At any rate, here’s the Christmas letter my wife and I are sending out to friends and family and Mexican soap opera stars. Enjoy the update, and if you’re good enough, I may return with more JLP content and a bloody nose!

—-

Christmas time is here, so along with the blizzards and various songs about bells, we have all been inundated with Christmas cards featuring pictures of everybody smiling. ‘Tis the season for writing pithy summations of our lives and then using the copying machine at work to print them!

2012 was a great year for our two kids Oliver (3) and Alice (14 months). Alice went from being a pleasant but somewhat strange-looking infant to becoming a cute little toddler with pigtails and a drunken sailor walk. Presently, her likes include drinking anything, touching computers, and being thrown onto couches by her father. Her dislikes include being tackled by her brother and naps lasting longer than 90 minutes. Meanwhile, Oliver is growing into a sensitive, happy boy. His favorite times of day are probably when he’s building with his blocks or chasing his sister back-and-forth across the house. He really loves Alice and enjoys playing with her, but he’s usually pretty happy just entertaining himself. Unlike Alice, who is our screamer, Oliver usually signals his satisfaction through quiet stillness. These days his hobbies include stacking anything, misidentifying colors, and eating sandwiches.

For Bridgette (413 months) this year has been a blessing, by and large. 2011 was marked mostly by pregnancy-related nausea, childbirth, and sleepless nights, so the improvement in 2012 was mostly a function of our kids getting a little bit older. She continues to enjoy staying home full-time with Oliver and Alice, though she still works some weekend hours at the group home for disabled adults that she’s been at for years. Her days are filled with raising and training our kids, with the occasional visit to see our church friends and neighbors. It’s no easy thing to devote the vast majority of your day to the well-being of little kids, but Bridgette has always done so with grace. Oliver and Alice are blessed by her patience and emotional generosity. Lastly, Bridgette beat me in bowling several times again this year, extending her lifelong streak.

As for me, I really don’t think I could have been more blessed in 2012. In August, I accepted a significant promotion at the International School of Minnesota. I’m now something called an Academic Quality Controller – what the rest of planet earth refers to as an assistant principal. I still teach one class, so fortunately I still get to experience what I enjoy about teaching. To this point, I’ve really enjoyed the new challenges of being in administration. My favorite part of every day, however, continues to be the moment I get home and hug the kids and kiss my wife. Aside from the satisfactions of work and home life, I continue to burn off resentment at the fact that my wife won’t laugh at my jokes by co-leading the Rock TV ministry at my church that produces short comedy videos. One of those videos was even accepted into the Twin Cities Film Fest this year, which was deeply surreal.

In sum, 2012 was a year of domestic comforts for the Welles, punctuated with some professional successes and the continual blessings and proddings of our church community. We wish each of you the same in the year to come, and may this Christmas season be a quiet reminder to all of us that we live in a world with radically self-sacrificing love at its center.

Merry Christmas!

With love,
The Welles

P.S. Our cats are still alive, presumably.

In case you didn’t already know, I’m something of an innovator in the kitchen. Any food you can think of, I like to add sugar and raisins until it tastes right to me. I don’t care about the rules of taste or good health or human decency – I just like what I like. Specifically, raisins and sugar.

I haven’t always been this way. There was a time when I ate my food just like any other person. That was before I read an article on the internet about how Obama is personally adding mercury to vaccinations to make us government slaves. Once I read that, I decided to start adding a ton of raisins and sugar to my food to protect myself. You’ve got to stay one step ahead of those guys if you value your freedom. After all, the science is settled.

But I digress. Instant oatmeal is a hearty, natural meal that contains few, if any, government-inserted chemicals known to cause children to become autistic socialists. When heavily laden with sugar and raisins, it is a wonderful change of pace from other foods like apple cinnamon oatmeal.

I have repeatedly berated the baristas at my neighborhood Starbucks to concoct some sort of coffee beverage that tastes like sugary, raisin-riddled oatmeal, but little progress has been made. It always ends up with me being escorted out by some hotshot shift manager who thinks he’s God and knows what normal people like.

Well, Mr. Shift Manager, you can’t make me change. I know who I am and I know what makes me happy. My secret garden is beautiful and you and your government vaccinations aren’t welcome there.

These are the tradeoffs, ladies and gentlemen. My life has been enriched with a rewarding job, a sweet companion for a wife and two uniquely cool little kids, but I must pay for this in free time. Like the typical American consumer, I am leveraged to the hilt. I have zero leisure liquidity. (Don’t ask where I’m getting the time to write this, smart guy, because I’m writing it while I’m going to the bathroom. So there.) I’m crammed full of life’s enrichment, like a washtub brimming with applesauce.

There was a simpler time in my life when I was able to repose and read history books, accompanied only by the crackling roar of a cozy fire and my silken nightgarments. I was served spiced refreshments by Quigley, my faithful manservant, who always knew the perfect moments to whisper my name and lift my pipe to my lips for another soft, invigorating puff. Specifically, those times I speak of were the 1890s, during America’s Gilded Age, a time I visit nightly in my dreams. (Incidentally, these dreams usually end in me being slain in a labor riot by socialist insurrectionists.)

Dreamt luxuries and idleness aside, my life is actually quite lovely these days. Yes, I don’t have the same time for reading or blogging or hating my cats, but it’s frankly much cooler to have a loving wife and two little kids who need me to be a good dad.

On an unrelated note, does anybody know how to rescue a 2 year old stuck in a drying machine?

This summer did not pass without some successes. I administered a good number of baths to adults at my summer job, which certainly counts for something (albeit something unpleasant). I went on several walks with my family, which were uneventful but made me look good in front of my neighbors. I also threw myself down a flight of stairs to delight my son without becoming concussed.

On the other side of my summer ledger, I also changed over 100 diapers and once cut away the filth-encrusted hair from my cat’s anal region, an act that probably represented the nadir of my existence. Close behind was tonight’s excitement in which I left my newly mobile daughter Alice on a bed to go retrieve her brother, only to hear the dreaded “thump” on the wooden floor a few moments later. Can’t say I enjoyed that. Thankfully, Oliver was there to narrarate events for me as they happened in case I missed anything. (“Alice fall down off bed! Alice crying!”)

Thanks to Oliver’s new obsession with the DVD, I have also endured listening to the opening sequence to the children’s show “Little People” maybe 50 times. I can’t get over how strange the song is – it’s like it’s been translated from another language – and the fact that it’s sung by R&B star Aaron Neville makes it even more bizarre. I’m convinced at this point that the voice of Satan must sound like a dozen Aaron Nevilles speaking in unison.

So that’s it. After these eight weeks of Aaron Neville and child abuse I’m about ready to head back to school and get my social studies groove on. Lunches with my family will soon be replaced with puzzling over how to make the ancient Phoenicians interesting and relevant to 15-year olds (the answer, as always: pass out laptops to the students and hope for the best).

Happy sadness to you all!

Instead I pace back and forth across my kitchen, lost in thought, an anxious tangle of hopes and worries. At issue is my longstanding desire to film a shot-for-shot recreation of the original Footloose‘s tractor chicken race scene with all human characters replaced by cats.

As you have no doubt already surmised, this revelatory move would surely unlock the scene’s subtext and an entirely new level of meaning would unfold as the losing cat jumps into the ravine only to have his tractor tumble on top of him, crushing him to death (a twist in the narrative meant to reflect America’s role in the world, post 9/11). Atop the melodromatic hysteria of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero”, our hero cat would get his claw stuck in a tractor mechanism only to be redeemed and win the love of another cat who would then end the scene by presenting her ripe hindquarters.

Sadly, I’ve encountered one obstacle after another on my way to cinematic triumph. Where am I supposed to get a dozen cats? Who is willing to loan me a couple tractors? Is Kevin Bacon interested in doing an extended cameo as a homeless onlooker writhing atop a pile of cats? My wife has thus far responded unfavorably to my repeated requests for funds and for some reason our date nights spent scouting abandoned ravines have ended in frustration and silence.

That’s why I’m writing this, dear readers. If you’re interested in seeing my vision brought to the screen, please email your credit card information to me immediately. In return, you will be credited as an executive producer and can lay in Kevin Bacon’s catpile.

Email now! Don’t let your mind stop what your emotions need!

This Twitter account will be dedicated solely to carefully documenting the strange and unnatural throughts that regularly pass through my head. This way I can quickly fire them out without much work, rather than building a 300-word essay around them like I would if I were blogging. In my first week of tweeting, there ended up being around 50 such efforts (you can read them for yourself or click the link on my blogroll to the right, if you’re dumb).

Long story short, this isn’t the end of the JLP. I’ll still post whenever possible because I like writing and my wife can’t handle my elevated level of weirdness when I haven’t blogged in a while. If you like the JLP, then follow me on Twitter, or better yet, follow me in real life, listening in on my mumbled self-talk and a series lectures delivered in the bathrooms of the Metrodome where I expound on the topic of rabbits.

No, it’s not all the extra feces another cat produces, nor is it the pattern of one cat peeing on the floor when they decide they don’t like how the other cat has used the litter box. It isn’t the way they woke me up at 5:30 this morning, forcing me out of bed and into my blogging harness. It isn’t the way they contribute absolutely nothing to the human experience, either.

Also, it isn’t the way that they sometimes grind on each other even though their genitals have been disengaged.

Want to know what it is? It’s the fantasy that they might somehow kill each other while my family sleeps and then somehow eat their own remains so that there are no messy consequences left for me to deal with. Wouldn’t that be amazing? It would almost be worth living with two arrogant, idiotic cats that demand attention and insist on waking us up in the middle of the night every night for five years to experience something like that. It would be like M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands, but in reverse.

Now is not the time to get into the specifics of which cat would initiate the killing cycle or how they would manage a mutual fall down our stairwell but still have enough energy and enmity remaining to go through the disgusting process of eating each other to death. I lay all those details out in an elaborate Power Point presentation I insist on delivering to my wife every night before bed.

Aside from that, there’s really nothing enjoyable about owning two cats. They don’t even fetch as much money on the black market as you’d think they would, given the number of disgraced scientists looking to conduct unethical cat-exploding experiments I imagine there are out there.

Thanks for checking in. I hope you found reading my thoughts to be an enriching experience. Come back next week when I share my opinions on the economy.

Thus far, my summer has been one of inane pleasantries and falseness. My nights have been filled with desperate longing while my days have been weighed down with hazy tedium. My children arise each morning at the unmerciful hour of 5:30 and I stay up at night reading a book that I despise until my mind can no longer sustain even this meager consciousness.

As unwelcome as a bloated, maggot-infested rabbit carcass tossed on a doorstep, my birthday has arrived. Now 34, I’ve entered the no man’s land of the mid-30s, an age marked by weight gain and an increased enthusiasm for classic rock radio. To celebrate this impending surrender to banality, my wife and I went out to a restaurant, ate some bread pudding for dessert, and submitted ourselves to the void.

And so another year has been notched off on the bloodied leather belt of life. I find myself burdened with unrelenting responsibilities and no closer to achieving my childhood dream of becoming Kirby Puckett’s best friend. Like the debris at the bottom of a box of shredded wheat, my once-fertile ambitions have been crushed into sugary dust. Alone in my desperation, my hopes unfulfilled, I am left searching for comfort in my loving family and generous faith community and enriching career, like a three-legged rottweiler with a post-graduate degree.

Well, now that I’ve hit rock bottom, I guess there’s nothing left to do but to go on a walk with my wife and hold her hand and talk about our life together, like some kind of stupid idiot.

Happy nothing.

Though the years may have thickened our midsections and shriveled our genitals, the bonds of friendship have remained strong, like a transcontinental railroad of emotions, built by Chinese immigrants and shiftless Irish layabouts. The burgers we ate were the golden railroad spikes that sealed our union, and the succulent beef juices that dribbled down our chins were like the joyful tears of Union Pacific stockholders when the graft-laden government contracts for the rail line were finalized.

My old friend and I regaled one another with tales of our lives from the past few years. Stories of marriage, children, and cat-loathing bandied back and forth, punctuated by hearty smiles and immediately-regretted winks. Our conversation sped wildly but wove a beautiful, geometrically precise story, like a spirograph of friendship. Assuming that the other customers at the restaurant were listening on as we spun our stories, I loudly shouted for everybody to leave us alone. So chastened, they returned to their meals and we to our apple-cheeked conviviality.

At the end of our time together, I took my old friend’s hand in mine and shook it firmly, a long-practiced Western custom. With evenly maintained eye contact and slightly moistened lips, we bid each other farewell and wished one another luck in our future endeavors (for him, impending fatherhood; for me, eating a large block of cheese).

Then, of course, since I don’t know how to quit while I’m ahead, I went to Dairy Queen by myself and ate three Blizzards, thus dooming myself to a long evening on the can.

The original pitch for this project was that it would be a short, simple, self-deprecating video. The pastors would rebuke Rock TV for our recent output, we assure them that we’ve got the message, and then proceed to deliver an inexplicable, dark video that alienates all. The writers seemed to like the general idea, and to my recollection, spent much of the first two meetings going over various ideas for the alienating portion of the video that didn’t make it into the final cut. After we were able to get a little meat on the bones and knock out a draft that was starting to look interesting, I contacted Jeromy Darling (one of the founders of our ministry) to see if he’d be interested in playing himself as one of the leaders at the Rock. At this point, the video changed quite a bit.

Jeromy wrote me an email with a dozen great, bizarre joke ideas that made him look like an arrogant weirdo that were quickly incorporated in the script. Furthermore, when we arrived at the shoot, Jeromy kept the strange ideas coming (the best example of this was the bit where he insists we drink the camel’s milk concoction). It was all twisted and hilarious, but the run time for that meeting scene eventually stretched to the 4 minute mark. This is obviously too long, but the editing team liked it all so much we just decided to roll with it and include 90% of the stuff we shot.

As for the two videos-within-the-video, I’m supremely fond of both. The Banana Reads Minds, the dark “art film” was shot mostly without my involvement. Melissa Johnson did an awesome job capturing the awful strangeness of such films and creating something as close to being Kubrickian as we’ve ever done. (Incidentally, that’s my son Oliver running past the screen at the end). The other short film, “Applied Proverbs”, made me laugh hysterically as I edited it alone in my basement on a Saturday night. It was not me at my most sophisticated, but there’s just something about that moment where the guy riding that huge dumpster gets his head smashed by the overhang – how exactly was that intended to end up?

In short, there’s a bunch of gags and bits that I love in this one. The flaws, as I see them, are that it goes on a little too long and it doesn’t really have a point. If there is a point, it’s that nobody seems to know how to really make a video that truly works (which is more or less true).

Stray thoughts:

-While we were shooting, I couldn’t get through Jeromy saying “It’s awful” with a straight face. There’s just something so off-putting about it that I can’t get over.

-Blaming my co-leader Ryan Pickett for the ministry’s recent weirdness was a bit of an in-joke, but it got a big laugh at the Rock. Ryan’s more popular than we thought, I guess.

-There was initially more stuff going on between Will (playing a dim junior partner) and myself (the beleaguered veteran), but much of it was dropped in the later drafts of the script and in editing as the video became more about us being put upon by these really strange guys.

-Will asking me if I’ve ever tried Big Red gum is the exact kind of line that I love. Nobody else really cares for it, but since I get the final edit, it’s in there.

Ferguson is an acclaimed Scottish financial historian who now teaches at Harvard and seems to have a cottage industry of hosting documentary series for the BBC. His book (like Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage & Culture) seeks to explain the so-called Great Divergence in wealth, power, and standard of living that catapulted Western civilizations beyond the rest of the world over the past 500 years, particularly China and the Muslim world. He points to a set of six cultural institutions or concepts mastered by the West to explain its preeminence: competition, science, property (a baseline for rule of law and democracy), medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic. As an analogy and a hook, he characterizes these as “killer apps” the West has developed that non-Western societies can download (as has been the case in many parts of the Far East) and that Western societies themselves can delete.

The book reads quickly, filled with unexpected left turns and tantalizing tangents. It’s like being led by the hand by a brilliant instructor who doesn’t quite have enough time to get in all the fun stuff he’d like to impart. Along the way toward making his argument, Ferguson covers topics like the popularization of blue jeans, the French Revolution (it was Rousseau’s fault!), the divergence between North and South America, and why Gandhi was full of crap. At times, this approach can be a little too clever. There were moments during the “Medicine” chapter where I had to remind myself what the topic of that section was as Ferguson was going on about late-period colonialism in Africa. Such complaints are slight, however. This book made a deep impression on me, and it has quickly been incorporated into my high school world history class syllabus.

This talk by Ferguson to a TED conference gives a good overview of the style and arguments of the book. It starts a bit slow, but quickly becomes compelling – the power of these ideas is remarkable.

Some scattered tidbits from the text that I enjoyed and will defend to my death:

-To me, the most tantalizing and potent chapter of the book was his examination of the killer app of competition. In it, he contrasts the fabulously successful, monolithic state of Ming China and the famous pre-Columbian world explorations of Zheng He with the petty, squabbling states of 15th century Europe. From there, he traces how the dynamic of competition (between states, between companies, between religious groups, etc.) benefitted Europe’s development step by step, while the lack of any such competition in China led to it becoming what Adam Smith called “a stationary state”. While competition certainly made European explorers, merchants and missionaries more ruthless and cutthroat, it also made them far more successful, influential, and in the end benefitted far more people.

-One of the books interesting asides has Ferguson compare the West’s relative luck in leisure drugs. In the 16th & 17th centuries, already increasingly industrious Europeans were introduced to stimulants like tobacco and caffiene. Meanwhile, China began its struggles with the engorged lethargy and whispy mustaches of the opium dens. In unrelated news, Niall Ferguson loves meth.

-Near the end of the book, Ferguson muses on the end of the West’s preeminence that we appear to be living through. He questions whether we as Westerners are still able to recognize the power and superiority of the institutions we have inherited. Too many Westerners today shrug this away and forget that, as he writes, “no civilization has done a better job of finding and educating the geniuses that lurk in the far right-hand tail of the distribution of talent in any human society.” (324) He ends the book with a call for a reaffirmation of our Western heritage.

-Other, less herlded Western innovations: corn dogs and kissing with tongue.

-Ferguson dedicates his book to his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the famous Somali-Dutch activist and critic of Islam who, he says, “understands better than anyone I know what Western civilization really means.” Unconfirmed, unspoken, and untraceable reports as of the time of this posting, however, indicate that Ferguson actually wanted to dedicate the book to me but his wife wouldn’t let him.

-Whereas Chinese society was built on Confucianism and Islamic societies built on the Qur’an, Western society is built on texts by Isaac Newton, John Locke, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare and the ideas therein. Ferguson also tosses in the speeches of Lincoln and Churchill for good measure, along with the King James Bible. He pointedly questions whether our schools emphasize these enough for our students to understand the forces that have driven the last 500 years.

-My lone addition to that list of Western civilization’s defining works: Metallica’s Ride the Lightning.

In case you didn’t know, the nations of Latin America are wonderfully immoral places where the weather is warm, the men are hot-blooded, and the women lose themselves by night in the scorching sensuality of the merengue. It is a place of class conflict, leftist guerrillas, and mildly profitable fish exports. There’s a common misperception that Latin America is a land of leprechauns and bagpipes, but that is no longer accurate. Instead, modern Latin America features thriving population centers filled with leprechauns on cocaine.

In northwest Brazil we find the Amazon basin, dominated by tropical rainforests filled with dog-molesting jaguars. It is home to diverse flora and fauna along with a number of tiny human tribes that still live unconnected outside world. According to the inerrant 1992 children’s film Fergully, these rainforests are more precious than human life itself. Today they are being cut down largely to make room for sugar cane fields to help in the production of ethanol while tributaries of the Amazon are disrupted to build hydroelectric dams. In response, Ferngully‘s beloved Batty recently honored his family by immolating himself as an act of political protest.

Most of the nations of Latin America inherited an unjust tradition of class exploitation from the years of Spanish colonialism, when all land was controlled by the foreign crown and doled out to a select group of elites, forcing the indiginous people into a life of servitude. This long-festering problem has recently manifested itself in a wave of election victories by socialist or populist figures. Presumably, these leaders have resolved those problems in a non-corrupt and democratic manner, and everything is better now.

Did you know that a man of Japanese descent was president of Peru for 10 years in the 1990s? This little-known fact helps highlight the growing demographic diversity of many Latin American nations. Did you know that he was forced out of office by a massive corruption scandal in 2000 and then presumably threw himself off a cliff from the ancient citadel of Maccu Picchu? History is full of surprises!

There you have it, friends. A helpful primer on the nations of Latin America. Literally everything worth knowing about this exciting and wonderful part of the world has been included here. I hope that your 7th grade geography report has been enriched with this important information.

Best of luck! Remember, it’s not wrong if you found it on Google!

Will Hines (the star of this particular video) has become a good friend of mine since he joined Rock TV a few years back, and a big reason for that is that we share a very particular sense of humor. My wife regularly teases me about how many texts he and I send back and forth, most of which read like (hilarious) nonsense. I remember a conversation early in our friendship when it somehow came up that we had each long been nursing ideas for comedy sketches involving characters from He-Man & the Masters of the Universe. I took this as an unmistakable sign from God that we were meant to co-lead Rock TV together.

In 2009, the ministry adopted the first of those two ideas, which became Skeletor Goes to Burger King (which has blown up on YouTube – now over 26,000 views!). Then, last year, the ministry decided to adopt the second concept, He-Man & Me. There are a number of ideas working in this video. At various points it’s a messed up after-school special or a pop cultural riff (He-Man, most obviously, but the title song sequence is almost directly lifted from an early-90s Christian kids show called McGee & Me – watch for yourself). The whole thing then operates on an odd wavelength – it never gets as silly as one might expect, it just remains the story of a guy who becomes friends with a strange, self-absorbed jerk.

We shot the live-action stuff on a couple warm Saturdays last August, and then Will spent much of the winter animating it. It was definitely a labor of love for him, but the end result is goofy and great, and I think it ended up making for a truly unique video. Additional bonus points to Will for his low-key, naturalistic acting job, which helped keep a lid on the tone we wanted.

Other stray observations:

-I love the “see you at swim lessons” line. These adult men seem to inhabit the world of 11-year olds, for unexplained reasons.

-Ryan Pickett and I had fun framing every shot of Will and Adam (his nemesis) in a way that made Will look like a hobbit.

-The repeated use of “closed-fist punch” was an element that was in every draft of the script, going back to Will’s original treatment.

-The video is admittedly a little “talky”, especially for a project that features an animated 1980s cartoon character. While this might not be everybody’s favorite approach to such a concept, I’m happy we did it this way. It’s less cartoonish than Skeletor Goes to Burger King, but there’s more to it that seems weird and funny when you think about it after the fact.

-Great performance of the theme song by Rock TV’s old friend Kevin Sawyer. The “Grayskull dreamin’” bit at the end was a nice little ad lib.

Enjoy!

For students, this is a time for barely-suppressed smiles and an unclenching of the work ethic to let the loose stools of summertime burst through. For parents, it is the calm before the storm. Soon their children will be left unsupervised to play video games to the point of blindness and eat entire packages of individually sliced cheese out of sheer boredom. For teachers, the end of the year is a time for cleaning out classrooms and feigned fond farewells.

Summer now beckons me with a facile promise of freedom, ignoring the realities of fatherhood and my obsession with memorizing the U.S. vice-presidents in chronological order. For me, summer will be no vacation. It will be filled with lawn-mowing and child-rearing and compulsive hand-washing and then it will be over. That’s how it goes. Nothing is ever as good as we think it will be (unless they make another Police Academy movie, which would be hilarious and amazing).

Before the last day of school, however, I’ve got to assign a few more detentions (to meet my self-assigned quota) and rip down a few more bulletin boards. I will fulfill these obligations in my trademark rote, dead-eyed pedagogical style. After that, it’s over. The energy from the first day of school is tapped out, along with all sense of meaning and simple human decency. We now knowingly cling to the false pretense that something has drawn to a conclusion, when in fact our inexorable march toward death continues unabated.

Happy nothing!

As you can see in this picture, the television features 1080p high definition resolution, a stylish mount, and the ability to babysit two young children. To this point, Oliver’s main reaction to the new television has been to tell us whether it is on or off and to demand the return of our old TV. To this I mumbled an absentminded response and continued staring transfixed at the new television’s brilliant display.

Perhaps paradoxically, we still don’t have cable or satellite, and have no intention of getting either. Our new television is used for watching over-the-air broadcasts of local stations, as well as old UHF favorites like the channels that broadcast Catholic mass or creepy cut-rate children’s programming. However, when viewed on a beautiful 40-inch LCD screen, the priestly vestments look positively radiant and high-resolution close-ups of the octogenarian laity droning their somnolent responses in the liturgical prayer crackle with vitality. Who needs the orange-skinned buffoonery on Bravo when this other stuff out there for free?

Thanks to our new television, our home has at last become a place of safe, nurturing love. Whatever the programming, its warm, brilliant glow is the hearth we gather around to create memories and meaning. We now begin our days with the promising pop of its power button, and retire for the night after genuflecting reverently before it and placing its remote control in a velvet sheath.

The world is now a more just, less boring place. On this Memorial Day, I offer a heartfelt salute to you, Magnavox Corporation.

Novice educators often make the mistake of thinking that the process is simple and put together some alphabetical monstrosity that torpedoes any chance at learning. A good teacher building a seating chart is like an iditarod racer selecting a hearty team of dogs for their grueling cross-country journey. They must make choices that maximize their team’s strengths, minimize their weaknesses, and forestall violent, cannibalistic insurrection.

Look at this classroom’s seating chart, for instance.

This is the mark of a master teacher – a work of rigid, fearsome, symmetrical beauty. It is impossible to tell whether these children are waiting to receive mathematics instruction or to witness a public execution. The classroom environment is spartan, the pedagogy is severe, and the technology is nonexistant. In other words, educational paradise.

In constructing their seating chart, a good teacher must first know their students. Who are the alpha males? Who’s the queen bee? Who smells like old popcorn all the time? Once assessed, the mixing and matching begins. In a way, it’s like being secretary general of the United Nations. Do you think Israel and Iran are seated next to each other? Do you suppose the Serbs and Croats are allowed to mingle freely? Hardly. A good teacher places obnoxious delinquents like Sudan in the front corner to minimize their distration while chatty butterflies like Italy are seated next to quiet, serious South Korea. Canada is a teacher’s dream – they’re responsible, pleasant, and can help defuse trenchcoat-wearing weirdos like Russia.

Properly placed, the classroom becomes a harmonious, symbiotic whole. Mishandled, the classroom becomes a flaming heap of overturned desks and desecrated bulletin boards. This is the difference between being a highly qualified educator and being a Taco Bell shift manager or combing the bears at the zoo or something else dumb.

Educators of America, you’re welcome.

Admittedly, mine is not a spectacular vehicle. It cannot accelerate or slow itself with any haste; it is neither shiny nor safe. Inside, it is formless and beige, like a foreclosed condominium. The display on the radio doesn’t work anymore and the A/C has become only minimally responsive. At this point, the car is probably better suited for transporting condemned prisoners to the place of their execution than getting me to work. The fact that I, a handsome, occasionally friendly man with full-time job and a full-grown beard am forced to drive it is yet another grave injustice of our capitalist system.

The most recent and serious breakdown of my Hyundai involved the lock on the driver’s side door, which became jammed shut. Thus, the cockpit seat was accessable only by getting in the passenger-side door and lumbering awkwardly over to the driver’s side. This feat was made more difficult by the fact that I am a 6’5″ man and the Sonata is a vehicle designed by the best and brightest modestly-sized engineers of Korea.

After several failed attempts to make the passage, I eventually figured out that a feet-first attempt was my only real shot at making it to the driver’s seat. So up and over I went: first swinging my feet and legs over to the driver’s side, then raising my hips and sending them clumsily over the raised arm rest with a strained grunt and stifled profanity. The final step was to wildly lurch my upper body from one side of the cabin to the other without dragging my head along the roof or wrenching my back. It was not one of the more refined, sophisticated moments of my life.

I ended up having to drive the car in this state for two days before it could get fixed. At one point, after running a quick errand I returned to my parking spot to see that my broken Hyundai was now closely surrounded on both sides with other cars whose drivers were sitting right there in their respective driver’s seats for some reason or another. Swallowing hard, I avoided eye contact and tried to move from the passenger door to my driver’s seat as confidently and smoothly as possible. Later, while veering wildly out of the parking lot, I realized that in my embarassed rush I’d managed to somehow rip the sole from one of my shoes halfway off while positioning myself.

In summary, my Hyundai humiliates me and destroys my shoes. If there were any justice in this world, I would be allowed to send it over Niagra Falls without the EPA getting in my business.

The book is a study of America’s headlong rush into the 1898 Spanish-American War, viewed through the conflicting perspectives of famously powerful Boston and New York elites and intellectuals like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William James, & William Randolph Hearst. Along the way, Thomas examines man’s fascination with war itself – how human nature is drawn to it, occasionally revels in it, and fears it. Somewhat less effectively, Thomas also frames the book to underline the similarities between the war fever of 1898 with America’s rush into the Iraq War a decade ago, going so far as to imagine Dick Cheney being the inheritor of T.R.’s famous war lust.

I enjoyed the book, with some qualifications. As a look into the elite Brahmin aristocracy of the Gilded Age, it’s terrific. I liked the character studies of crusted intellectuals like William James (whose pluralism-friendly philosophy of pragmatism has become quite influential, and which I teach in my philosophy class) and the audacious, unscrupulous journalist William Randolph Hearst. The chapters on the war itself were fresh and lean, capturing that strange mix of bloody adrenaline, and confused, dreary boredom.

Having studied Roosevelt a fair degree already, I appreciated Thomas’ treatment of him less. Roosevelt left behind a mountain of written material and speeches, and Thomas seems to have scrounged around for every half-cocked comment about military glory he could find in order to paint him as a man who was close to being dangerously unhinged (and a burden to his family) when it seems to me the record shows him to be nothing of the sort. Similarly, Thomas awkwardly and unnecessarily drops in racially insensitive quotes from T.R.’s letters every now and again, as if to signal his unsympathetic nature to the modern reader lacking context otherwise.

As I’ve written about, Roosevelt is best understood as a moderate who lived in strained times. He was an intellectual savant who could talk himself in circles with “on the one hand this, but on the other hand that”, but usually chose a course of action that was both practical and bold. To insinuate that he was a bigot or racist by the standards of his era is unfair, particularly in the racially hypersensitive times we live in today. It seems to me that Thomas’ thesis on war itself (that it is a dark but inescapable function of human nature) soured him on Roosevelt, who idealized martial virtues. Thomas later offers up a fair, if half-hearted postscript, noting that, as president, T.R. kept the U.S. out of war and that his presidential rhetoric was “not particularly bellicose”.

—

Here are a few stray tidbits from the book that I appreciated:

-My favorite line in the book, and a phrase I intend on making use of myself, was found on p. 357. Roosevelt had returned from war, and was asked how he was doing. He shouted back, “I am feeling disgracefully well!”

-Of all the men studied in the book, Thomas’ sympathies seem to lie most with William James. This is well founded. James was an insightful intellectual with cosmopolitan attitudes and a realistic understanding of human nature and society. The antics of the “war lovers” Roosevelt, Hearst, and Lodge dismayed him, but he was also unimpressed with the so-called “mugwumps” – high society progressives and reformers who sniffed at politics and everyday Americans. This group would seem to have been a natural community for James, but their smug antipatriotism struck him as self-defeating, and their stuffiness left him bored.

-Apparently everybody in 1898 wore black for some reason.

-William Randolph Hearst comes across as a strange guy. For all the crazed headlines and yellow journalism he was responsible for, and for all the publicity stunts he pulled (including sailing to Cuba to insert himself heedlessly into the war), he was an odd, awkward dude. Painfully shy, alternately manic and morose, with a limp-wristed handshake and an affection for chorus girls, he loved influence and melodrama but was pained when attention was placed on him. He filled his newspapers with bloated partial truths and filled his letters to his mother with self-pity. He was like Glenn Beck’s effeminate 1890s doppelganger.

-Soldiers serving in Cuba referred to malaria and yellow fever as “the black vomit”, which is beautifully and disturbingly evocative.

-The 1890s was a golden age for facial hair, when beards were pointy and mustaches robust. Not until the 1970s ascendancy of Dan Haggerty would America’s beards see such warmth and richness again.

-Famously, the 39-year old Roosevelt resigned his powerful post as assistant secretary of the navy (he was the de facto head of the navy much of the time because of the secretary’s long absences) to raise a cavalry regiment of cowboys and Harvard men to personally fight in the war. Of course, this was an insane thing to do, and literally everybody seems to have told Roosevelt this. Undeterred, he wrote long letters to friends and advisors explaining his motivations as being honorable and disinterested. While T.R. was no doubt acting on some of his deepest convictions, Thomas suggests that Roosevelt was also acting to erase the one blemish on his much-loved father’s record: the fact that he had avoided fighting in the Civil War. This was Roosevelt’s chance to avenge the family name, and he did so with gusto – the move would literally launch him into the presidency a few years later.

-Roosevelt loved the vigorous life and fighting. In a letter to Lodge after the fighting was over, he breathlessly began one paragraph, “Did I tell you that I killed a Spaniard with my own hand?” Experts agree that, had T.R. been alive in 1987, he would have fought and defeated Hulk Hogan in Wrestlemania III.

-In 2001, Bill Clinton posthumously awarded Theodore Roosevelt the Medal of Honor for his service in the Spanish-American War. The next night, the ghost of Roosevelt appeared to Clinton and commanded him to annex the Philippines and pardon Mark Rich.

Picture, if you will, the heady days of the Carter administration. The sweetly unnatural strains of the Bee Gees were blasting from every radio and the dark majesty of Burt Reynolds’ chest hair spilled across America’s movie screens like a wheat field of virility. From this milieu, I burst forth onto planet earth, fully formed and wonderful. An obedient, long-napping blessing to my parents and an eventual benefit to culture and higher thought across planet earth, I was a uniquely special and humble person from the beginning.

Here is a picture of me when I was about a year old. Look carefully, and you will see my adult soul peering out through those blank, unfocused eyes. My thinning baby hair and corpulent double chin belied the cunning and calculation that would later serve me so well in my middle school years.

Let us now address the issue of my false nose in the above photograph. From the start, I used humor as a device to procure the love and acceptance of others. In this instance, the juxtaposition of my childhood innocence with the oversized nose of a man garnered rousing laughter and lifelong memories from my family. In a way, I have chased this image across the years of my life. Every joke I’ve cracked since then, every blog entry I’ve written, and every detention I’ve assigned have, in some sense, been an attempt to recapture this lost moment from my childhood, now gone forever.

Flash forward ten years. Here I sit with my siblings. From left to right, my sister Julia, my brother Brian, myself, and my other brother (whose name escapes me at the moment). Clearly, my life had grown more crowded with the growth of my family. Despite my loud, prolonged protestations, I was no longer the center of my parents’ (and the world’s?) attention.

Once again, my adult characteristics are on full display in this photo. The impatient, withering stare. The sophisticated attire. The disengagement with those closest to me. No doubt my wife will nod and sigh wearily in agreement when she finally reads this blog post after my repeated prompting. Then she’ll return to reminding me not to eat five bowls of cereal in one day.

So there you have it. Me, encapsulated in two photographs and some 400 words. Consider this my obituary, except it is ironic and flagrantly inaccurate.

Still though, this is how I choose to be remembered.

*Cue “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan*

Equally as terrible, several people at our home recently became ill.

Late Friday night, my long and illustrious streak of vomit-free living came to an ignoble end. Swimming with flu-induced nausea, I stumbled into the bathroom, collapsed to the floor, clipping my head on the toilet, and blacked out. When I came to, I had thrown up and my jaw ached like it had just collided with the hairy knuckles of the aforementioned swarthy Serbian assassin. Pleasantness followed for the next 12 hours, as the rest of the household cowed in fear of the sickness.

Complicating matters was the fact that Bridgette’s sister and two young children were staying with us for what was scheduled to be a weekend of unrestrained, screaming frivolity. However, my illness cast such pall over the festivities that the best they could manage was a silent, sullen visit to a nearby McDonalds playland, itself likely infested with the flu and pools of syphilis.

Predictably, my sister-in-law and niece were each struck asunder by the flu last night. The circle of barf was complete, and our house sank into a sinkhole of stinking squalor. Now, all are miserable, and the only thing left is to wait for the dreaded flu to strike our kids. For the moment, they remain as unwitting about their fate as was the Austro-Hungarian archduke on that June morning in 1914. Hopefully, when our kids become sick, other neighborhood children will not be pulled in with them because of the entanglements of a misguided alliance system.

Ultimately, there really isn’t anything more to say. Our household is currently passing through the shadows of life, and we have been made miserable.

This is all Germany’s fault.

Whether you are reading this website out of morbid curiosity, misguided hostility, or untreated depression, all are welcome inside the concrete digital walls of the JLP! We’re all the same here, except some people’s hands are clammier than others, and a few geniuses insist on breathing through their mouths. Because of our universal humanity and love of being tickled, we choose to affirm one another with our words and sensuous abdominal massages.

Now that we have formed a perfectly shaped semicircle, I invite each of you to stand before us by turns and express our deepest, most inexpressible shame. Then, by your tears and our voyeurism, we shall become one. Though deeply painful and plainly unnecessary, this process is both healing and compulsory.

The world is a painful place, dear readers. Financial hardships and knife-wielding north Minneapolitans have a funny way of upending your plans and stabbing your dog right when you least expect it. That’s why your JLP friends are here. We want to help you through it by listening to you and maybe asking you to consider taking your shirt off. We are a nurturing community of rejected misfits and greasy internet weirdos. We reject traditional societal norms and ignore common social cues. Instead, we nod nurturingly and impose sweaty, restorative hugs.

Come, reluctant readers. Join our therapeutic semicircle of wellness. But remember, everything is a secret!

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.

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.

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.

For those unfamiliar with the details of my life for some reason, my wife and I are the ambivalent owners of two half-witted cats, Mona and Ben Franklin. The two of them torment us with their incessant early morning yowling and unnatural perversion. Once upon a time, we delighted in their imbecilic antics and found comfort in their ample girth, but now that we have actual human children to raise and tend to, the luster is gone.

Let me put it to you this way: while I wouldn’t want to smother them each to death with a large bath towel per se, I also wouldn’t spend much time mourning them if they were both killed by a rattlesnake or something.

Last night was the last straw. My time spent cleaning up and taking out their noxious leavings could have been spent doing more productive, affirming things reading a book or embracing my wife or sewing pleats into my jeans. What good is it to have cats if we have to put so much work into their care and they just lay around creating uncomfortable situations?

To clarify, I’m not saying that I’m actually going to do anything to my cats. I’m just saying that they are each uniquely terrible and it would be better if they had never lived, that’s all.

Their poop stinks so bad, you guys.

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!

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.

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.