ALONE WITH MY THOUGHTS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-29-19)

     This weekend I'm reporting to you from sunny Belmar, New Jersey. I know every inch of this small shore town that booms with summer rentals. I've been coming here now for a summer weekend for the last 25 years, by myself. It's a great chance to recharge my batteries and be alone with my thoughts for a couple days. You should try it, and if you want to, you can be alone with your own thoughts instead of mine. Why haven't you done this already? Because when you mentioned that you were thinking of taking a weekend for yourself in Belmar your wife's eyes lit up thinking of the peace and quiet, the freedom to do what she wants when she wants, not having to deal with all your disgusting habits (you really need to clean up your act). You're thinking that there's a slim chance that the place could function without you.

     It's the same reason that many Americans won't take time off work to go on vacation. It's because they are afraid that the company will realize how easy it is to get along without them, and they will become expendable. The day that your company hired you they began the long process of eventually replacing you with somebody younger and smarter that they can pay less money to. Most people don't understand that, but I do. When I went for my first interview with the company 39 years ago, I stressed how easy it would be to replace me. And the company, realizing what a valuable asset that is, hired me on the spot. Since then they have never been able to find anyone as easily replaceable as me, and thus they have never replaced me.

     My hotel is right across from the beach, and the minute I park my car in a GREAT space on Tenth Avenue 12 drivers in a row pull up next to me and ask me when I'm leaving. I'm used to that question from my old girlfriend's Mom so it doesn't bother me. There aren't many hotels around here and this is a quirky place indeed. There is no smoking allowed inside any of the rooms, which all smell like smoke as if they were burning parts of the Amazon jungle in there. There may be other policies that are loosely enforced, but I don't care because I'm right across from the beach.

     In the afternoon I pedaled my bike over to Point Pleasant to see if the place lived up to its name. As I crossed the Manasquan River I noticed a sign that said "Bridge Freezes Before Road." I couldn't help wondering, how much before? Is this something I should be worrying about in August? Somebody felt it was important enough to put the sign up, so I used extreme caution. I parked my bike at the bike stand and parked myself at the tiki bar. Point Pleasant did live up to its name, it was both pleasant and pointy. I ordered a frozen margarita. At the tiki bar margaritas freeze before both the road and the bridge, so I used more extreme caution.

      There was a minor dust-up when a seagull took a tern for the worse and flew in the side window, scaring the crap out of everybody and almost causing an alcohol-related tragedy, me spilling my margarita. It reminded me of when we were walking on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and my sister Anne started feeding pizza to the seagulls. My sister Anne is a friend to all animals, she doesn't discriminate, and she assumed she was performing an act of charity because it's hard for birds to order pizza. But a Hitchcockian scene ensued, and everyone on the Boardwalk turned against her, and I thought they were going to return with pitchforks and torches and burn her at the stake, so we covered her in a blanket and ushered her out to Tennessee Avenue.

     After enjoying the sunshine all day I like to go somewhere at night that has a band. It's important to support live music, or you're going to be left with that crap that they play at restaurants that mistakenly consider themselves trendy, where they play a tiny part of a song over and over and over with a lot of reverb and a catchy beat, and then they just get bored and stop, and play a different part of a different song that has no substance.

     Tonight's band was in fine form. They played, "Shut Up and Dance," which my wife always loves to dance to. She always feels the need to stress the "shut up" part over the "and dance" part. Somebody in the band yells noisily, "MAKE SOME NOISE!" They weren't too specific, so I make some of the noises that I'm famous for. I can do a fantastic imitation of a family of pigs talking to each other, for instance. And I was just about to play "The Flight of the Bumblebee" by hitting my cheeks with my hands when five girls come over and asked me, "Can you take our picture?" They hand me their phone. "Of course! Where is the F-stop on this thing? I touch the side of the phone and now the camera is facing towards me. I hit another button by mistake which takes my picture and sends it to all of her friends. "Sorry about that," I say, "but if it's any consolation my hair looks better than it usually looks at the shore."

      Sunday arrives before I know it. It's almost check-out time by time I wake up, so probably a lot has happened before I know it. I guess I'm done recharging my batteries because I used my phone, my iPod, my radio and my laptop so much that now they're out of batteries and need to be recharged. Also, my thoughts don't seem to want to be alone with me anymore.
 

LIFE AS WE KNOW IT

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-22-19)

     You may have heard that some knucklehead on the internet posted an invitation for other knuckleheads on the internet to "storm Area 51" because "they can't stop all of us!" This post is basically a classified ad, since Area 51 is classified as a highly classified area owned by the Air Force, presumably used to test experimental aircraft and weapons. It's nearby to a town called Rachel, population 54, less Rachel herself who died in 1980. No one knows if Area 51 is involved with aliens from other planets, because the Air Force plays things very close to the vest. What am I personally going to do about this? I'm going to open an ice cream truck in Area 50, which is right next door, but nobody cares if you're there or not. It's hot as hell in Nevada, and nothing brings aliens closer together than ice cream. Aliens, I don't know if you're listening, but look at the side of the truck and decide what you want BEFORE it's your turn to order, so you don't hold up the line.

     I'll tell you right now I don't believe in paranormal activities. Most people who know me will tell you that I also don't believe in normal activities. I don't believe in ghosts, for instance. Here's a spoiler alert, because I don't wish to ruin your religious beliefs, but why won't people get it through their thick heads that after you're dead, it's no different than before you were born. The physical world survived without you then, and it will keep surviving when you are gone, unless you're reincarnated as an alien, of course. I don't believe in clairvoyance, even though I do boast some ability in that area myself. I can accurately predict the opening series of the first Giants game this year: First play, Saquon Barkley runs for a gain of one-and-a-half yards. Second play, Manning pass, incomplete. Third play, Manning pass, complete for three yards. Fourth play, Giants punt. Please laugh only when it turns out that I'm right. I could actually go on and predict the whole first quarter if you'd like. I don't believe in déjà vu, except that every time I turn onto my street I feel like we've been down this road before.

     I guess maybe I believe in the paranormal more than I thought I did. One thing I certainly do believe in is life on other planets. We went to a planetarium last year, and they showed this huge map of the universe, and each star on it could have 8 planets like ours, not counting Uranus (unless you want me to), capable of supporting life. I started to count all the stars, and I didn't have time to count all of them but there were at least 26. What I definitely don't believe in is spaceship sightings. Why on Earth would aliens come to Earth? Music is in a horrible state, there's nothing but reality shows on TV, and we seem totally unable to govern ourselves. If aliens did invade us and take over the Earth, odds are it could be an improvement. If Illegal aliens do become a problem, we may have to do something about it. If I am elected, I will build a HUGE force-field around the United States, and I'm going to make the Martians pay for it. Did you hear that Martians? BUILD THE FORCE-FIELD! BUILD THE FORCE-FIELD!

     I read that a spaceship from Israel crash-landed on the Moon and dumped these creatures called tardigrades all over the place. A tardigrade is a very weird microscopic organism that looks like an eight-legged pig with a shower drain stuffed into its mouth. It's both adorable and very disturbing should you choose to look it up. You may not thank me for calling these to your attention, but they are somewhat fascinating because they can survive extreme heat and extreme cold while living in a state of suspended animation with no available water, and possibly survive on the Moon. I'm sure they thought they were just going to be hanging out on the spaceship, enjoying the mild temperatures and available water, and all of a sudden they wake up on the Moon. After they've cracked each other up for half an hour going, "That's one giant leap for tardigrade-kind, and one small step for tardigrades!" "Yeah, because we're microscopic! HAHAHAHA!," reality sets in and it's pretty boring. The same thing happened to me when I overslept on the train and ended up in Beacon. Beacon is no breathtaking metropolis at that hour but at least it isn't the Moon.

     I'm not going to whip myself into a lather just because we find some damn protozoan living on an ice cap on some faraway planet, unless it comes out that it's highly advanced. We humans think we're pretty smart stuff, but I'm not even sure people are highest on the food chain here on Earth. I go to work every morning, I take a car to a train to a bicycle to an elevator, and I bust my buttons for 8 solid hours, and during that time my cat sits around on its ass all day, gets all his meals, his dry cleaning done and sleeps for 23 hours out of 24. Now you tell me who's smarter. By the way I never heard one stupid thing come out of a protozoan's mouth, possibly because I'm not exactly sure which end its mouth is on. But I've heard plenty of stupid things come out of a human, many of them from me, actually.

     What's going to happen when I finally sign up for one of these rocket trips Elon Musk is planning, and the driver misses the exit and we end up on some planet with life on it? Just for fun I abduct one of the inhabitants to run some experiments on, hoping the event will be used in a soap opera plot on their planet's TV station. "You're not at ALL what I was expecting," she says. "I thought you'd have this big round head, dark goggly eyes, long, graceful limbs, etc." "Well, let's get to the experiments," I say. "How do you reproduce, for instance?" "We just use the Xerox machine. It's in the corner if you'd like to have a go." I put the alien into a shoe box with some lettuce. That's what I always used to do when I was a kid and I caught a salamander or toad or something, and thought it might want to whip up a salad for itself. The alien makes a noise! It's trying to converse with me in its own language! I open the box and it turns out the noise was made by the alien tying my shoe laces together- I suppose I should have taken the shoes out of the shoe box.

     I'm not sure we need to travel light-years away to find intelligent life, or even light-months. Let's stop all this nonsense and search for intelligent life on THIS planet. We can start with the White House. I don't believe that any trace of water has been found there, so we can start by identifying any low-level organisms that can survive only on Diet Coke.?

ROCKIN’ IN THE FREE WORLD

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-15-19)

     You can probably tell by my hair, but I've been in a band since I was 12. At the age of 12 you're not necessarily in the game to make a hit with the ladies, excepting your Mom and Grandma, but it's good to have a head-start for when you reach puberty. I wanted to play the drums, because I have four sisters and you're not allowed to hit a girl, and it helps to hit something that can't hit you back. My Dad, for reasons still unclear to me, insisted I play the trombone in the school band instead. I tried to make him understand that the trombone is simply a musical prop invented to steal the toupees off of cartoon characters. So I continued to moonlight on the drums, and by the time I was 16 girls could barely tolerate me, which was definitely an improvement.

     Remember the good old days of rock and roll? If you do then you certainly weren't there. It was a breeding ground for excess, and back then you could never have too much excess. If we played at the bar until 3:00AM it was an early night, and after we were done I could expect a hangover to replace the hang-under I had before we started. We were loud, we were raw and we were undisciplined. And that was before we even started to play.

     Did I ever tell you about the drummer for the Billy Squier band? He lived in the area and used to come around to the local bar and sit in with my band. He wasn't much use standing up, but behind the drums he was a monster. He had a lot of hair and a lot of cocktails, and that's not a good combination if you also smoke. And the reason for that became apparent after one performance when he tried to balance his drink in one hand and his cigarette in the other hand, and had no more hands left for when he lit his hair on fire. It was up to me, who had limited training in firefighting, to extinguish my distinguished guest using my beer. I tried to do it as efficiently as possible, because I was looking forward to the rest of that beer, but I had to go all in when a smoldering brush fire popped up behind his ear. He didn't seem to take much notice of the whole affair except insofar as his cigarette was now too wet to light except from the wrong end.

     But that was 40 some-odd years ago, and looking back it seems that most were odd. All this time I've been going to band practice with three other guys, and it's been like a fraternity party only with less rules. I was playing with a jazz group for months, and when I asked when we were going to perform in public they told me that they weren't really interested in that, they just wanted to drink single malt Scotch and escape from their wives for a little while, don't you? "Why would I want to escape from your wives?" I asked. Another time me and one of my old rock band-mates were haunting one of our old haunts and he said, "Do I have to remind you what I did in that corner over there?" "Refresh my memory," I said. He did, and it was not as refreshing as I thought it would be.

     But things are a little different now that I've started a band with two girls. In old days you'd be thinking, "TWO women, and YOU? They're probably going to kill each other after they kill you first." But this is a new day. There is less talk about imaginary feminine conquests and more talk about restorative yoga.

     They're younger than I am, so I thought I could be the model of bad behavior, but it hasn't worked out that way. I'm the old dog that's learning the new tricks. I'm learning how to burp in time with the music. I've learned a few words that only women know because only women need to know them. And they're teaching me not to be anti-social about social media. The girls handle all their business electronically, set lists, lyrics, everything. Colleen was playing a tambourine with one hand and a drum with the other, and she was trying to turn the page on her iPad with her nose. We positively identified that it was her because she left her nose-print. She's happy to blame any mistakes that I might make on me, and any mistakes she makes on "Mercury retrograde," whatever that may be. I'm used to having EVERYTHING blamed on me, so I see see that glass as half full.

     All of a sudden I'M the mother hen, and the world is finally upside down. Lauren was thinking about getting a tattoo, and I've been trying to talk her out of it. My opinion is that there is nothing a fat dude with a beard can draw on a woman that's going to be much of an improvement over the woman herself. "Think to yourself what it will look like when you're 90, and if you still insist on it after that mental picture, at least make it something that will look good with wrinkles, like a Shar-Pei." The girls love each other, and now I have my hands full trying to keep them from trying the same tricks my sisters used on me.

     Plus I'm finding out a lot of things I didn't know before. I'm learning that nothing goes with rock and roll like an avocado salad. I'm learning that my hair looks best on Instagram when back-lit. I'm learning that good skin doesn't happen by accident. And it's all good. Perhaps Kiss sang it best when they sang, "I wanna rock and roll all night, and party every day." And to those of us old enough to have been in high school when that song was released, let me just say that at this point, I wanna rock and roll 'til sometime after dusk, and party every other day. After that I could use a nap.
 

LIFE'S A BEACH

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-08-19)

     We weekended with friends in the Hamptons, which is the only place you can use "weekend" as a verb. It's a transitive verb after labor day, but during the summer the traffic is so bad in the Hamptons that it's an intransitive verb. It's impossible for non-residents to get around, but Laurie and Mark know all the shortcuts when it's time to go to the beach. You take a left at Sebaponic Road, a right at Quiniponack Road, then a left at Ponaponac Road and then a right at Quagaquonic. Then you have to cut across some guy's lawn, but it's an easement so everybody does it. There is even more money in the Hamptons than there is traffic, so why doesn't somebody build a monorail? Since it's a monorail you only have to build one of them, and it stops everywhere you need to go. It comes to our street to pick us up, but we're not ready yet, so it has to wait until we finish making the sandwiches. When you bring a sandwich to the beach, you find out how it got that name. Then the monorail goes to the CVS (we forgot sunscreen, but all they have is banana and coconut, I wish somebody would invent a new flavor), then stops at the deli (everyone else gets fresh fruit but what they really want is potato chips; I get potato chips but what I really want is Kit Kat bars), goes across that guy's lawn and dumps us off at the beach right near the ice cream truck.

     I get a dirty look from the ice cream guy, who can sense that I don't live there and have probably overstayed my welcome. I give him a dirty look right back to let him know that he's way off base because I was never welcome in the first place, and I'm also angry that he has such a good parking space. I clearly don't belong around all that money. To live here you have to know what compote is, you have to be able to afford staff and you may not under any circumstances drive a Dodge Dart. I don't have a staff but I sure could use one. I need a separate professional for each job I have around the house. I'd like a catbox specialist who really knows the scoop. I'm going to need my own weed guy, and also someone to pluck all the unwanted plants out of the garden. I'll hire a trash technician to take out the garbage, and perhaps he can figure out how it got in here in the first place. I make a mental note to pick up more W-9 forms when we get back to town.

     Surprisingly, as we're driving about the back roads there aren't very many people around. There are a lot of deer though, there's probably some kind of Deer Fest going on this weekend. There's one in front of me with kind of a deer-in-the-headlights look, and when I turn around there's another one in back of us with a deer-in-the-taillights look. It's hard to see out the back window, because Laurie has parking permits for every beach in the Hamptons. Life is too short not to, but deciding which beach to go to is time-consuming. One has nicer sand, but the waves are dangerous. Another one has no parking, but a really nice bathroom. The other one is close by, but it doesn't have any dangerous waves.

     Isn't that Billy Joel's house? Yes, and he bought it from Madonna who got it from Alec Baldwin. Who purchased it from Billy Joel. I wonder who owns that house over there, it's huge. Laurie says it belongs to a hedge fund guy. Makes sense, because if you look at it from the street all you can see is a 40-foot hedge. Hedge fund guys like a lot of privacy so you don't ask too many questions about how they got all that money. I know it's not from human trafficking, because no one who lives in the Hamptons would ever do anything to add to the traffic. However, if you look at the houses from Google Earth you can see everything! One guy has a maze built out of shrubbery, and it looks like one of Madonna's dancers has been caught in there for quite some time. Here's a house that has a moat to prevent people from accidentally falling into the lake and drowning. Another guy has had the entire state of Rhode Island installed into his back yard.

     I'm not moving out here until I can afford to live on a compound. I'm not sure what that is but I know it involves at least one molecule of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen. I'd like my own tennis court, but indoors, so no one from outside can see that I can't hold my serve. I'd put in a 40-foot hedge at net so no one from inside can see that I can't hold my serve either. Security is an important consideration. I'm so tired of Kate Beckinsale wandering over in her bikini asking me to put sunscreen on her. And Martha Stewart always waving her cupcakes in my face. And here comes Seinfeld again to argue with me about the size of my heliport. I'll need a concrete wall like the one that used to be in Berlin, but tasteful, with a concrete gate. You can only get in if you know the secret password, which is the name of my cat plus whatever year it is. Ironically my cat has been way more useful as a password than he's been as a pet.

     We stop at the market in town to pick up some stuff for dinner. I walk around the Hamptons pointing and saying, "I think that's Rick Melén's house, but he hardly ever comes here. He lives in a beautiful mansion, you know, but he's a few molecules short of a compound." I have a cardboard cutout of me sunbathing au naturel that can only be seen from above by Google Earth, so if you really want to see my house be careful what you can't un-see.