humping a cake.

Unnatural similes aside, I beckon you to join me in a sensual, mutually satisfying lounge. My arms are open and my lips are moistened slightly in anticipation of our relaxing recline into one another. In the sweet stacking of our bodies, our two essences will pool together into metaphysical union. In our repose, we will become one, just like Reconstruction make America one again, except ours will feature no flagrant racism or carpetbaggers.

A great riddle in my life has been the lack of reciprocal lounging I have been able to entice people into. Be they friends or random passersby or Tom Bosley from Happy Days, others have shown a striking resistance to my invitations. I have tried every conceivable approach to these requests, from tearful to profane to shockingly profane, and nothing seems to work. Recently I have taken to displaying myself in an enticing manner on tabletops in public spaces. This has won me only a scolding from a shift manager at Burger King.

Now that you know my history, I will make the stakes clear: without your body warmly enveloping mine, I am nothing. Without the weight of your body pressed against my chest and your breath soft on my neck, I will almost certainly throw myself into an empty mine shaft. I have lost all perspective on this.

Just give me this one thing. Come lounge upon me. It will be glorious.

Hooray for a new outtakes video! This video (like our outtakes projects in 2009, 2007, 2005, & 2003) features winning smiles, jocular belly-slaps, and giggles aplenty. It also features Todd Luker repeatedly demanding beans.

I don’t have a ton to say about this project, other than to note that it was a pleasure to assemble. I was happy that I was less promiment this time than I was in the 2007 & 2009 incarnations , though this was due more to the fact that I had fewer acting roles than any increase in my professionalism or ability to properly deliver a line. Fortunately for the ministry, Will Hines stepped in with a few well-delivered ad libs about kidnapping Al Gore’s children to save the video for us.

Enjoy the pleasure!

P.S. The song is “Skate With Me” by a Minneapolis band called Kubla Khan.

In celebration of life’s bountiful blessings, I will feast unnaturally upon turkey flesh and bun meat for hours on end. Potatoes, both mashed and scalloped, will be force-fed into my quivering potato-hole at a disturbing rate. Against the tearful warnings of my loved ones, I will proceed recklessly, like Sonic the Hedgehog on meth.

This year, my Thanksgiving will be celebrated in Minnesota’s Iron Range, where the skies are gray, the mines are depleted and and the men are mustachioed and virile. This salt of the earth setting will season my banquet with a rusty zest that pleases the tongue and depresses the economy. Smiles will be minimal and conversations will be perfunctory; the fleshy sounds of eating will be interrupted only by the occasional engorged groan.

I have already begun the process of preparing for tomorrow’s recklessness. Though a series of unpleasant stretches and unnatural devices, I have expanded my stomach volume and coarsened my vocal texture. This will allow me to safely consume an additional quart of sweet potatoes and will give my voice a rich, ragged resonance redolent of a Spanish conquistador in the throes of violent victory.

By this time tomorrow, I will be in sweet agony. My shirt will be soaked through with sweat, and my abdomen will be grotesquely distended. My lips will be raw and my my breathing irregular. My hands will be spackled with meat fragments and my thumbs will be dislocated for reasons not remembered. These are the terrible costs of Thanksgiving.

Here’s wishing all of you a similarly heedless holiday! And remember, wine makes the truth louder!

Yes, like my cats returning to lick each other’s anuses, I am once again blogging about the weather. How can I not? The first snow is always one of the most special times of the year, along with my wedding anniversary and each time I drop my wife’s phone in the toilet and don’t tell her about it.

There’s something about the first snowfall of the year that melts my heart and warms my glands. Standing at the window watching the snow come down with a half dozen Werther’s Originals in my mouth, I feel childlike and renewed. I am transported to another time and place, where yuletide carols are being amiably slurred by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

Then, in my imagination, after Bing and Frank finish their song I am informed that I will be allowed to receive a hug one of the two men. However, the agonizing choice of which man to embrace reduces me to tears and Crosby refers to me as worthless trash. Magical memories.

The portly racists in the country rock band Alabama once sang of the beauty when “it’s snowing in the pines”, and (except for the racism) they were right. The soft white haze of the new snow against the trees lends a nostalgic glow to the proceedings that would make Thomas Kinkade blast his crap. It’s enough to send tears streaming down my cheeks and blood streaming out my mouth.

Savor it, my friends. The first snowfall can’t last forever. The best, most beautiful things are always so fleeting…

Enjoy the increased road fatalities!

Winter is coming!

Once again, the sun is giving us the seasonal silent treatment and we are left with a bracing chill and fading memories of happier times when the days were warm and swimming pools glistened like like an 8th grader’s forehead. Shunned by the earth’s source of energy, we are once again forced into the gruff embrace of winter, like taking a 4-month cabin retreat with Jerry Sandusky.

While walking into work this morning, I couldn’t help but notice the frigid prickle of the wind as it snatched through my sweater and tickled my friendship zone (as my wife refuses to do). It was no doubt unpleasant, but as a native Minnesotan, I am at peace with winter. I agree to shovel its snow and endure its windchills and it agrees to help me avoid small talk while outdoors and move on before Easter. True, I’m the Robin Givens to winter’s Mike Tyson in that relationship, but what are my options? Move to Florida? I’d rather blow up the planet than do that.

Florida is garbage. I heard that the Epcot center is teeming with alligators.

Speaking of cold, check this out!

Haunting, isn’t it? An underdressed toddler exposed to the cold, ostensibly for educational purposes. It’s like kindergarden in North Korea. Anyway, I’m glad the internet exists so I could show that to all of you and make my comments.

So anyway, winter’s coming, it’s getting colder, blah blah blah. My point is that I’m a miserable person.

(Incidentally, something about this blog post seems familiar. Very, very familiar.)

You see, my wife got sick on Saturday, and my daughter Alice has gotten into the unfortunate habit of not being able to fall back asleep after her (very) early morning feeding. She eats just fine, but then when my wife lays her down she starts grunting and squirming like a naked and bound obese man laid on a scorching-hot sheet of aluminium.

The wife and I, meanwhile, lay just a few feet away praying to Jesus that she would just fall asleep and we could catch maybe another few minutes of precious sleep before our son Oliver gets up and begins demanding banannas and body-slamming the cats, like some potassium-starved “Macho Man” Randy Savage.

Rather than luxuriating in deep sleep and dreams of pumpkin pie Blizzard jacuzzis, our early mornings have become a period of high anxiety, and this morning I ended up wandering around the house with Alice in an effort to get my sick wife another hour or two of sleep. But what was I supposed to do with a fidgety baby in a dark, cold living room at 4:45am? Without cable, the television offerings were less than ideal. Unable to choose between the weather station featuring an android’s voice or the Proactiv infomercial featuring the android Jennifer Love Hewitt, I flipped the TV off and ended up brushing my teeth for 20 minutes instead (once I started, I couldn’t stop because I hadn’t anticipated the difficult logistics of bending over to spit).

Eventually I was able to get Alice to fall back asleep, and by 5:30 I was on to my morning routine, bleary-eyed and an hour ahead of schedule. By drinking several quarts of coffee, I am now able to approximate human speech and emotion. However, equal parts fatigue and chemical adrenaline make for a strange morning, as my clammy, trembling handshakes to every stranger I see can attest.

The moral of my story? Young fathers, if your wife is sick, pretend to be sicker.

While I am happy with the consistency of the laughs here and the sweet sentiment, the back story of this project strongly flavors my feelings toward this video. As a church ministry, we exist to serve the needs of our congregation and our pastors, and after their experiences with recent videos like Christdome, Tax Refund Strangeness, and Small Group Fight!, their message to us was loud and clear: these things are getting weird.

Now, as you JLP readers are familiar with, I like weird. For years serving in the ministry, I restrained a lot of my weirdest impulses to try to keep the appeal as wide as possible. In the last few years, however, as our ministry has gone younger, I made an internal decision to let the younger writers run with things, acknowledging at the same time that the age of 90-second web clips has altered sensibilities for many people in that younger generation. Random gags and awkward riffs became the new normal (even, in the case of Christdome, set within a structured “message video”). Not everything worked, but a lot of it did. However, it definitely wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea.

So this video is a (temporary?) return to restraint and structure. It is much less tangental, much more sentimental, and features some pretty broad gags. Also, while the message of the video is about contentment, it could be categorized as a “dating video”, and we’ve never gotten less than a great response with such projects. For whatever reason, romantic tension primes people’s laughing impulse at our church.

I also think it’s a well-done project with a snappy pace, a bunch of good line gags, and an ending I love. I honestly have no idea how this will be received at church, though. Part of me suspects that people will like it because it’s relatable and sweet, but I truly don’t know. I do know that if this one gets accused of being too weird, it’s time for me to hand over the reins.

Favorite bits:

-The grape-eating marriage fantasy is my favorite gag. I remember when I was typing up the first draft, including the bit about Luke looking into the camera and announcing “This is marriage”, and smiling happily to myself. Kudos to whoever thought of that during the meeting.

-I was afraid that the grapefruit explosion gag would be too problematic to shoot and too broad to end up being any good, but I was wrong. When I saw the footage set to that music (from the climax to Glory) I was happy.

-All the Welles make an appearance in the background (Alice in utero).

-Will Hines wasn’t supposed to be in this one at all (he’s had a ton to do with another video we’re currently working on) but we needed an extra for Matt to be talking to during the “anxiety with dating” sequence so we threw him in there. He made up all the business about eating Rolos with his older cousins, and I absolutely love it. (Okay, so maybe there’s some weirdness in this one.)

Enjoy!

UPDATE: The video was received enthusiastically at church, so there you go.

The JLP has been silent and motionless for months, nagged only by the occasional buzzing of ungrateful readers and incessant spam-bot comments. While my blogging station sat vacant, the internet has been overrun with barking, bearded barbarians and man-eating rottweilers. They have entered our walls and fondled our housecats and made untoward comments to our grandmothers. No apology on my part could ever put back what was lost or heal the subconscious of those who witnessed the savage cat-rapings.

I cannot apologize, nor will I pledge to never allow this to happen again. (In fact, it is likely to happen again relatively soon.) All I can do now is try to rebuild the walls, clean up the mess, and put the cats out of their misery.

In lieu of an apology, I will offer a series of weak explanations:

1) Recently, medical experts pulled a living human being out of my wife. It was among the most disgusting and amazing things I’ve ever seen. I have taken to the young person and will raise her in my own graven image. I am proud to report that she has already learned my ways well, passing the days sleeping, screaming, and watching others clean up her poop.

2) My professional life has recently been riddled with unfortunate unexpected developments. A number of my supervisors no longer work at the school, leaving me adrift in an infinite sea of paperwork and unsolvable crises. As you can see, I have risen to the occasion by blogging about cat molestation.

3) Abraham Lincoln told me in a dream to stop blogging. Then he and Robert E. Lee touched their beards together and spoke my name in unison.

And there we are, dear readers. The situation now is bleak and unlikely to de-bleak itself anytime soon. All I can offer is my pledge to toss out a few ragged scraps of blog-chuff like this from time to time. All I ask in return is your continued loyalty and silence in my presence. It will all be over soon, by the looks of it.

Together we will calmly walk off the blogging cliff, holding hands as we fall cleanly through the air toward oblivion.

I’m pleased with how this one turned out. I think the gags are consistent, and the message works pretty effectively. Certainly, as a Christian and as a parent, I can relate to the impulse to create a “safe” cocoon inside our home or small community safe from the crappiness of our neighborhood or the attitudes of our society in general, yet that certainly is not how we are called to live as Christians. That’s the tension that supports what’s happening in this video and the concept of a Christdome. That, and the unhelpful phenomenon of creating “Christian” versions of secular products and establishments, generally to the benefit of nobody. In fact, for some Christians, these distractions can actually suck up all the oxygen in the room to the point where they don’t even exercise their own prayer life and relationship with God anymore because they’re so busy with these distracting peripheral issues.

Hopefully, we also made the video funny enough along the way, so those themes go down easy.

Stray thoughts:
-I don’t know if we maximized its potential, but the “Christian Muppet Babies” bit is a definite favorite of mine.

-The myriad fist bumps and soul patches comes out of a number of interactions I’ve had with various pastors (not my own) who, in an attempt to be “relevant”, utilize such measures. To me, fist bumps and soul patches signify “Christian hip” (not a compliment).

-I went way overboard during the shoot with extended fist bumps and overeager grabbing of my co-actors, and we had to carefully scale that stuff back in the editing stage. Unfortunately, that results in a few awkward edits, but whatever. I just need to work on being more under control when on camera, I guess.

-Here’s a still image from a deleted bit from the video that we eliminated because it was just too strange. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem, but a number of people have commented pointedly that Rock TVs are getting really weird lately, and we didn’t want to push things too much on this project. (That’s for NEXT video…)

Enjoy!

My summer has been most wonderful, filled with lingering naps and indulgent glasses of rich, warm milk. I spend my evenings enjoying the cool breeze that passes through my sunroom and reading books about men from long ago with beards of finest grooming. When strangers pass down the sidewalk outside, they greet me with a friendly wave, and I reciprocate by telling them my name and warning them not to read my mind.

On Wednesdays I am visited by Colten, a young man with flaxen hair and slender knuckles. He helps me to balance my checkbook and shop for groceries. He is a functional conversationalist, and, I suspect, a skilled masseuse, though to this point he has refused to touch me, even on my neutral area. We have a private joke where he admonishes me to treat him with basic human dignity after I dip his shoes into containers filled with my own urine. I do not believe he has read my mind yet.

Wednesdays with Colten aside, the days pass aimlessly. I awaken with the imagined sound of a cat saying my full name with perfect enunciation. Sometimes in the evenings I drink more milk and make anonymous threatening phone calls to area businesses. Though my words are obscene and hateful, I assume that the targets of my harassment receive my calls with good humor. I think that having a sense of community spirit is very important.

I received the canister of your hair, and have placed it upon my mantle where it will remain until it is removed. Thank you for shearing yourself.

I hope that this humble note finds you in bright spirits. I will call on you when the weather cools and the world dons its collective sweater with an airbrushed wolf on it. Until then, I hope you enjoy the enclosed jar of mouse preserves.

Sincerely,
Rembrandt

While the book was zippy and provacative, I confess that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I anticipated. Part of this has to do with the strictures of doing an oral history rather than a traditional one – narrative threads get picked up and dropped abruptly, and context is too-often scarce. The plus side of an oral history is that the reader often gets a sharper sense of the personalities and motivations of the figures involved, liberated from most of whatever the author’s interpretation of them might be. I now know who the biggest a-holes in the history of ESPN were, and these fellows have nobody to blame but themselves.

Another issue that limited my enjoyment of the book was that it seemed to run out of trajectory about midway through. The first half of the book follows the rise of the ESPN from its humble inceptions (conceived as a cable access-style channel covering the hotbed of Connecticut sports) through it’s rise to becoming one of the dominant forces in American media. We hear about all the people who mocked the notion of a 24/7 sports station, and all the seedy behind-the-scenes tales of unhinged parties and sexual misadventures from the network’s early days. Also, lots of business deals happen and are covered in mind-numbing detail. If, for some reason, you’re deeply interested in the changing business models of the cable industry, then there’s lots of juicy stuff for you here. I confess that I often ended up skimming through those pages.

The second half of the book loses a bit of its momentum, tracking ESPN’s steps since its mid-90s ascendance. The authors try to use the various management shifts as narrative guideposts, but this is only somewhat effective. The last 300 pages start looping through predictable patterns: people complaining about management, various episodes where on-air talent said something they shouldn’t have and apologizing, and finding out which people at ESPN hate each other (i.e. Berman and Kornheiser). In and of itself, it’s interesting, but at a certain point it becomes a little repetetive.

Still, the book is breezy, and generally enjoyable. Easy weekend reading for a sports fan.

Here are a few insights gleaned from the text, thoughtfully blended with lies:

-Here’s my impression of some of the major personalities after reading the interviews…

Dan Patrick: Down-to-earth, hard-working, team player. Wrote the textbook on anchoring SportsCenter.

Keith Olbermann: Incredibly smart, gifted writer. Perhaps the best SportsCenter anchor in the show’s history. Simultaneously, unbelievably self-centered and unpleasant to work with. Paranoid, accusatory, and thin-skinned. Suzy Kolber, who never has a negative thing to say about anything else in the book says, “Keith was an unhappy person. He made a lot of people unhappy around him. I’m sure he made me unhappy.”

Chris Berman: Every anecdote blatantly glorifies himself. Energetic, simple, and sincere. (He blew a gasket when ESPN lost NFL Primetime in 2004, and rightfully so. I always felt that was the best show on the network.)

Bob Ley: Smart and grounded. Company guy.

Stuart Scott: Thoughtful and perceptive.

Tony Kornheiser: Nervous and unhappy, and very aware of both. Difficult to work with at times, but gifted.

Bill Simmons: Big ego. Calls the shots at ESPN.com, to the annoyance of his editors and some on-air folks who seem to resent him. Insightful and funny.

Jim Rome: Surprisingly gracious.

—

-Numerous sources describe the boys club that was ESPN in the 1980s. Sexual harassment of female reporters was rampant and ignored by management. In addition, the women’s “restroom” was nothing more than a crude biohazard pit dug in the lawn behind the building.

-Some of the most entertaining portions of the book have to do with the behind-the-scenes antics of management figures. The recklessly hard-drinking, loudmouthed Stu Evey towered over ESPN’s first half-decade, serving as the liaison between the network and the Getty oil company that owned it. Inexperience be damned, he insisted that his opinion be heard on every conceivable matter and spends plenty of time congratulating himself for it in the book. Years later, Mark Shapiro, a young hotshot executive took creative control of ESPN while still in his thirties. While many of his programming choices worked brilliantly (PTI, most notably) he also burned bridges and kept everyone on edge with his blunt, abrasive style.

-In order to ensure that only the most sports-obsessed work at their Bristol campus, ESPN requires all job applicants to complete a difficult sports exam and apply ointment to Tony Kornheiser’s open sores while he groans his approval.

-The folks at ESPN shamelessly credit themselves for popularizing NASCAR, poker, professional monkeybars, and Christmas trees.

-ESPN made waves in 2005 when it landed the prestigious Monday Night Football gig, thanks to the aggressive negotiations of Shapiro. At the same time, he fumbled his handling of the announcers, quickly alienating both John Madden and Al Michaels to the point where they jumped ship to NBC. Things didn’t improve when Shapiro coarsely decreed that ESPN’s own Joe Theismann’s leg be re-broken.

-In one memorable scandal, Chris Berman got in hot water while hosting NFL Primetime when he threw to a commercial break by shouting, “Segregation now, segregation forever!”

I get so excited to eat pizza that sometimes I start tasting blood! I hope there aren’t any mushrooms on it, though. (Mushrooms make me poop brown water.)

Most people eat pizza for dinner, but today we get to have it for lunch. The world has gone upside-down! First the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, and now this! And like austronaut Christa McAuliffe before me, I will soon touch the face of God.

Millard Fillmore once said, “Pizza rules and the Fugitive Slave Act drools.” I still subscribe to this philosophy, and wish that President Fillmore were alive today to provide moral clarity on the issue of pizza with fruit on it. To me, fruit-laden pizza is just as repugnant as slaves running away.

Having pizza for lunch is mind-bendingly awesome because just four hours ago, I was eating cereal, and now I’m eating pizza. That’s like celebrating Christmas the day after Independence Day, with Santa wearing an American flag leather jacket. Such pleasures combined are enough to melt my face like that guy who looked into the Ark of the Covenant.

Well, the pizza’s here. Time for me to start eating at an alarming rate until I am sweaty and unconscious, like a corpulent walrus stranded in the Arizona desert.

The book is a crisp, concise examination of the the successes, failures, and character of Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, exploring their remarkable friendship against the larger backdrop of the Civil War. Flood does a wonderful job at describing the military progress and maneuverings of the war along with the tangled political web that made up the Union Army brass. (I’d strongly recommend the book to any Civil War novice seeking to understand the major battles and prominent military figures.) While it’s always a pleasure to read about men like Lincoln, Lee, McClellan and Stanton, the figures of Grant and Sherman are the focus, and Flood expertly brings them to life in all their complexity.

Both men were Westerners, both were West Point graduates who had floundered for years before the war (Grant with his drinking, Sherman with his failed business dealings), both began the war as obscure afterthoughts in the Western theater along the Mississippi. Both men were occasionally hounded in the press (Grant as “a butcher”, Sherman as insane, or a traitor), and neither had many natural allies in the Union army. Yet, by war’s end, they stood alone as the men who had delivered victory for the Union and literally saved the nation, along with President Lincoln.

A few thoughts and reactions, mixed with some pleasant lies (please hum “Ashokan Farewell” in your heads as you read):

-The personalities of Grant and Sherman made for quite a contrast. Grant was a man of plain manners whose stooped, stoic demeanor made him easy to underestimate. He was a clear, excellent writer who usually said exactly what he meant, and from an early point was able to see the war in it’s widest scope, and how the many moving parts would have to coordinate to achieve a final victory. He was intuitively aggressive on the battlefield, a fact that set him clearly apart from most Union commanders. On the other side, Sherman had a keen intellect made evident by the ideas that habitually came racing out of his mouth. He grasped problems in all their complexity, and though he was far more prone to racial prejudice than Grant, he shared with his friend a firm empathy for the men of the Confederate Army and longed for a hasty conclusion to the war. Indeed, while both were often criticized for their perceived brutality, they understood early on that the war would could not be won superficially or through maneuverings alone. As Sherman wrote to Grant, “[The South] cannot be made to love us, but may be made to fear us.”

-Contrary to some accounts, Grant’s drinking problem never fully went away during the war. He still drank whisky to excess, on occasion, although such instances always happened during quiet spells and there was never a report that he was unable to carry out his duties. Also, when drunk, he insisted that he be addressed as “General Spiderman”.

-A major newly transferred to Sherman’s command described him as “the most American looking man I ever saw.” Today, that honor belongs to Toby Keith.

-Snippets that illustrate the character of Ulysses S. Grant:

During the Battle of the Wilderness, at a point when it looked as if Lee’s army might overrun Grant’s headquarters, he was asked by an anxious officer if they shouldn’t be moving headquarters back to a safe distance. According to a witness, “The general replied very quietly, between puffs of his cigar, ‘It strikes me it would be better to order up some artillery and defend the present location.’”

Another account from later that day, after a Union general pleaded with Grant to pull back to avoid Lee being able to cut off their supplies and communications: “Grant rose to his feet, took his cigar out of his mouth, turned to the officer, and replied, with a degree of animation he seldom manifested, ‘Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do. Some of you think he is about to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.’” (243)

After the conclusion of the surrender negotiations at Appomattox Courthouse, Grant stood reflecting on the steps outside a house, when Lee passed him on horseback: “Grant stopped and took off his hat. The yard became silent; every Union soldier there removed his hat and came to attention. Robert E. Lee lifted his hat once and passed through the gate…For the remaining five years of [Lee's] life, he never allowed a word against Ulysses S. Grant to be spoken in his presence.” (313)

-Grant’s beard was brown, Sherman’s was red, and Lee’s was white. The spectrum of death.

-Perhaps Grant’s greatest achievement in the war was his victory in the Siege at Vicksburg, in which he deftly coordinated his movements with ships in the Mississippi to better his angle of attack, and later intentionally cut off his army from his supply line to allow him the mobility he desired. The dramatic victory came after a long spell of Confederate victories and delivered control of the Mississippi to Federal forces. Afterwards, Grant received an astonishing letter from Lincoln. The president began by laying out all the concerns he had about Grant’s plan and how he had worried about Grant’s leadership. Lincoln then closed with, “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right, and I was wrong.” To me, this is astonishing. Where most presidents in recent memory would gloss over their misjudgments, or say that they agreed with the plan all along, Lincoln once again displayed his remarkable humility and moral character.

-Sherman liked to say, “The worst thing about war is that there’s never anything cold to drink.”

-The two men displayed an intense, tender loyalty to one another throughout the war. Both stoutly defended the other in the press and to the second-guessers in Washington, and both were quick to defer to the other’s judgement. Sherman vouched for Grant in the early days of the war when Grant was trying to overcome a reputation as a drunk and a screwup. Grant, meanwhile, tactfully smoothed over a political storm created when Sherman negotiated overly-lenient surrender terms with the last large Confederate army (this flare-up was exacerbated by Lincoln’s assassination that same week). Working behind the scenes and travelling to North Carolina to amend the terms himself, Grant allowed his friend to save face and preserve his reputation. As Sherman himself said during the war in a letter to Grant, “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and that if I got in a tight place you would come if alive.”

-Shortly after the Battle of Shiloh, an aide to Sherman walked into the general’s tent to find him in a shirts-up tickle fight with Grant. When the two finally noticed the young man watching them, they hurriedly straightened themselves up and had the aide executed for treason.

Father’s Day is a wonderful occasion when dads across our great republic are treated to pancake breakfasts and the promised opportunity to change the oil on the car without the shrill shrieking of their children to inturrupt them. It is a day of warm, obligatory embraces and the cold, gentle rewards of having a Dairy Queen Blizzard all to oneself.

My Father’s Day began well this year, as my wife allowed me lay in bed until 7:30am. A non-parent reading this might be startled that this would count as a luxury, but in the world of fatherhood, where children unmercifully awaken at 6am and proceed immediately to kick at your genital regions (maybe that’s just my kid), it’s downright indulgent.

After a pleasant morning spent in my underwear without shame, we packed up and went out to Culver’s, a fine establishment whose menu features various rearrangements of meat and melted cheese. Our dining experience was harried and mechanical, as it usually is when accompanied by a 20-month old. Yet it must be said that their crinkle cut fries added an element of savory sophistication to my Father’s Day experience. Too bad my kid threw a lot of them on the floor.

By this point you may have gotten the impression that I somehow view fatherhood as a grotesque burden that must be carried, as if I were the poor horse that Wilford Brimley is sitting on in that diabetes commercial.

Of course, that would be a gross mischaracterization of my feelings (not unprecedented for the JLP). I genuinely love being a dad, and I love Oliver more than these 300 words would allow me to say. Fatherhood is the biggest and best thing that has ever happened to me (seriously though, I still don’t exactly understand exactly how it happened to me). It’s just that things are really different once you’re a dad. Sleeping in and leisurely dinners at nice restaurants are extraordinarily difficult to pull off. Instead, we dads get an awkward Sunday in late June filled with nice sentiments in the morning, chores by mid-afternoon, and maybe a few crinkle cut fries in between.

Truth be told, it was an awesome day. I loved (and was incredibly thankful for) every part of it.

As the days continue their inexorable march toward human oblivion, I acknowledge that I have failed to keep the sub-sentient readers of this blog appraised of my ever-noteworthy actions. For this and many other things, I shall never apologize.

Such unpleasantness aside, I will now take this opportunity to make a few irresponsible remarks about recent events in my world.

-My much-anticipated trip to Manhattan chaperoning some of my newly graduated students was a total success.

Not only did all 27 of us return to Minnesota alive, but we did so having seen dozens of advertisements for MTV’s Teen Wolf. Also, I ate at Red Lobster one time. It truly is the city that never sleeps!

-The summer days have been sultry, as they are wont to be. As a result, my home ends up feeling as hot as a Southern courtroom (my insistence on wearing full length judge’s robes hasn’t helped matters). To beat the heat, I usually stuff a bag of frozen peas down my pants.

-I am always working to bone up on topics that I teach about in my classes. Specifically, I have boned up on the topic of bones, and how hard it is to break them with my wooden baseball bat. Preliminary results show that cat bones are the most fragile.

-I continue to eat breakfast cereal at an alarming rate.

-To combat the crippling illness of boredom, I have consumed medicines of all varieties: herbal and chemical, syrups and gelcaps, legal and illegal. None of them have been prescribed. The end result has been crippling nausea and a magical mystery tour of new colors and shapes that won’t stay still. My reasons for this are opaque and my methods have admittedly involved violence, but you will certainly agree that my actions are nonetheless above criticism.

As you can see, my summer has thus far been startlingly immoral. I have no explanation or justification for this, other than to pointedly note that there is a Democrat in the White House.

Like a gang of convicted felons breaking out of prison, the schoolchildren of America have been let loose upon the countryside to violate our great land for three horrifying months. And like the aforementioned sociopathic thugs, the frenzied and carnal delights of the schoolchildren will be heightened by the knowledge that their enjoyment is fleeting, and that they will be locked away back in the antiseptic world of school soon enough. Children and gangbangers cannot escape justice forever, no matter how many ice cream cones they eat or cars they break into and defacate in, respectively.

For teachers, summer break is a chance to recharge our batteries a bit and do some work to improve our classes for the next year. In my case, this involves going to workshops and doing some reading and research. In the case of some other educators, summer break means scrapbooking or going to a cabin in a remote cabin in Wisconsin and getting as drunk as possible. All are equally responsible and unassailable, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

A nice thing about summer break for me is that I get to see my family more often. According to my wife, I have a 19-month old son at home who, like me, enjoys climbing things while babbling nonsense. I look forward to meeting this little individual and implanting my knowledge and values into his brain using some sort of fast-acting mind laser, which I assume exists.

Enjoy the dawn of this summer break my friends. It is a sweet, succulent moment in the otherwise unrelentingly wretched cycle of the human experience. It’s like finding a $20 bill right before seeing a dog get run over by a pickup.

Bonhoeffer was, of course, the Lutheran pastor and theologian who helped found the Confessing Church movement which resisted the Nazi party, and was later directly involved in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Before being executed at a concentration camp in the waning days of the war, he had managed, in 39 packed years, to write several hugely consequential books on theology and philosophy, and alter the trajectory of Christian thinking to this day.

Yet while Bonhoeffer is a rockstar in theological circles, he is still a somewhat obscure figure to most Christians. For my part, I knew of him, but not much about him. Metaxas argues during his narrative that this is in part because Bonhoeffer’s ideas have been hijacked at various points over the years by different groups illegitimately claiming him as their own. Bonhoeffer’s fragmented musings written from prison on “religionless Christianity” have been particularly popular among some leftist thinkers and secular humanists in the 60s & 70s. Though Bonhoeffer’s own peers and confidants rejected this particular interpretation, it became influential, and was this apparently enough for many mainstream Christians to look elsewhere for guidance and inspiration.

At times, Metaxas frames his book as a correction to that phenomena, and he consistantly points to the unfailingly Christ-centered nature of Bonhoeffer’s thinking, and reframes “religionless Christianity” as a concept in keeping with Bonhoeffer’s lifelong argument against empty religious legalism. At the same time, he doesn’t shy away from the fact that Bonhoeffer compelled Christians to live in the world, and to fully engage it, rather than seek comfort in some dualistic scheme where all things earthly are wretched and to be escaped. Bonhoeffer posits that the Christian life is one of action, sharing in the sufferings of others, and being a prayerful instrument of justice.

When I originally picked up the text, I was unaware of any such battle between the theological right and left over Bonhoeffer (after all, I’m no theologian). I was even tsk-tsked by a few liberal friends on Facebook over having selected the book. While I can’t pretend that I’m a capable arbiter of Metaxas’s fairness to one side or the other, after having read it I can say that it was stimulating and completely compelling. His history reads fast, and with a flair for language that I really enjoyed. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times both wrote favorable reviews, and a liberal-ish Lutheran pastor friend of mine said that, while he disagreed with Metaxas’s take on Bonhoeffer’s theology, he enjoyed reading it. In short, while it is not a deeply scholarly work (he zips past many intricate political developments with a potent phrase or two), it struck me as a responsible book.

My take: the text is dense and the complexity of the conspiracies can be daunting, but it is also wonderfully challenging to the conscience and, primarily because of Bonhoeffer’s remarkable life, thoroughly inspiring.

A few other notes from the text:

-Bonhoeffer himself comes across as an endlessly interesting individual: highly intelligent, confident, and serious-minded, but also very generous and even playful at times. As a cultured aristocrat, academic, and world-traveller, he was completely unlike the average parochial-minded Lutheran pastor of his day. At the same time, his radically Christ-oriented life and passion for shepherding a parish or seminary distanced himself from the cool, insular world of university theologians. Again and again, Metaxas quotes observers of Bonhoeffer who marvelled at his life and the moral force of his words. That he would ultimately choose to justify political action subverting the state through his Christian theology is paradigm-shifting, but in keeping with his deeply-rooted character. There was absolutely nothing fickle about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

-In 1930, Bonhoeffer spent a fateful year doing postgraduate work in New York. Though generally unimpressed with American seminaries, he enjoyed his experiences at African-American churches, and the trip solidified his universalist view of the church. During that year, he also penned the Lee Greenwood hit “God Bless the USA” and suggested that somebody should shoot Huey Long.

-If Dietrich Bonhoeffer were alive today, he would probably be a rabbit hoarder.

-Bonhoeffer’s role in the Valkyrie assassination plot was two-pronged. On a tactical level, he used his contacts in Great Britain to suss out whether the Allies might respond favorably toward the conspirators (Churchill responded cooly, which Metaxas righly criticizes). On a moral level, Bonhoeffer framed the mission (at the center of which was the murder of a human being, it should be noted) as one of Christian obedience to God’s call through action in this world. Many of his co-conspirators, including Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the man at the center of the assassination attempt, were devout believers who clearly understood the evil nature of the Nazi regime.

-In a colossal blunder, for the 2008 film Valkyrie that depicted the Hitler assassination plot, the role of Bonhoeffer was “reimagined” for Tim Conway’s celebrated Dorf character. In the film Dorf/Bonhoeffer fouls the plan by accidentally pouring hot coffee on Hitler’s lap and is summarily executed.

-As a teacher, I much appreciated this anecdote about the rowdy confirmation class that a young Bonhoeffer inherited from an ailing old minister. Made up of hoodlums from a rough Berlin neighborhood, this class (required for young men in Germany in those days) made it their mission to make their teacher’s life a nightmare. Bonhoeffer’s close friend Eberhard Bethge described Dietrich’s first day, as the boys raised hell:

The old [minister] left the scene in despair, leaving Bonhoeffer standing silent against the wall with his hands in his pockets. Minutes passed. His failure to react made the noise gradually less enjoyable, and he began speaking quietly, so that only the boys in the front row could catch a few words of what he said. Suddenly all were silent. He remarked that they had put up a remarkable initial performance, and went on to tell them a story about [his recent trip to] Harlem. If they listened, he told them, he would tell them more next time. Then he told them they could go. After that, he never complained about their lack of attentiveness.

-Seriously though, the Minnesota Twins suck this year.

-Bonhoeffer fell in love in his late 30s with an impressive young woman only in her teens. They were later engaged, but he was imprisoned shortly afterwards. As best we can tell, his love language was Being Martyred.

-Bonhoeffer was confident and inspiring to the very end. On the last day of his life, after having just completed an informal prayer service among his fellow prisoners, Bonhoeffer was summoned away by the SS. Everybody present knew what this meant, of course, and said their goodbyes to him. One of them later described what Bonhoeffer said to him as he left: “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.” Hours later, after calmly and prayerfully walking to the gallows, he was hanged as a traitor to the country he loved.

Look at me. My face is caught in some remote grimace, with the tensions of the day and this particular McDonalds drivethrough evident in my flat, strained expression. Meanwhile my son smiles with the apple-cheeked innocence of youth, his mind no doubt alight with fanciful thoughts of racecars or Berry Berry Kix or the color yellow.

Though physically we are separated by only an arm’s length, emotionally we are miles apart. He, the bouncing naif, and I, the stooped and pockmarked warhorse. If he is the galloping colt, then I am the toothless old stallion on my way to a lunchdate with the muzzle of a shotgun.

My point in showing you this photograph is not to go on again about how life has left me a morose, vacant-eyed automaton. That much is self-evident, and I take comfort in knowing that it will likely all be over soon when I get clipped by a city bus while out on a jog, or meet some other similarly pointless and arbitrary death. Instead, my point is to show off the sweetness of my boy and the sleek interior of my sensible Hyundai.

I order to you to look upon both with a faraway smile, your lips slightly parted in tender amazement, and your eyes slightly crossed with bitter envy.

Well, that’s all the time I’ve got for tonight. If any of you would like to send me a photos of yourself going to the bathroom, I’ll be happy to post them here and offer some accompanying philosophical ruminations. I think that’s going to become a hot new thing on the internet.

Now I’m off to go raise my son to become a man of sturdy morals and stout character, as soon as I find where he wandered off to.

Here’s the situation: 25 teenagers, flush with academic success and the finality of high school, pockets engorged with cash, with only me and another chaperone to hold them back in the craziest city in the U.S.A. To paraphrase President James Buchanon in 1860, “Everything should work out just fine.”

It was a genuine honor that the seniors requested me as their chaperone. I’ve had this group on and off in my classes since they were 7th graders (it’s a small private school), and they’re genuinely a good bunch. I’m going to go ahead and assume that they wanted me with them because they like and respect me, and not because they think I’m a pushover who’ll look the other way if they duck curfew. I plan to preempt such notions by lecturing them about how Manhattan after midnight is patrolled by gangs of knife-wielding circus clowns high from huffing paint thinner and looking for midwestern naïfs to disembowel. I will support my case with a viewing of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, a film long hailed for being exactly accurate.

I’m not exactly certain what the administration is looking for out of their chaperones. If they’re looking for a tall, bearded man who can clearly enunciate rules and who wants to visit the Statue of Liberty, then they’re in luck. If they’re looking for somebody who can recommend good restaurants and avoid getting lost in the subway system, then there might be a problem. Let’s face it – under my supervision, these kids are pretty likely to end up stranded at a vacant Coney Island gas station right about the time our departing flight is taking off. If that happens, I might have to go to plan B: throw my cell phone and social security card in the trash and begin a new life as a drifter riding the rails with only a melody and my Master’s degree to keep me company.

Also, does anybody know if Manhattan has a Arby’s?

Here’s what I found when I searched “Unicorn Fondle“:

Look at that sick little bastard. All he ever wants to do is fondle unicorns and experience the low depravity of interspecies love. Too bad he’s got no arms. That poor unicorn is just going to have to go fondle itself, I guess.

“Forbidden Shampoo”

Having a cat lick your hair clean would certainly qualify as a forbidden shampoo in my book. This is what happens when single women get lonely and experiment.

How about “Bramblefuss“?

Dear Lord! What sort of awfulness is this? My new nightmare is that I wake up in a dank pit waist deep in a writhing pile of these red-eyed sons of bitches.

“Turtleneck Riddle”

Wow, Roseanne Barr has really let herself go…

“Pitstick Exuberance”

I see polite smiles, wood paneling, and a mirror inexplicably placed directly behind a couch, but I don’t see much exuberance here. I only see profound social discomfort. (I will grant that the pitstick is implied.)

“Sadness Mouthwash”

It’s time to visit the grandparents in their new condo! I have to stand because their damn dog refuses to get off the chair. Christmas cards are still hanging in the doorway even though it’s May. Grandma can’t sustain a conversation because she refuses to stop watching the Hallmark Channel. Grandpa brought us cups of coffee, but he doesn’t seem to realize it’s just hot water. This is sadness defined. Time for some mouthwash to get drunk and forget our memories.