LIFE IS A MASQUERADE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (11-03-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

 
     Last weekend we went to a fun Halloween party with our friends Mark and Laurie, and I know what you're probably thinking: "Aren't you a little old for that kind of thing?" And to that I say, "Yes." Here's where you're expecting me to say, "HOWEVER," and say why Halloween is fun for children of all ages, etc. But really, I'm just in it for the candy, plain and simple, plain and peanut.

     The hardest part is figuring out what I'm going to be. Being me is hard enough for people to put up with. Furthermore, any costume I put together has the Dolly llama to be compared with. That was the time when I went as Dolly Parton, with my acoustic guitar as an accessory, except that my face was that of a llama, which I constructed out of my wife's bathroom rug. My llama face had a movable mouth which I controlled with a string, and I could accompany myself on the guitar in a chorus of "9 to 5" or "Jolene." Picture it in your mind, if you will, and if you won't it's probably for the best.

     Two weeks later when my wife asked me if I had any idea what happened to the bathroom rug, I had to tell her the truth. "Honey, I think we may have been robbed. That was probably a Persian rug, and it could have been very valuable. We were no doubt the victim of a cat burglar, my guess is it was a Persian cat."  

     I always think of a better costume the day after the party. I won't tell you what I was this year because it was kind of dumb, but I had to fashion a war service medal, and I needed a metal piece from one of our light fixtures. "No, Honey, I don't know why we always get robbed this time of year, but don't worry, next Halloween I'm going as Sherlock Holmes, and I'll get to the bottom of this."

     I love a good party, but I've always wanted to be invited to a real masquerade ball. You know the kind of affair I'm talking about, with beautiful women dressed as Queen Victoria, wearing an exorbitant wig, holding up a flirtatious eye mask, her husband dressed as a handsome viscount, whatever the hell that is. "So, madame, who am I talking to? All I can see are your eyes, but I feel like they are looking straight through to my soul. It's like you can see right through me, and somehow know that I got my viscount costume at a discount. Did you make that mask yourself?" "No, it's a certified N95 mask I got on Amazon."

     You know that if someone invites you to a costume ball, it's going to be big, expensive, and the food's going to be top-notch. You know this for a fact, because no one wants to be known for their small balls. But if I was invited, would I even go? It could be dangerous, because at every costume ball I've ever seen on television or the movies, someone gets killed. And there are always two people dressed in the same costume as the killer, which creates a whole lot of confusion and mayhem. I guess if I want to play it safe I'll dress as a gangster, carry a violin case, and you'll just have to guess whether there's a machine gun in there or if I'm just planning to kill you softly with my song.

     If you want to enjoy a successful evening I have some tips for you: 1.) Avoid anything served in a cauldron. Yes, it's probably just chili, but if somebody spits out the eye of a newt, you'll think of me kindly for once for warning you. By the way, I see a lot of newts bumping into things towards the end of October, because depth perception suffers with only one eye. 2.) Remember that you're eventually going to have to go to the bathroom. I always manage to overlook that simple fact when designing my costume, and it results in me eventually tearing a hole in something that shouldn't have a hole in it, and then I have to cover it up with something inappropriate that dropped off of somebody else's costume. 3.) Don't drink too much at the party. Have you ever been stopped by the police dressed as a policeman? It's probably not going to go as well as you thought it would.

     It seems like at every Halloween party I've ever been to, I end up watching a Yankee playoff game in a crowded room with a television set. While all the Mets fans are having a good time forgetting about baseball, dancing in the other room, we're looking glum because the Yankees always lose on the Saturday before Halloween. It results in sore dinosaurs, morose monsters, pessimistic pirates and woeful wenches. And there's some sad things known to man, but none truly sadder than the tears of a clown.

BEARLY A SCRATCH

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-27-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     Habitats are shrinking every day, and if we're not careful there's a species that may soon find itself on the endangered list. And that species is US. When we went into the woods behind our property the other day we noticed a tree missing half its bark from about 3 to 8 feet from the ground. We posted a picture of it on social media and everyone weighed in with their theories: Deer rubbing their antlers (they would have had to find a stepladder); a woodpecker (you'd have to be an awfully big pecker to peck that much wood); a cougar (maybe a cougar holding a woodpecker); a beaver (building a dam in the middle of the woods?); lightning (if lightning struck using a Milwaukee Sawzall); Sasquatch (the most plausible of the bunch). 

     But at the very top of the damage was a gouge in the exact shape of a paw with sharp claws on it. It couldn't have been more obvious if it had left fingerprints, a DNA profile and a written confession. I couldn't figure out what a bear would want that's inside that tree- was it GOLD? I started scratching into it in a frenzy until my wife calmly escorted me back inside to research the phenomenon. Apparently bears dig into trees when they are desperate for food, and the inner sapwood provides a source of nutrients that is at least, obviously, high in fiber. It made me wonder what the other bears thought of the first bear that suggested eating raw wood. "Wow what a great idea! What wine goes with wood? Hey, look over there- it's a storm drain cover! Why don't you give that a try! It's high in iron! In fact, its... grate!" 

     It seemed a little scary to me that a bear can inflict this much pain on a full-grown tree. I had an image in my mind of bears as a somewhat benign and friendly group. They usually talk, have a hug named after them and sometimes dance. I think of Winnie the Pooh, a bear who likes poetry, speaks in an accent, has a best friend who's an ass, and wears a shirt but no pants. Maybe this is a bad example. 

     Yet they always seemed caring and helpful. When I was a little kid, Smokey the Bear would come on TV and tell me, "Only YOU can prevent forest fires!" And I thought to myself, "Who, ME? What the hell am I supposed to do about it?" I didn't even live near a forest. There was nobody else who could help?

     Even in the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," the bears let her go without so much as a blonde hair out of place even though she was technically guilty of breaking and entering. If I was Goldilocks, and I'm pretty sure she HATED being called that, I would get into the Bears' garbage cans and spread their trash all over the driveway, add a little ironic comic twist to the story.

     Nowadays there is a family of bears starring in their own television commercial, and come to think of it they do not really come out looking too good either. The family has chosen toilet paper as the focus of their budget, and they're trying to cut down. They argue incessantly about how many sheets they should use. Winnie the Pooh never did THAT, and his last name is POOH.

     And of course there were Teddy bears, whose name came from an incident in which Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that had been treed and subdued during a hunting trip, deeming it poor sportsmanship. That turned the bear into a cuddly stuffed toy that lived on your pillow. Mine was a kind of scary-looking old soul with only one eye and mangy fur and looked like he shouldn't be left alone with children.

     Bears have other weird habits. There are many reports of them raiding bird-feeders, as if some sunflower seeds are going to satisfy a 500-pound appetite. Does that sound like the work of a sane animal? Also, who, besides my Dad, could spend the entire winter in the den? Maybe my tree-eating bear is the most normal of the crowd. We have a beautiful cherry tree in our front yard and I don't want him getting any ideas about becoming the "George Washington of Bears." Even if he doesn't lie about chopping it down afterwards, it's just as dead either way, and I couldn't bear the thought of it.

UNDERSTANDING FOOTBALL

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-13-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     Now that we've settled a few weeks into the football season, I must confess that there are still some things about the game that remain inscrutable to me. For instance, I don't understand the running back who just finished running 40 yards for a touchdown. He's tired, that I can understand, too tired to lift that plastic bottle of Gatorade, so somebody runs up to him and squirts it in his mouth. First of all, he has to blindly trust that the guy has good enough aim to get it in his mouth, and not squirt some of it up his nose. Then, as thirsty as he is, he spits it all right back out. How is he going to recharge his electrolytes doing that? Thank god no one offers him a bowl of borscht after the touchdown.

     I don't understand why some of the penalties seem way too severe, and others seem way too lenient. If your kicker kicks a kickoff out of bounds the other team gets to start from their 40-yard line, which seems excessive to me. Yet, right after the quarterback throws the ball, you can pick him up by the nape of his neck, shake him like a squeaky toy, and toss him back down on his head and no one will think any less of you, except the quarterback. 

     I'll admit I can waste a lot of time doing dumb things. For instance, I can easily spend 20 minutes scraping all the mayonnaise out of the bottom of the jar, not because I'm so cheap that I can't just buy another jar, it's because I don't want the mayonnaise to win. But I can't fathom the amount of time people spend playing fantasy football. My friend Paul says it's not a waste of time, he won $100 last year. He said he's been doing it for about six years, and it only costs $200 a year to get in. We have different ideas about some things I guess, because I'm pretty sure there aren't any guys at all on MY fantasy team.

     Sports betting has spawned a whole new industry of stat-keeping, if you can understand the bets themselves. You can just choose your favorite team and bet the spread if you want, and either give away points or take points, based on who is projected to win. If you're feeling frisky you can choose a parlay bet, explained in simplistic terms on the internet as, "a single bet on three or more unrelated events. Each of those events is referred to as a ‘leg’ of the bet. The entire stake is applied to the first leg. If it wins, the total return from that first leg is used as the stake for the second leg." A picture is worth a thousand words, but that's going to require a two or three thousand-word picture.

     They have something called "sabermetrics" for baseball, which means: the quantitative analysis of data relative to the comparative performance of individual players. Before I knew what sabermetrics meant I was totally against it, because it sounded like an exercise class that my wife might try to shame me into taking. But now that I've seen the definition, I have even less idea what it actually is than I did before.

     I don't understand the need to see a player sustaining that gruesome injury in super slo-mo, over and over, from different angles. Players have gotten so big and so fast that they can cause the human body to twist in directions that are not represented on the average compass. If someone's knee ends up looking like a German wurzelbrot, I do NOT want to see how it got that way. In fact, even if you invite me to dinner and cook a German wurzelbrot, I do not want to see how it got that way. 

     I don't understand why anyone plays the game at all. Through the years, safety equipment has come a long way, but helmets still have those guards around the player's mouth to prevent them from biting anybody. And today there is much stronger attention to brain injuries, which can be hard to diagnose. The symptoms can mirror other conditions such as amnesia. If a player forgets who he is after a blow to the head, it can be time consuming to narrow it down using the process of elimination. 

     I'm six-foot-two, and if I enter any home built before 1955 I will definitely knock my head against a low-flying beam at some point during the visit, possibly damaging the structural integrity of the house. When that happens, I want you to administer the following test: Ask me what a parlay bet is, and if I answer it correctly, please have me airlifted to the nearest hospital.
 

A FIRE-STRUM OF ACTIVITY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-20-22)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     Last Saturday I attended a "friends hootenanny," where a bunch of us get together with our guitars and some percussion instruments and see if we can get the neighbors to call the cops. There was no square dancing, and if there was dancing I'm quite sure it would have been in a shape that Pythagoras would need a new theory for. There was no barn with bales of hay to sit on, and the only cowbell there did not have a cow attached to it, which made it much easier to play.

     There were no jugs of bathtub hootch, but there were plenty of libations in keeping with the spirits of the occasion. There was a full fall lineup of mulled cider, mulled wine, I think there was even mulled water for those mulling a long drive home. I brought my own domestic, mass-produced light beer with me so that if I get stopped by the police on the way home, they're not going to ask me if I've had too much to drink, but if I've had enough. People assume that I am glum drinking such banal brew. "Wouldn't you be happier with one of these full-bodied, hoppy IPAs?" No one bothers to ask the IPA if it would be happier with ME. "It has hints of chocolate and cherry-wood!" I don't need any hints, I'll get it my own. "This one is so bitter it will make your uvula furl up. I hate it! I've had three already!" "This one is a white-coffee stout. It's very well-balanced, like a really good checkbook." "This one doesn't even have a label, but I add a little to my gas tank every now and then and it cleans out the carburetor." I'm good, thanks anyway.     Our host Athina prepared a wonderful outdoor supper. When people go to great lengths to cook nice food for their guests, I try to slow down my devouring process so that I can appreciate it more. Usually I'm like a raccoon with an eating disorder, rummaging through the refrigerator looking for something that seems lonesome, and I eat it before I can positively identify it. 

     When the sun went down the guitars came out and the fire blazed. We came together over music and friendship. There were Republicans, there were Democrats. There were no Independents that I know of, and if there were we would have brow-beaten them until you could hardly recognize their eyebrows. I'm just kidding about the eyebrows. If you can't put your differences aside around a campfire, then where can you put them aside? "Are those your differences over there next to the woodpile?" "Yes, that's them." "You didn't put them very far aside, I can see them from here. Tell you what, I'm going to put mine over there too, and if we want to stoke up the fire we're going to have to get past our differences."

     The only argument we had wasn't even about politics, it was about what key the Beatles' "In My Life" is in. I say it's in the key of A,  and Phil insists that it was recorded in A-flat, and sped up to A. My suggestion that we play it in A and do it slower was met with scorn. I ended up playing it in A while Phil did it in A-flat, and as a result we discovered how jazz was invented. We also did one of my favorite Springsteen songs, "I'm on Fire." The whole time I was tapping my toe I didn't realize how close it was to the flames, and as a result I nearly discovered how "I'm on Fire" was invented. The music chugged on.

     It reminded me of sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories. You try to scare each other with the most chilling tale you can think of. I don't remember ever doing that, but I'll get my chance after I'm long gone, and I sit around the campfire with my friends telling stories about people who are living. They're much scarier than ghosts could ever be. If I ever want to frighten people at a campfire I'll just tell them that at one time I was thinking of becoming a teacher.

     I hope we can pass the tradition on to the next generation. The thought of a bunch of DJs sitting around a campfire mixing snippets of EDM together makes me want to root for the fire.

     Was my guitar out of tune this whole time? I used an electronic tuner, but apparently I had it set to "oboe." It didn't matter. It was just another thing to laugh at. And if you can't laugh at yourself, anyone of the people there would be happy to do it for you. Remember, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your guitar, but you can't pick your friend's guitar.