LET'S AGREE TO AGREE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (11-14-24)

     By the time this column reaches your mailbox, we'll have a different president. You may be pleased with the result of the election, you may be horrified by it, but one thing's for certain: Our political system is not very good at pleasing anybody. The Founding Fathers made a lot of mistakes when they sat down and figured out who should do what, and a lot more bad decisions were made along that got us where we are  today, which is, when all is said and done, a place where a lot of dumb things are said and nothing much is done.

     I know exactly what needs to be changed, and I could go on and on about that, but instead, I'll just say that Americans are fundamentally lousy at arguing. Our debates usually start at the polar ends of the spectrum, instead of finding a point at which we both agree, and making small steps where they diverge. It's like zipping up a zipper after you just ate an entire pizza. It seems impossible to get both sides together, but you keep working at it, and you get it zipped up, and it hurts for a while, but eventually you order another pizza.

     Let's start at the beginning: I think we can all agree that the Earth is round. Oh. We can't agree on that? Well, then let's at least say that it's not trapezoidal. I conducted my own experiment, set out by car in one direction and ended up exactly where I started. By doing so I proved that, a.) the earth is round, and b.) I'm not exactly clear on how to use my GPS. Let's just agree that the Earth is flat in Iowa, and go from there. 

     Can we agree on immigration? Maybe you are in favor of a more equitable system for the introduction of people from other countries. While immigrants of recent years often arrive seeking a better life by escaping economic collapse, or religious or political persecution, the original immigrants to this country thought they were in a place seven thousand miles away from here, looking for spices because the food was THAT BAD where they were. Perhaps we can at least come together on the fact that if we all went back where we came from, no one would have been born. 

     Climate change. Now there's something we can all come to a meeting of the minds on. Global warming is happening whether or not you believe the weather. You may think it's a conspiracy theory, a bunch of scientists getting together (well, pretty much all of them) and staring at computer models, something I also do in my spare time. Let's just agree on one thing: Due to climate change, Elizabeth Hurley is becoming inexplicably hotter.

     The economy is inflating, no one could argue with that. Or is it? Maybe everything else is just getting smaller. Food is more expensive, yet my waist keeps getting bigger, resulting in a rare double-belt-tightening. Should America espouse a "trickle-down" theory of economics, where we decrease taxes on corporations and politely ask that they spend the extra money on hiring more workers and not on robotics and artificial intelligence? Or should we rely on a "demand-side" model, where, through individual tax cuts and government spending, we rely on consumers to drive the economy by buying a lot of crap they don't need, like 800 pairs of shoes, size 7 1/2, that take up most of the damn closet? (This is purely a hypothetical example.) I did much better in home economics than economics, so let's get together on the importance of accepting cookies.

     Life is no bed of roses, and that's why health care is such a thorny issue. So you need a health care plan. My plan so far has been to do something stupid on the tennis court about once every three months that requires surgery, thereby financing another one of my orthopedist's children's education. I don't know whether you think that government intervention in the health care system is a form of socialism, and that that is a dirty word. But what I do know is that when something happens to YOU, and you find out that it's not covered, you will let loose a torrent of words that are MUCH dirtier. let's just concur on the fact that those never-ending commercials for health care plans are the very things making us SICK AND TIRED.

     Foreign policy is foreign to me- I don't know who we should pick as our friends and who are our real enemies any more than I did in high school. Let's just agree that it's fun to travel to other countries and visit our foreign policy once in a while, to see how it's doing.

     Are we so embedded in our own beliefs that we can't come together on simple programs that benefit us all? Maybe, but we could focus on baby steps. You have to learn to crawl before you can run for office. For now, just leave it to me: Can we agree that a pizza is flat? And can we also agree that it's round? There- I fixed us.

COVERING ALL THE BASES

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-31-24)

     It's October already, and America's summer pastime has blossomed into the Fall Classic. I love baseball, and this is the time I love it the best. The other major sports are fine, football for example. Football is fun because they play in the rain or snow, and when the football gets loose everyone chases it around like a greased pig. And I like the name of some of the penalties, "unnecessary roughness," for example. If you grab a running back and throw him upside down on his head, it could be considered a necessary amount of roughness, depending on how much people dislike him. But you can't use your own head to hit another player, even though it's just as likely to hurt you as him. It's like the word "criminal mischief," where you allow that a certain amount of high jinks is all well and good, but if you add too much tomfoolery and throw in an overabundance of monkey business or shenanigans, you could have a misdemeanor on your hands.

     There's nothing wrong with basketball as a sport, but it seems like a lot of trouble to go through to put things into a basket one at a time, with someone trying to prevent you from doing it. I've encountered the same thing when I attempt to sort the laundry in the same room as my cat.

     Hockey is kind of exciting, and just saying the word "puck" unexpectedly in mixed company is an end in itself. But it goes so fast on television, people chasing an object no bigger than a cake of soap. It's hard to follow, and one of these days they'll blow the whistle when they realize they've been batting around someone's cell phone the whole time.  

     Soccer? I know the rest of the world loves soccer, but those are parts of the world where watching paint dry is also popular. My brother says, "You just don't understand the game," which isn't any more true than "I don't understand people WATCHING the game." I could fix the sport in two seconds by widening the goal two feet, decreasing the field by 20 percent, and adding a poodle to each team.

     But baseball is unique in so many ways. The innings of a game unfold like the drama of a play with nine acts. Then there is a play within a play- the action of the scoring and defense within the inning. Drilled further down is the confrontation of each at-bat, the ebb and flow that can quickly change the tide of the outcome. And every singular play is, well... a play. It's an individual challenge within a team war. And, unlike a Broadway production, no one feels the urge to break into a song.

     There is no clock to determine if you have time to catch up. Take all the time you need. We can bake some cookies while we're waiting, or do our taxes. No one will say, "Hey, can you score any faster, please?" Like they might in real life. During the 7th inning, we'll stretch, and sing a song together. During the 8th inning, a nice nap. By the 10th inning, maybe the cookies will be ready.  Also, there are no designated dimensions of a baseball park; each one is different. And, it's the only sport I know of that will admit that balls might be foul.

     Baseball also has the most entertaining fights in all of sports. I'll describe one to you: The pitcher grows tired of the same guy repeatedly hitting home runs in the game, so to get even he throws a ball at a completely different guy, who is much smaller. He aims for a spot near his head, but misses and hits him in the back. The guy who was hit makes a threatening gesture toward the mound, the same one your Mom made if you caught a garter snake and it got loose in the den. The pitcher then performs a pantomime symbolizing the entire "You talkin' to me?" scene in "Taxi Driver." Which is the international symbol for everyone who is employed by either team to run onto the field, in search of someone to hold them back. By this time players are streaming out of both bullpens, but instead of fighting each other along the way, they slow-jog all the way to the pitcher's mound to give the fight more time to be over. 

     Players are pointing at one another and yelling, and here for the first time, is what they said: "This happened last week and both benches emptied." "Oh, that wasn't a fight, someone tried to microwave some Chinese food that was three weeks  old." "Well, I'm going to have to punch you anyway in case you were thinking of doing the same thing." "Sir, I am on your team." "Really? I don't believe I've ever seen you before." "I'm a pinch runner, just called up today." "Well, I saw you pinch my sunflower seeds before, and then you ran. I'm going to have to ask you to step outside." "We are outside, but we can step inside. I only took the sunflower seeds to put in the birdfeeder. The Orioles, Cardinals and Blue Jays are in town next week." The fight escalates from there, and ends up with dinner reservations.

     This should be enough to convince you to watch the World Series with me, and enjoy one of the few sports where the "World" is defined as two countries on the same continent.

THE FALL GUY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-24-24)

     Every fall when I walk outside the house I smell that smell in the air, and I panic for a fleeting moment. It's the smell of overdue homework, of menacing teachers, of disappointed parents. Even after all these years I still feel a twinge of guilt for having made teachers work so hard for such meager results. 

     To my Dad, good grades meant a smooth four years of college, which meant an on-time graduation, resulting in potentially one less kid cluttering up the house. When you have six children, churning out college graduates is like an assembly line, and I was threatening to hold up the works like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory.

     Teachers told my parents that I wasn't applying myself. But certainly neither of us would have benefitted by a more liberal application of me. They told me I was a smart-ass, correctly identifying the most intelligent part of myself. They would call my parents in for a conference, and I can only imagine how it went: "Your son is not taking his work seriously," the teacher would say. "Yes, we notice the same thing at home- he does his chores un-seriously." "He's becoming a disruption in class." "There too? He's a disruption around the house also." "At school, he complains about his homework." "Oh really? At home, he complains about his schoolwork." "Well, I'm glad we had this chat, it seems like we're in total agreement."

     My parents, teachers, guidance counselors, all said the same thing in different ways: I was a slacker not living up to my potential. I told them that they couldn't be more wrong, because they had vastly overestimated my potential. So they sent me off to a BOCES vocational testing facility, where I undertook a barrage of tests meant to derive suggestions as to what career path I might undertake, based on my intelligence and interests. I was expecting the results to show that I was best suited to become whatever the opposite of rocket scientist is. I definitely was not expecting the outcome I got, a recommendation of "flower arranger" (I'm not kidding about this). To this day, whenever I see an arrangement of flowers, I think, "Those were probably arranged by someone who did not apply themself in math class."

     I'm not sure where it started to go wrong, since I began as a gifted student. Excelling in blocks, coloring and the alphabet, my academic career was off to a rousing start. In middle school I was a promising pupil, but by high school nobody believed my promises anymore.

     It's too late now, but if I had studied harder in science and mathematics, perhaps I could have become part of the team that developed artificial intelligence. I would have had the most to gain from any intelligence that didn't have to come from me. But I am conceptually retarded in math. I couldn't put two and two together, and what if they don't even want to be together? People assume that traffic and weather want to be together, and both of them keep getting worse, so look how that turned out.

     Finally, just when it seemed like my academic career would come to a grinding halt in the 12th grade, I figured out the key to writing a credible term paper. All this time I had focused on finding a clear-sighted, intelligent thesis and supporting it with dumb analysis. After my moment of awakening, I realized that a ridiculous, far-fetched premise would be much easier to prop up with my fatuous arguments, and I blossomed as an scholar, getting accepted to one of the premier communications schools in the country.

     In college as a serious student, I prepared myself for the first job in my 44-year career at the most famous of the broadcast networks in the world: watching television for eight hours a day. There was never a job more suited to my talents and training. I understood that eventually I would marry an intelligent wife and let her do the thinking.

     And that has worked out spectacularly. My wife is well-read, quick-witted and wise. She provides me with half of an insightful conversation in many subjects. I'm supposed to supply the other half. For my part I like to think of myself as the "yang" to her "yin," a perfect counterpart who provides what she might be lacking at the time: a steady barrage of one-liners during sensitive parts of a movie (which in my defense are the boring parts). 

     And yet, that smell of fall still has the same effect now as it did then, and with a fresh jolt of anxiety I realize why it's so strong: I never handed in my final high school term paper. If my teacher gets a hold of me now, he's going to throttle me within an inch of his life, because he must be really old by now. I bolt back inside the house where the only smell in the air is the cat box, and dealing with that is long overdue also.

A FITTING TRIBUTE

 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-10-24)

     This is how I shop for clothes: I bought six pairs of Lee jeans from Amazon, 34 waist, 34 length. Can you believe that after all these years I'm still a 34-inch waist? Okay, 35. 36, but that's my final offer. How do I keep my slim waistline? By tightening my belt with a chain wrench before zipping up my pants. The waist is a terrible thing to mind.  

     The truth is that I don't know much about how to shop for clothing. Manufacturers should realize that most guys don't put a lot of thought into it. They should just decide what we want, produce it, send it to us based on the sizes we tell them (such as, "oh, pretty normal-size I guess," or "just round it off to the nearest whole number"), ship it to us, debit our bank accounts and leave us completely out of the process.

     And do it periodically, because guys never throw out clothing. I have a pair of jeans that has a rip above the knee that's eventually going to go all the way around, and then I'll have to decide if there's such a thing as half a pair of shorts. 

     I ignore terms like "the rise" when shopping for pants, because it sounds like something that's none of my business. "Inseam" I guess is pretty self-explanatory, but I'd like to be able to measure my pants without turning them inside-out. I wear my jeans pretty long, in case I have cowboy boots on, but when I wear sneakers the cuffs scrape along the ground, picking up all kinds of things that may later be introduced as evidence.

     I haven't bought any shirts for a long time, because shirts are hard. Xtra-Large usually means tall and portly, whereas I am not extra-tall but I am extra-whimsical, and that's a very hard size to fit. Tee shirts aren't much easier. If I buy a Large it's sometimes too small. If I buy an Xtra-Large it's usually too large. If I buy a Medium, sometimes it's TOO medium.

     It's even worse for women, where the sizing isn't based on empirical measures, such as inches, but on an inscrutable foundation of magical premises, the most important of which being that no woman is satisfied with her actual size. EVER. So clothes-makers jump through hoops trying to find phrasing that dances around the reality of the facts. When clothing designers coined the term "plus size," they were trying to be sensitive to the idea that it's sometimes hard to lose weight. "Plus size" sounds like an asset: there's just more to love. "Multiplication size," even if often more accurate, would not service this purpose. "Petite" is an honorific that makes an appealing term for women who can't reach any of the kitchen cabinets. Some "petites" are so petite that they end up in the "juniors" department, wearing styles that their Moms wouldn't let them out of the house wearing, except that THEY'RE the Moms now. Shopping in the "Misses" Department at your age tells you up front that you're way off the mark. 

     Confounding it all are the sizes themselves. The numbers are often inconsistent between manufacturers, not to mention internationally. You can still try to force reason upon the issue. To accurately determine your waist, wrap the tape measure around the narrowest part of your torso, just above your belly button. The tape should be snug but not tight. Okay, ease up a bit, you're turning blue. You seem to have keeled over. Let's move on. Numerical sizing for women is supposed to take into account her proportions, and provide a tailored fit, taking into account her various feminine attributes. If, as she ages, there is an  inverse proportion, complicated math may be involved. "Can you believe that after all these years I STILL wear a size zero?!" "Wow, that's  the same size as before you were born!" 

    Some sizes run small. Well, if they were actual inches they'd have no choice but to run in place right where they were. Maybe you want something with a "fuller cut?" Don't overfill it or you might spill something. Maybe you'd like something "curvy" and "off-shoulder?" If so, the road I live on might be perfect for you.

     I've gone shopping with my wife, and it's a very frustrating experience. She wanders from one rack to the next, and picks up each sleeve and rubs it and goes "Hmmm." Women have a special way of divining whether a garment fits/ is the right price/ looks good on her just by touching it once, whereas it might take her several years to figure out that her boyfriend doesn't fit at all.

     I just thought of THE PERFECT THING for you! It's asymmetrical, bat-wing, boat-neck, box-pleated, patch-pocket, notch-collar, puff-sleeved, adjustable-suspension, automatic-transaxle and self-leveling, and you can drive it off the lot today with only 20 percent down! The bottom line, which should fall somewhere near your bottom, is this: If you dress well, and everything fits, you may finally be taken seriously at work. And as a humor writer, that's the last thing I need.

PAST TENSE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-26-24)

     You may say I'm a relic, you may say I'm a troglodyte, you may say I'm a Neanderthal, just because I think that there are some things that are automated that maybe shouldn't be. You may also think I'm a circumlocutionist, but I'd have to look that up before agreeing with you. 

     I'm not saying I want to go back to washing my clothes in the river, because who knows where the guy up the river's clothes have been? I don't want to return to the days before automatic appliances came along to save us so much time that now we were free to go to the gym and work off all the extra pounds we gained when automatic appliances started doing all the work for us. No, I want a refrigerator with a "Shelvador!" I want a dishwasher with "Faucet-Flo!" I want a washing machine with a "Surgomatic" push-button control!

     I'm just saying that automation isn't everything. Did you ever go on the "people mover" at the airport? It's a treadmill-type device that offers you the chance rest your tired feet while it moves you AND your suitcase at a speed somewhere between "mosey" and "inert," for a stretch of distance roughly the equivalent of 20 feet or so. The fact that a snail could beat me to my seat and get slime all over my blanket makes me crazy.

     Music streaming services have taken away the artists right to bury a song in the middle of an album that you hate at first but eventually grow to somewhat tolerate. And because of streaming, nobody makes "mix tapes" any more. That's where I took all the best songs from all my albums and put them all on a tape for you. If I made you a mix tape, that meant that I love you. I love you, but I hate your taste in music, and I'm hoping that you'll play it when I'm around, even though you don't like it, because you think that I will because you love me too, now that you realize how much I love you. Do you think your Spotify algorithm would go through all that? Your Spotify algorithm would dump you for a whole lot less than I've put up with so far. OH, and I want my mix tape back.

     We have a water cooler at work that activates by a proximity switch that senses your body heat and emits water into your cup when you get close to it. It was introduced during the pandemic, when people thought you were going to get cooties by touching something that somebody else touched who had cooties. My sister used to wash everything in her grocery bag when she got home because I guess maybe she heard of soup cans dying during the pandemic. Anyway, the fact that the automatic water cooler doesn't work very well is disappointing, because I thought it would be one of the few things that got turned on when I was near it.

     My wife has an automatically adjusting driver's seat in her car. All you do is press a button and PRESTO! About five minutes later, my knees have almost disengaged from the steering wheel. I ask my driver's seat, "Is this going to take much longer?" "Nooooo. This is what I do. It's my jam." "That's okay, I'll just do it myself, I'll just-" "No, no, no, I got this! It'll only take a few more minutes." "Really, I'll just use the lever and-" "Nonsense, now you just sit back and relax." "Those are the only two things I seem not able to do right now."

     And in my car, there's a setting for the headlights that automatically turns on the high beams when I don't need them, and switches to the low beams when I can't see well enough. Someone probably stayed up all night thinking of that, then got into an accident on the way home testing it out.

     My Dad loved gadgets, especially automatic gadgets that would eliminate the drudgery of everyday tasks, such as brushing your hair. If you were to brush your hair 200 or 300 times a day, imagine the time you would save if you had an automatic hairbrush to do it for you? Well my Dad managed to unearth just such a device, and I have four sisters who, when this hair-eating menace yanked out their delicate follicles, barely escaped with their lives. HOWEVER, if you are a brother with four sisters and you pull their hair out 200 or 300 times a day, imagine the time you would save if you had an automatic hairbrush to do it for you?

     Why can't somebody invent something REALLY useful, like a device that senses that a "Kars for Kids" commercial is about to air, and mutes my radio or television automatically for exactly 30 seconds?

     I think the worst offender is the auto-fill function of word processors. All you have to do is start a sentence, and it will figure out what you want to say and say it for you. At least I think that's what it does, I broke it by trying to make it guess what I was going to say.

     I guess I'll never really have a "smart home" as long as I happen to be living in it.

WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU ONLY MAKES YOU FATTTER

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-19-24)

     Is it my imagination or is it getting harder and harder just to maintain my current weight? As I get older I have to watch what I eat, because if I don't I might stab my fork into a vegetable by mistake.

     I weigh myself every day before my shower, and I subtract a couple pounds for my pants, a pound for each sock and one for my tee shirt, My hair is long right now so that's another couple pounds, and 50 pounds for my knapsack. If I notice an uptick in my weight, I just take a couple more things out of the knapsack. After the subtraction I weigh 120, which pretty good for a woman my weight.

     I never want to go on a diet because my doctor tells me I have to, especially if he's overweight, too. And if he tells me I need to go on a low sodium diet, I take the advice with a grain of salt. But if it turns out I need to alter my approach at the table, how to go about it?  Each diet has its pros and cons. With the paleo diet you eat the same things someone from the paleolithic era would have eaten, such as vegetables, fruits, possibly a Glyptodon. The pros are, you eliminate all processed foods, and it's simple to follow. The cons? Name me one person from the Paleolithic era who's still alive. Also, Glyptodons are chewy.

     There's the keto diet which, by starving the body of carbohydrates, "tricks" the body into producing ketones, which then fuel the body instead. It may be effective for short-term weight loss, but also has its pros and cons. Pros: You can eat all the Brussels sprouts and cauliflower you want. Cons: You can eat all the Brussels sprouts and cauliflower you want.

     There's the Mediterranean diet, which tries to emulate the eating habits of countries that use olive oil, fish, potatoes, fruits and vegetables. Cons: It's expensive to eat healthy. Pros: The Mediterranean is really nice this time of year.

     There's the Mayo Clinic diet, which is high on foods with a lot of mayonnaise. I didn't actually look that one up but it seems pretty obvious.

     The doctor is just going to tell you not to go in for any fad diets, simply cut down on portions, eat sensibly and exercise more. And you start to think, well, that makes sense, maybe I can do this. Then he says all that stuff that they say really quietly at the end of a commercial, only it's so fast you can't really make it out, and you just hear fleeting snippets, like, "use responsibly," "do not take during pregnancy, or before, or after," "not liable for your problems," "don't be such a baby," "suck it up," "may cause death" and "you do a lot of other even dumber things." And you say, "What?" and he says, "Oh, nothing." Yet they always take your deductible in advance in case you don't make it through the consultation.

     My wife drives me nuts because she can order a salad with just about anything in it, and then rave about how great it was for the rest of the night, and she never puts on any weight. She could order a salad made out of bar bells and never gain a pound.

     I am a hound for chocolate, and I smuggle it away like a dope addict and eat it in private. We had a dinner party and Margaret and Gene brought this great chocolate cake with a ton of chocolate frosting on it. The fact that I could have my cake and eat it too was just the icing on the cake (Okay, I'm done now). When I finished the last crumb there was still icing all over the plate, so I waited until my wife went into the kitchen and started licking the plate. I glanced over at the doorway and there she was, with a smug look on her face where the shocked and disappointed look usually is. She said, "I bet myself five dollars that you would do that and you did." I said, "Well, if you use the money to buy more cake we can do this again and eventually you'll have a million dollars. That's why they describe cake as 'rich.' By the way, exactly which rule of etiquette says that you can't lick icing off a plate?" I doubled down. She said, "The rule of etiquette that says you can't lick icing off a plate."

     I feel like restaurants have my back by making it so expensive to eat out that you could lose a couple quick pounds every time you go, just from your wallet. Recently I ordered a chicken sandwich and asked for extra mayonnaise. They cheerfully provided a tiny cup of it, and even more cheerfully added an extra .75 cents to the bill at the end. If they start charging me when I ask for a straw, that will be the last straw. And in New York there's a bar I go to that when I ask for a beer, they won't tell me how much it is, as if such things aren't discussed among civilized people. Instead they bring the check in a little tray, as if I'm going to try to deduct it on my tax return.  

     That reminds me of the 1040 diet which, every April, when you realize much you're going to lose, spoils your appetite. You think I made that one up? We'll see in seven months.

PLANE TO SEE

  ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-12-24)

     This year we attended an air show over the beach in Ocean City, Maryland. I'd never been to one before, and it was quite spectacular. The hardest thing to get used to at an air show is looking up and noticing a huge A-18 Growler silently flying disturbingly close to you. A second or two later an Earth-shattering noise rolls through, unaccompanied. 

     There were stunts, intricate formations, aviatrics (I made that word up) and a lot of really cool hardware. The dedication and precision of man coming together with machine was awe-inspiring. It's a demonstration, a symbol of and a tribute to the brave men and women working to support us in the air as well as on the ground. Present were aircraft like the F-22 Raptor, a supersonic fighter that went straight up into the air and let out an array of glowing, smoking flares. An A-10C Thunderbolt is a twin-engine jet designed to support ground missions. It can fly with high maneuverability at low speeds and low altitudes. For this particular operation it caused a high degree of anxiety as it buzzed about 200 boats viewing the proceedings from off shore.

     The C-17 Globemaster transport plane is a behemoth that looks like it just came from the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord at Shady Maple, then ate the Shady Maple. It's made to carry people and materiel during combat flights as well as humanitarian missions. The highlight of the event was a performance by the Frecce Tricolori demonstration team of the Italian Air Force. Painting the sky with plumes of red, white and green smoke, they performed tight maneuvers in crowd-pleasing patterns.

     Who exactly is in charge of discovering just how far you can push these nimble giants? I'm glad it's not me. "We tested out some great new stunts at the lab, and I have some good news and some bad news about how it went. First, the good news: There's free coffee at the commissary until 1400 hours. The bad news is we've lost a couple of planes. Fourteen, to be exact. They were flying in formation, but the formation they were flying in was the 'infinity' symbol, which we've never actually tried before. We're pretty sure they're still out there somewhere. They're solar-powered, and it's taking forever to find them."

     I couldn't help fantasizing that I was a stunt pilot in the air show. I'm not sure why I was chosen for this fantasy, someone who is as vehicularly-challenged as I am: when I was younger, in my parents car, I thought we would get in trouble for passing a sign that said, "No Passing." I also suffer from motion sickness. Even if I'm watching a courtroom drama on television and somebody files a motion I get a little queasy. But in a fantasy, you can do a lot of stuff that common sense, law, and the rules and regulations of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleading squad would normally prevent you from doing.

     In the wild blue yonder I perform a perfect "barrel roll." The plane goes up and continues upside down, before righting itself in its original direction. Picture the path of a corkscrew, but don't forget to take the cork out before I do this thing. Next I do an aileron roll, which turns the plane 360-degrees on its lengthwise axis. Then I fly straight up about a thousand feet and go into a stall. That's because the keys fall out of my ignition and land somewhere in the back of the plane, and I have to dig around and find them in the rear. Some of my internal organs are also back there so I collect those, too. I can almost hear the cheers on the ground. Wait until they find out that I did all of this by mistake, trying to land.

     Soon it becomes apparent to Air Control that I don't know how to fly a plane. I should have received at least the bare minimum of training for this fantasy. The boys in the tower are going to have to "talk me down," like they do in the movies. An Air Force colonel grabs the microphone and calls into my earpiece. I had taken off the headphones to listen to my iPod, but now that I hear him chattering away I put them back on. The Colonel yells, "MELÉN: You're too high." I reply, "It only seems that way." "Back off the throttle. NOW." I grab the only two things that move and pull them back. One of them is my knee, so that does nothing. The other, luckily, is the throttle. The Colonel yells, "I don't like the  attitude of your fuselage." "Me neither," I reply, "I'm grounding it for a WEEK if I ever get it on the ground." "Bring your nose up, NOW." "You're right, that's better- now all I can see is the ceiling." 

     But then I land the plane perfectly, and as my fantasy would have it, beautiful actress Catherine Keener is in the tower. I ask her to dinner, and she says, "Thanks anyway, but I have a date tonight with the Colonel. He's quite a man!. OH- also, some other great news! I won your fantasy football pool!" I'm woken out of my daydream by a voice coming over the PA at the Stunt Flight Test Lab- turns out they just invented a new version of the "barrel roll," and this one has poppy seeds AND sesame seeds on it!