CLASSIC: It is an honor I dream not of.

Since, as we all know, my motto is and has always been “Safety First” – followed closely by “Dignity, Always Dignity” – we’re going to return today to our occasional series of seminars on drastic and dangerous life events.

This week’s topic is “how to survive going to two weddings in one day.”

- Firstly and most importantly – this really cannot be stressed enough – do not wait until the day you are attending two weddings to buy the shoes you are planning on wearing to two weddings. For while your brand-new shoes may be very impressive in their own right, and when combined with your brand-new suit and shirt and tie, all selected and coordinated specifically for the two-wedding day, make you resemble nothing so much as the reincarnation of Burt Lancaster himself, and we’re talking like vintage 1955 “I just got finished sleeping with Ava Gardner AND Lana Turner and, my oh my, what’s your name, sweetheart?” Burt Lancaster, wearing brand-new shoes to two weddings in one day is a CATASTROPHICALLY BAD IDEA. Doing so will cause your resemblance to Burt Lancaster to rapidly erode, as it is a known fact that Burt Lancaster was in possession of both his feet, and after a couple hours of wearing brand-new wingtips the only thought in your entire head – overriding your base, lizard-brain lusting after food, sex, lower taxes and oxygen – will be a burning desire to chop off your own feet with a rusty axe.

- Have backup. This is valuable in several respects. If, for instance, you tear the price tag off your brand-new tie a little too vigorously and rip out one of the moorings of the little tie-holder-label-thingy, while driving to the first wedding you can call your backup and say, “you got any safety pins? What do you mean you threw out all your safety pins? How the fuck can you throw away anything as fantastically useful as safety pins? Fabric glue? Will that set in time? Okay, fine, bring that.” (This is an actual, complete quote.) Or, when partway through the first of two weddings in one day, you can say to your father, “if you don’t get me a pair of golf shoes that look like wingtips I’m going to chop my feet off with a rusty axe.” If your backup gets snippy, you can remind them that pain overrides family and that once you start chopping off body parts it can be very hard to stop. You know, like Jedi.

- While buying nice new Burt Lancaster-izing clothing for two weddings in one day is endorsed, if you are buying your clothing at someplace you have never shopped before be sure that you actually look at the prices of the clothes you’re buying, so you can avoid situations such as tearing the price tag off your brand-new tie a little too vigorously and, while wondering how you’re going to fix the little tie-holder-label-thingy, glancing at the too-vigorously-removed price tag and realizing that you have paid more for a tie than you normally do for a shirt, and that you normally pay pretty handsomely for shirts to begin with. This realization is closely followed by a feeling of growing horror while you try to calculate how much you paid for the new shirt from this place, then wondering whether the guy at the gas station on the way to work on Monday morning will accept the change from your cup holders as payment.

- While the bucolic location for the first reception might make you think that everyone will be very relaxed and easygoing, always remember to be very, very careful when surrounded by large groups of Germans. This advice applies pretty much anywhere, really. And for god’s sake, whatever you do, don’t mention the war.

- Your desire to end the lives of certain guests at the reception is not something you should verbalize.

- At the first reception, if your father has been hopelessly addicted to the bride’s grandmother’s pastries for the last 40 years, telling your father that the dessert tray is a collection of pastries made by the bride’s grandmother and that they are out and ready to be eaten is a surefire way to guarantee that you do not get to eat any of said pastries.

- Silk suspenders do not have the same kind of “give” in them as the cheaper, elastic suspenders you may have worn in the past. This means that things like going to the bathroom take exponentially longer as you will spend several minutes trying, Houdini-like, to extricate yourself from them, since after you realize that you could have made a car payment for what you inadvertently paid for said silk suspenders you will find breaking your own back preferable to doing any damage to the goddamn things.

- Wearing contact lenses for the first time in almost a year is recommended if the first reception is outside on a beautiful sunny day, as it makes the wearing of sunglasses possible. Trying to drive from one reception to another in the dusk of twilight while wearing contact lenses for the first time in almost a year is not recommended, as the combination of your eyes adjusting to your slightly-different vision and the tricky, shifting light of the immediate post-sunset period will make driving in under-lit suburbs much more exciting than it really needs to be.

- When arriving at your friend’s parents’ house for the second reception, do not trip over the SAME GODDAMN TRICK DOORSTEP THAT YOU HAVE TRIPPED OVER EVERY ONE OF THE HUNDREDS OF TIMES YOU’VE GONE INTO THAT HOUSE FOR THE LAST TWENTY FUCKING YEARS! Seriously, don’t do that.

- No matter how much your new clothing makes you resemble Burt Lancaster, the sentence, “you look so much like my ex-girlfriend that I really thought you were her, but when you walked past and didn’t punch me in the face I realized you weren’t” is not the first thing you want to say to someone you’ve just met. The fact that it is 100% literally true does not matter. Even at a nighttime, outdoor reception, where the darkness makes you resemble Burt Lancaster that much more, saying things like this clearly marks you as “not relationship material.”

- Get your friend who lives out of town and is thus marrying a woman you haven’t met yet to introduce you to his new wife BEFORE he is drunk.

- If you once watched one of your friends drink 26 beers in one night, offer him a ride home BEFORE people start playing beer pong if you want to leave the party any time soon.

- And, finally – whether your belief tends toward Jehovah, Vishnu or the Lords of Kobol, never let anyone think that you don’t thank the powers that be every day that you have the friends you have, without whom none of these fun things are possible. (Or necessary.)

JLK

I could be the good guy.

I was involved in a conversation on Facebook about Jean Grey.

I realize that some people will read that sentence and feel an urgent need to bail on this whole thing right now, so I’ll pause here for a minute to give them the opportunity to do so.

So, yes: there was a discussion, of which I was a part, about Jean Grey. A point was made that Jean Grey is pretty awesome. Now I had thought that this point was so blatantly, unassailably obvious that no one would even bother voicing disagreement.

Problem is, someone did not disagree – I mean, how could you? – but made a corollary statement so reprehensible, so unthinkable, so simply and fundamentally WRONG that had Cthulhu himself heard it he would have replied ,“dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

This statement was:

“Emma rocks.”

Oh no.

Oh, HELL no.

Emma Frost does not rock. Not even a little. And even if she did – which she fucking well does not – Emma Frost does not compare to Jean Grey. Emma Frost is to Jean Grey what… you know what, I don’t even need the SAT analogy question. Emma Frost is to Jean Grey what Emma goddamn Frost is to Jean Grey. They are not even remotely comparable, and I will give you ten reasons why.

REASON THE FIRST: COLOR THEORY

Jean Grey is a redhead. Emma Frost is a blonde. I have nothing against blondes, and have historical records to prove this, but in terms of pure hotness they lag behind redheads. I mean, that’s just science.

At this point some of our English friends may make snickering comments about “gingers,” in response to which I will kindly point your attention to your own divine Ms. Karen Gillan, and then kindly remind you that you people eat black pudding, thus rendering any aesthetic judgments from your entire island completely meaningless.

The only way, in a purely physical sense, that Jean Grey could be any hotter would be if she were a tall, curvy brunette, and the people in the back raising their eyebrows right now and muttering “I don’t think THAT part is science” can go screw.

This 100% scientific fact, conveniently, segues nicely into my next point.

REASON THE SECOND: THE PERFECT MATE

In the movies, Jean Grey is played by Famke Janssen. Famke Janssen is incredibly hot. This, again, is science, and the fact that she is a tall, curvy brunette is pure coincidence.

In addition to being incredibly hot, Famke Janssen is also incredibly awesome. Think about the things you’ve seen Famke Janssen in: Goldeneye. Rounders. The first two X-Men movies (i.e the good ones). That one TNG episode. When you think about that stuff, invariably the first thing you think of is, “man, Famke Janssen was awesome in that.” If you watch the end of X2 and don’t cry like a little girl at Jean’s death scene, well, I’m pretty sure you aren’t human. And I once read an interview with the writers of Rounders where the first question – I am not making this up – is “why didn’t Mike have sex with Petra?”

If your movie stars Matt Damon, and Ed Norton, and John Malkovich, and John Tuturro, and is single-handedly responsible for jump-starting a multibillion dollar industry, and the first question you get asked is “shouldn’t that guy have fucked Famke Janssen,” you are talking about a woman who leaves a pretty indelible mark.

Jean Grey is played by Famke Janssen.

Emma Frost is played by January Jones.

I don’t think I need to elaborate any further THERE, do I?

REASON THE THIRD: ADMIRABLE PERSISTENCE

No, seriously, she’s January Jones. EOL.

REASON THE FOURTH: IN WHICH I ELABORATE FURTHER

January Jones! For chrissakes! She’s AWFUL. She’s awful in EVERYTHING. Like everyone else, I used to think it was just Betty, that the problem was that she was playing the worst character on television. Alas, this is not the case. She is wretchedly unlikeable and awful in everything. EVERYTHING. Yes, even Love Actually. I know, right? You think, “wait, that can’t be, Love Actually is a perfect movie!” And every year I agree with you, and spend a whole year in anticipation of watching a perfect film, and then every December I (and you) get to that scene and say, “oh, fuck me, I forgot January Jones is in this.”

When your ass is getting blown out of the water acting-wise by Ivana Milecevic and Elisha Cuthbert – Elisha Cuthbert! – you have serious problems, and their names are all “I am a terrible actress.” I even watched that shitty Liam Neeson movie she was in – I legitimately cannot remember the name of it now, and refuse to look it up – and she’s fucking terrible in THAT.

And First Class, Jesus Christ in a handcart, don’t even get me started on that. In First Class her performance brings every scene she’s in to a screeching halt. I believe Damon Lindelof, after viewing First Class, said it best: “turns out Emma Frost has three mutant powers: telepathy, diamond form, and sucking at acting.”

Famke Janssen > January Jones. That is all.

REASON THE FIFTH: I’M THE BEST THERE IS AT WHAT I DO

Wolverine, if you weren’t aware, has been secretly-or-not-so-secretly in love with Jean Grey since time immemorial. This has been played up and down in the comics over the years, and was played very nicely and poignantly in the first two movies, until BRETT FUCKING RATNER showed up in the third movie and decided to turn something nice and poignant into just one more sledgehammer to bludgeon the audience with.

BRETT FUCKING RATNER plays the end of X3 as “Wolverine has to kill Jean because his powers will let him survive!” No, dickface, Logan has to kill Jean because he’s the only person left alive who still loves her after you cockmongers killed off Cyclops because he made a movie with Bryan Singer, and that’s how the goddamn story has to end.

The point of all this being that Wolverine is, pound for pound, basically the most awesome thing in the entire universe, and HE wants to fuck Jean Grey. If you’re the most amazing thing in the universe and there’s someone other than yourself that you want to have sex with, that person must, by definition, be pretty goddamn amazing.

This, again, leads nicely into my next point, which is…

REASON THE SIXTH: SERIOUSLY, NO ONE LIKES YOU

The only person who wants to have sex with Emma Frost is Cyclops, and…

REASON THE SEVENTH: I’M DEALING WITH MOTHER TERESA HERE

Jean Grey’s most important, and greatest mutant power is the ability to put up with Cyclops. Yes. Tolerating Scott Summers is more impressive than turning into a giant flaming space monster and using your mind to destroy an entire galaxy.

I’m sure we’ve all noticed this, but just in case you haven’t, Scott Summers is a gigantic douche.

Let’s see: you are a handsome and affluent white male. You are highly intelligent. You are in physical shape that would make Olympic athletes weep with jealousy. You have SUPER POWERS (admittedly one with limited use, but still). You live in an ultra-mansion in Westchester County where, and this really cannot be stressed enough, you are the LEADER OF A TEAM OF SUPER HEROES who kick 14 kinds of ass across MULTIPLE GALAXIES AND PARALLEL UNIVERSES. One of your brothers is (or was, I haven’t entirely kept up) a government secret agent, the other is an Emperor, for chrissakes, and your father is a PIRATE WITH A SPACESHIP.

And all. You do. Is WHINE. You whine constantly about how hard your life is.

Oh, and, lest I forget: your wife is a smoking hottie who is one of the most powerful beings in the universe. Who, more importantly than being one of the most powerful beings in the universe, puts up with your whiny bullshit. Loves you, even!

Seriously, every time I see Cyclops I just… I don’t even want to punch him in the face. I want to kick him in the junk. And this, Jean Grey marries.

She’s not a mutant. She’s a goddamn saint.

REASON THE EIGHTH: SHE’S ONLY MOSTLY DEAD

The reason that stuck-up douche Cyclops even gets to think about Emma Frost is because his wife has the unfortunate habit of dying, and in the periods where she temporarily shuffles off our mortal coil, in his grief, Scott chooses to fuck the blonde chick dressed like a prostitute who hangs around the mansion because everyone else on earth hates her.

But wait, you say, temporarily? That means…

Yes. Jean Grey dies a lot, but that’s not really a big deal because Jean Grey always comes back to life. She scoffs in the face of death. Seriously. She’s died, what, five or six times now? When she died at the end of Morrison’s X-Men run, did you say “ZOMG JEAN DIED!” No. Of course not. You’re not stupid (like Emma Frost). You calmly sat back and said, “well, of course Jean died. That’s what Jean does.” And, if what she does is die repeatedly, then by extension something else she must do is always come back to life. It’s incredible. Doomsday, whose stated superpower is coming back to life, looks at Jean Grey and says, “wow, that chick is pretty amazing. And hot, though it wouldn’t kill her to darken to a nice brunette.”

Emma Frost is a slut who turns into a rock and reads minds (turns out most people near her are thinking “wow she looks like a slut”). Jean Grey is a dignified schoolteacher who is IMMUNE TO DEATH.

REASON THE NINTH: I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH.

January Jones. Seriously, man, January fucking Jones.

REASON THE TENTH: BRAINY IS THE NEW SEXY

Let me be honest for the barest picosecond here: guys who are smart and competent, despite public approval of cheerleaders and fashion models and Britney Spears, like women who are also smart and competent. The smarter and more competent the better.

Bearing that in mind, let’s see:

Jean Grey graduated from a prestigious and selective private school, can fly a jet, teaches children, has a level of sheer patience with whiny douchebags unparalleled in human history and, oh yeah, can’t die and is the most powerful telekinetic in the universe.*

Emma Frost was Sebastian Shaw’s girl Friday.

IN SUMMARY…

One of these women exudes class and brains and competence. The other is Emma Frost.

JLK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Barring, possibly, the son of her demonically-possessed clone who was raised two thousand years in the future, but that’s another show.

A Story For Christmas, 2011

There are, over the years, things I regret saying.

Some of them are fairly obvious and can probably be guessed at by a lot of the folks reading this. “Uh, I guess I’ll have a vodka and cranberry? Are those good?” is one of them. “Nah, I don’t smoke… oh, what the hell” is another. Those are the top two, easy. “So, hey, Cindy, do you want to go to a movie?” isn’t exactly number three, but it’s certainly in top ten someplace.

One of my all-time classic boneheaded utterances came back in my final year of college when, mostly in jest, I said the regrettable words, “I find furniture shopping to be vaguely masturbatory,” which has put me in the both ridiculous and pathetic position whereby my friends seem to think they can make me go basically anywhere if they promise to stop at an Ikea along the way.

This is the very definition, the Platonic ideal, of ridiculous. My friends – who by virtue of being my friends are uniformly very nice people who I enjoy helping – thinking that in order to get me to help them with some undesirable task like finding a birthday present for their in-laws or going grocery shopping for a party, they must say some sort of magic code phrase like “we can swing through the furniture department at Macy’s while we’re there.” Thinking that, even if I didn’t want to go out that day, any resistance I might have had to filling their wedding registry would instantly evaporate at the thought of a series of tastefully-presented Queen Anne dining room sets.

It is pathetic because it’s true.

I would be willing to guess that a lot of the people reading this also know that I am a total nerd for Christmas – this is, what, the fourth or fifth of these that I have done? – but folks, I have to be honest with you:

Another thing that I regret saying was when I let it slip out in public how much I love bubble lights.

Now, let me walk this back just a little.

When I was a kid, I mean a really little kid, we had bubble lights on our tree. And, as I have said repeatedly in this very space, bubble lights are awesome. However, bubble light technology is something that has apparently declined in the intervening, er, [mumble mumble] years since I was a kid, and I didn’t see any for a long time.

The first of my adult interactions with bubble lights came a couple years ago, when my parents gave me a plug-in bubble night light for Christmas. Bubble light, Santa, etc etc. However, as long-time readers may remember, that bubble night light came with a warning label longer than a Thomas Pynchon novel which had the phrase “contact your local poison control hotline” in it. That very light, in fact, is gleaming right now in the kitchen, in open defiance of the warning label’s exhortation that every time you plug it in you have to stand there not taking your eyes off it for a single nanosecond, Sally Sparrow-like, while clutching an industrial fire extinguisher lest it randomly explode due to a minute fluctuation in local air pressure.

In each of the subsequent years, I have gotten bubble lights as gifts from various and sundry folk. For all the years in which the abomination that was the Christmas Stick was in use, my father steadfastly, absolutely refused to allow them on the tree. Last year, when he finally relented and this family reverted to an actual, real Christmas tree, he relented further and allowed me to put the strands of bubble lights I had been given as gifts on our new, live tree.

As the lights go on the tree first, later in the evening I was hanging one of our uncounted hordes of ornaments when I got my head close to one of the new bubble lights and said, “uh, this thing feels like it might be kind of hot.”

I worried that the lights might be a little too warm for the tree. To test my hypothesis – scientific method FTW – I firmly grasped one of the bubble lights between my thumb and forefinger and said, “GAH FUCK THAT’S HOT!”

Suffice it to say we unplugged the bubble lights, waited for them to cool enough to remove them from the tree, and packed them back up in the ornaments box. I love bubble lights, yes, but unfortunately I do not love bubble lights more than I love having a house and not being on fire, and as, I believe, the only person here who has actually BEEN on fire (twice, no less) that is a fairly easy decision to make.

This morning, then, came the Christmas gift giving, and after the torrents of “oh thank you” and “holy shit” – I will admit that very few people do shock-perfect gifts as well as this family does – I came to my final gift. I tore off the wrapping paper to find a square of clamshell styrofoam, which opened up to…

A 6-inch high desktop Santa Claus.

Holding a bubble light.

I stared at it for a second, put it on the side table I had set up to hold my tea, and then started rummaging through the packaging.

“What are you doing?” my mother said.

I said, “I’m looking for the warning.”

My father said, “what makes you think it has a warning?”

My head still in the box, I said, “trust me.”

And oh, does it have a warning.

We’re not talking the little UL tag on a tree strand of bubble lights, or the single paragraph on the back of the Santa night light packaging. Oh, no. This little Christmas WMD has an entire warning insert, roughly the size of a three-by-five index card, printed on BOTH sides in very, very small print. The warning label says “IMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS” at the top. This is followed by thirty-one – THIRTY-ONE (31)(XXXIII)(trentuno)(Curtis Marsh) – bullet points listing all the various ways one must be careful while using the dektop Santa plug-in bubble light.

The first safety instruction is, “READ AND FOLLOW ALL SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS.”

I said, “thanks, Mom.”

I thought, everyone I know is either trying to kill me, or thinks I’m waaaaaaay braver than I actually am.

My dad said, “go plug it in.”

I thought, yeah, after I get a fireproof box with an electrical outlet.

I said, “uh… I will later.”

Then I smiled, and thought, you know, they may be trying to kill me, but at least they’re trying to make me happy at the same time. And I’d rather be killed by bubble lights from people who care than live miserable without the light or the people.

So, let’s go plug in Santa.

Anybody got a fire extinguisher?

Merry Christmas, all.

JLK

CLASSIC: How is this MY fault?

On my way to work every morning there is a light – at Ryan Avenue and the Boulevard, for those inexplicably keeping track of my route to work – that I have actually successfully driven through without stopping I believe four times in my entire life. It’s one of those weird things. It’s an intersection I end up at approximately 800 times a week, since you have to go through it to go essentially anywhere that isn’t Center City. And I always get stuck at it. It’s one of those things you get used to.

This morning, for whatever reason – Monday is usually the lightest traffic day of the week – the wait at the light was much, much longer than usual, stretching back a solid three blocks. While I was sitting there, for some reason, I had a flashback to another time I was sitting in traffic, although that one was much more weird and scary.

Many years ago me and a friend of mine, let’s call him… say… “Patrick” decided to go to Boston for a long weekend to visit a friend of ours who had recently moved there. For some reason – this part is hazy, it may have possibly been because I didn’t have a car at the time – Patrick was going to drive us up there on a Friday afternoon. This was a spectacularly bad idea for any number of reasons, the foremost among which is that Patrick was (and to an extent still is) completely incapable of successfully driving anywhere without laser-guided telemetry to get him there. The first time he tried to go to my house when we were in college he ended up at a bowling alley 21 miles past my house. TWENTY ONE MILES.

Boston, if you’ve never driven it, is roughly a six hour drive from here. Patrick picked me up at noon. We arrived at our friend’s apartment on Beacon Hill at 10:30PM.

Here’s how you make it take ten and a half hours to get to Boston:

First, you have someone drive you who, I am fairly certain, cannot always discern their right from their left. Then you have this person make only a cursory glance at a road atlas and think that this road here, yeah, 95, sure, that can take us the whole way, right?

So, instead of taking (if I’m remembering correctly) the New Jersey Turnpike up PAST New York City to… the Merritt Parkway? I honestly forget… you take the Turnpike INTO New York City and try to cross the GW and hack your way through the Bronx and suburban Connecticut on 95. Now years before we had them here they had those giant LCD signs on 95 in Connecticut, and once we get across the GW (elapsed bridge time: 45 minutes) and finally get moving, the sign says “HEAVY TRAFFIC APPROACHING DARIEN, CT”

When we see that sign Patrick begins rummaging in the space behind the seats with his right hand. Eventually he pulls out a map and says words that, to this day, echo in my nightmares:

“Find us a better way.”

I find what I think is a way for us to get to the Merritt Parkway without undue distress. This, of course, does not happen. After taking the first exit we can, Patrick first turns west, i.e. AWAY from Boston, and after much screaming we finally make it onto this OTHER highway which is, of course, at a dead stop.

“This is all your fault,” Patrick says.

“How is this MY fault?” I neglect to mention that the actual route entirely is my fault, but it’s inconsiderate to distract the driver.

“We were MOVING on 95,” Patrick says.

“Fucking turkeys,” I say.

“I, ah… I’ve never heard traffic described that way.” Patrick sounds confused.

“No,” I say, pointing at a flock of wild turkeys on the highway embankment. “Turkeys. Over there.” Like 20 turkeys just sitting around watching the traffic. This is my first ever exposure to the state of Connecticut and between turkeys and traffic I am unthrilled to say the least.

“That’s something you don’t see every day.”

“I don’t get stuck on a random highway in the middle of Connecticut every day either.”

“Shut up.”

At this point we’ve been in the car for maybe three hours. Eventually we get to a point where what we’re on is moving and it is determined -rightly or wrongly – that we need to get back onto 95. There is some kind of highway spur that goes to 95 through New Haven, which at that point I understood to be a slightly dingier place than Hell.

Traffic has been moving for a while and we’re on this spur back to 95 when Patrick turns to me and says – I swear to God these were his exact words because they will be burned into my brain until the day I die – “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we don’t have any brakes.”

Despite Patrick’s attempts to the contrary I am considerably alarmed.

We manage to limp off the highway and into a Pep Boys that was INCREDIBLY conveniently located right off the exit. It is now 5:30 in the afternoon on a Friday (5 and a half hours to New Haven, BTW). The mechanics have all gone home. The people working at the Pep Boys are telling us that we can leave the Jeep there and someone could possibly look at it Saturday morning, but that it’s also possible the sun could explode on Saturday morning and the two things are about AS possible, and more than likely it will be Monday before someone looks at the brakes.

My vacation weekend in Boston is rapidly turning into my weekend sitting in a motel across the street from a Pep Boys in New Haven (which, until I would go to Los Angeles a few months later, was at that point the Worst Place On Earth I Had Ever Seen). Patrick is talking to the people at the service desk – god knows what he’s talking about – and they’re firmly saying no sir, we can’t call in one of our mechanics, but there’s a lovely Motel 6 just down the block when I notice a guy leaving the store with like 4 bags of auto parts.

I run outside and stop him in the parking lot. “Are you a mechanic?” I ask, desperate. He is. I ask him if he would PLEASE PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE OH GOD HELP US I’M GOING TO DIE IN NEW HAVEN just look under the hood of Patrick’s jeep and let us know if there’s something immediate we can do.

This is how much I know about cars. I think the brakes are under the hood.

The guy actually agrees, opens the hood , and after approximately four and a half seconds says “you’re out of brake fluid.”

“That’s it?” I ask.

“That’s it. Cost you five bucks and you’re back on the road.”

“Wow. Thanks.”

The mechanic – aka The Nicest Man I Have Ever Met – walks away smiling. I go back into the Pep Boys to find Patrick now with approximately half of his upper body leaning across the counter, his feet now barely touching the floor, pleading with the person at the service counter. I consider letting him debase himself a little further before I remember that he is actually my friend and could, were he so inclined, leave me in New Haven.

“Come on,” I say, grabbing his arm and pulling him away from the service desk. “I took care of it. We need brake fluid.”

“You TOOK CARE OF IT? What does that MEAN?” he asks.

“Just find a couple bottles of brake fluid and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“What does TOOK CARE OF IT mean? What did you DO?”

Knowing him and knowing me I imagine Patrick assumes I, Jack Bauer-like, tortured a perfect stranger into diagnosing the car. I tell him what actually did happen.

“Brake fluid? That’s it?” he asks.

“That’s it.”

He pauses, then says, “we’re really fucking stupid.”

“No,” I say, “we’re smart, we just don’t know anything about cars. There is no shame in that.”

I resist the urge to tell the story of the first time I tried to put motor oil in my car and put it in the transmission.

“We know what BRAKE FLUID is, for god’s sake. I mean, we’ve HEARD of it.”

This argument essentially went on for the remaining five hours it took to get from New Haven to our friends apartment, 90 minutes of it spent actually IN Boston looking for it. Because calling someone from the Virgin Islands to help you navigate around a city he’s lived in for like 3 months and never actually driven a car in – that, my friends, is intelligent behavior at its best.

As for what happened in Boston, well, that’s another story, innit? Another long, sad story…

JLK

An Open Letter to International Business Times Editor Shawn Moynihan

Dear Shawn:

I read your letter, and in the spirit of the times – open letters are all the rage now, apparently – I thought I would respond in kind.

You and I have been friends for no small number of years, thanks in part to our mutual love of Star Wars. You’re the biggest Star Wars fan I know, and I mean that as an honest and great compliment. You and I both travel in social circles where being a big fan is pretty common, but out of everyone I know who loves Star Wars, I’ve always felt that you were one of the few who “got it.”

You were the guy who, like me, loved Star Wars not just for special effects or its place in filmmaking history or as fuel for an obsessive need to collect things (though you and I both indulge in all of those). You were the guy who connected with the weight behind the hype, who realized that the important thing about Star Wars wasn’t sound design or toys or editing.

You recognized that Star Wars is the quintessential modern myth in the quintessentially ancient sense. You recognized that Star Wars is a story designed to teach lessons, and fundamentally important lessons at that: Star Wars is the simplest, easiest way to teach children why it’s important to be good, to stand up for what’s right, and to help people in need.

Yes, there are other vehicles for those lessons as we get older. Tolkein does most of the heavy lifting once we hit the teenage years. In college and beyond we can literalize the subject by studying Kant or Aquinas or stick with pop culture and drink deeply from A Song of Ice and Fire or the adventures of The Doctor.

But if you want to teach a 7-year-old kid the difference between right and wrong and why it’s important to do right, and have that lesson stick with him his entire life, letting him watch Star Wars to his heart’s content is more effective than a thousand sermons. And you, Shawn, understand that better than anyone I know.

So yesterday, when I saw on my Twitter feed a post from @ShawnMoyn that read “Dear Mr. Lucas: Are These Blu-Ray Tweaks Really Necessary?” I thought, oh dear, I hope Shawn hasn’t abused his position at the IBT to launch a public broadside against George Lucas.

I clicked the link, and four seconds later I thought, oh dear, he has.

Most of the points you make in your letter – almost all of them, really – are spot-on. There can be precious little argument that, in a purely objective sense, George Lucas is a terrible, terrible filmmaker, or that his continued depredations upon the Original Trilogy are precisely that: depredations. I didn’t need to read your letter to know that you feel the same way (though in your letter you articulate those thoughts in your usual excellent manner).

I got a little worried when you flirted with the demonstrably idiotic (and distressingly prevalent) notion that fans “own” Star Wars in some way, but I thought you nicely redeemed that misstep by making the point that part of being an artist is knowing when to stop working, and that Lucas is risking severe fan alienation by not realizing that.

But George Lucas isn’t the problem, Shawn.

You are.

You close your letter by saying that despite the fact that you hate what Lucas is doing to the Original Trilogy, you are going to buy the Blu-Ray boxed set anyway.

My friend, as a wise man once said, “that… is why you fail.”

I’m not certain I buy the other distressingly prevalent notion that Lucas keeps tinkering with the Original Trilogy because he wants to suck money directly from fans’ wallets. There surely comes a point where even someone like George Lucas has enough money, and after making 1.4 gajillion dollars from Star Wars (that is an exact figure, I looked it up) I’m pretty sure Lucas is past that point.

No, Shawn, the reason Lucas keeps changing the films is because Star Wars fans like you KEEP BUYING THEM. At the end of the day, my friend, this is still showbusiness – you of all people know that – and there’s no booth at the local high school here: you vote with your wallet, and for going on 15 years now Star Wars fans like you and me and countless others have overwhelmingly voted again and again to let George Lucas keep making changes to the films we love so much.

This time, though, I’m voting no. I’m pulling the other lever for once. I’m cancelling my pre-order of the Blu Ray set. Yes, it’s true that I am in a small minority, and that my un-purchase won’t actually accomplish anything. My protest vote is, in the end, a futile gesture.

But these movies I watched as a kid taught me that you have to do the right thing no matter what.

I hope, Shawn, that you are strong enough in the Force to do the right thing as well.

K’oyacyi, ner vod,

JLK

Downwards is the only way forwards.

Last night I was at this girl’s house, a friend of mine.

Nothing serious, nothing fancy. Simply that, after 8,000 tries, I had finally convinced her to sit down and watch Doctor Who. We made some popcorn, sat on the couch, and watched The Eleventh Hour. It was great, of course, but The Eleventh Hour is always great. After the show was over she got up to take the popcorn stuff out into the kitchen.

“Admit I was right!” I shouted after her. “You loved it!”

“It was pretty good,” she said from the other room.

I muttered to myself, “that’s not exactly what I asked for.”

I twisted around to my right and leaned over the arm of the couch to look at the pile of books stacked up on the end table. What I saw there shocked me – I owned EVERY SINGLE BOOK sitting on that table. The first three Game of Thrones books. A couple of the recent Star Wars releases. Gatsby. Dune. Jurassic Park. Even, most unbelievably, a copy of Queen and Country Volume 3 – Operation Crystal Ball, and the red leather hardcover to boot – a book that until last night I was fairly certain I was the only person anywhere to actually buy.

How did I never know she read this stuff? Queen and Country? How has THAT never come up in conversation? We’re the only two people on earth who read this.

I spent some time doing some quick mental calculations – it felt like minutes but it was only probably a few seconds, she was still in the kitchen and how long can it take to toss a popcorn bowl in the sink – and came to the rough conclusion that the odds of me owning every single one of the motley collection of books that happened to be on her end table the night I stopped by was something like one in nine hundred billion; the odds of me never knowing that our reading habits were almost exactly similar was just as unlikely.

The fact that the odds were so far against it didn’t really trouble me – last month when I had my wisdom teeth out, the oral surgeon was describing “dry socket,” a particularly heinous side effect of tooth extraction that involves a lot of pain and gunk and going back to the oral surgeon every day for ten straight days.

“Jesus,” I said, “what are the odds of me getting that?”

The doc waved his hand dismissively. “One, maybe two percent. I wouldn’t worry.”

I snorted. “You know how much money I’ve lost to one or two percent?”

Three days later I was back at the oral surgeon’s, and I was back again every day for the next week and a half.

So I didn’t think much about the ridiculously long odds. I have more experience with ridiculous odds than a normal person could possibly believe.

Still, all the same books. Fucking wild.

I turned back around and my feet got tangled up in something. I felt a sharp stab of pain in my knee and heard someone say “waaaaaaah!” and suddenly I was stuck on the couch and my friend was sprawled out on top of me.

I muttered to myself, “gah, fucking knee.”

More conversationally, I said, “what the hell?”

She smiled at me. “You turned around the EXACT second I was right behind you and you kicked my legs out from under me. I tried to keep my balance, but…” She looked at the coffee table. “It was either fall on you or the coffee table.” She smiled again.

I looked at the table, which was very nice. “Probably the smart play.” I looked back at her and realized that the result of my clumsiness and her nice furniture could be interpreted in a fairly lascivious manner. “It wasn’t intentional, I swear. I can barely see out the eyes in the front of my head, the ones in the back are total shit.”

She said, “it’s okay.”

And she smiled at me again, only this time it was different.

Again, I couldn’t tell you if it took a second or a minute, but eventually I realized, oh, I think we’re supposed to kiss now.

My brain went into warp speed overdrive.

“SEE!” It said. “You don’t have to always think and analyze and plan this shit and obsess about EVERY SINGLE DETAIL and bore everyone you know to death with this crap for months on end. Sometimes, good things just HAPPEN. Did you even think this was possible tonight? Hell, you didn’t even PLAN tonight!”

No, I said back. I did not plan this. Hell, I’ve never even thought about this.

As her and I leaned toward each other my brain quietly said:

“Liar…”

The picosecond before we kissed, my phone rang.

Since 2004, the ringtone on my various cellphones has been the theme song to the BBC show Hustle. It is, honestly, a remnant of an earlier, darker time in my life. I had no job, no prospects at a job, I hadn’t founded The Pros From Dover or discovered the Dark Horse yet, and I was generally and thoroughly an angry, miserable bastard. One night, though, I discovered Hustle on the internet and was instantly hooked on it, staying up until 4 or 5AM to download new episodes as they came out, and when I got a phone that could make a ringtone out of any mp3 on earth, I chose the theme music to a show about con men.

I would say it is a wonder that I ever escaped the sea of horrific negativity I lived in back then, but that last paragraph puts the lie to that: later that very year I started the theater company and found the DH, and like almost everything I’ve ever done that was worthwhile, other people did a lot of the work.

Still, in the last couple weeks I’ve been thinking I need to change my ringtone. I still love the show, dont get me wrong, but high-class British con artists just, I dunno, it isn’t me anymore. I’ve pretty much got it narrowed down to two choices, and for a while now I’ve said to myself, eh, one of these days I’ll get past the inertia of all these years and finally change it.

As my phone rang last night, that picosecond stretched out and I thought, god I wish I’d changed that stupid ringtone. Talk about bad timing. And it’s so fucking LOUD.

But then, the picosecond stretched out even further when I thought, wait a minute. My phone isn’t THAT loud. It sounds like it’s coming from all over the place. And, what the fuck, didn’t I put my phone on vibrate when I got here?

The picosecond stretched out some more and I thought, hang on, when did I get here?

My spine turned to ice.

HOW did I get here?

The theme song from Hustle blaring around me from the entire world, the picosecond refused to end and I realized my phone wasn’t going off because someone was calling.

It wasn’t a ringtone.

It was the music warning me to be ready for the kick.

I looked up at her, desperate for the magic picosecond to last a little longer.

She just smiled again, and the picosecond snapped.

I lashed my arm out at the phone, sitting on top of a stack of books next to my bed. I pressed the button on the side with my thumb to turn off the alarm. I held the phone up an inch in front of my face – my glasses were on the other side of the room – so I could read the message box. “7:13. ALARM.“

It might as well have said, “HA HA, JOKE’S ON YOU.“

Eventually, via a complex system of grabbing the door frame and slowly pulling with various major muscle groups – getting up in the morning with a bad back is always a challenge – I managed to haul myself upright and sit on the edge of my bed.  I sat there for a second, then looked at the phone again.

7:13. ALARM.

I muttered to myself, “just a dream. Doesn’t mean anything.”

I looked down, and the phone said:

LIAR…

I got up to get in the shower, tossed my phone on the bed and thought, the ringtone is getting changed today. That thing is never playing that goddamned theme song ever again.

JLK

CLASSIC: The next time we hang out, I will redeem myself.

A little while back I was walking past a bar in a casino after a mildly disappointing round of Texas-style Hold’em when a cocktail waitress I knew from another casino came by. We headed in, I bought some drinks, we got to talking, and at one point she looked at me like I had three heads.

“Are you actually enjoying this song?” she asked. Apparently I had been lightly bopping my head to the techno song that was playing over the bar speakers.

It is important to note that I cannot discern the words of this song, merely that I can hear the backing tracks and that I am aware of vocals which I cannot make out.

“Yeah, it’s not bad,” I said. “It’s well-put-together.”

She gave me an indulgent smile. “Are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure,” I said, and I began to launch into an exegesis on how to construct a good techno track.

She interrupted me about halfway into my second sentence and said, still smiling, “this is Miley Cyrus.”

I said, “it’s wha?”

“Miley Cyrus,” she said. “You know, from Hannah Montana? On the Disney Channel? My niece loves it. She’s eight.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, trying to say something. What eventually came out was: “Yes. I see. Well.” (pause) “Yes.” (longer pause) “It’s still put together pretty well.” (pause) “Yes.” (pause) “Fucking hell.”

Flash forward a couple weeks after that. I’m on vacation at Disney World, it’s our last day, and my family and I are at Epcot. They tell me repeatedly that I should do the Test Track ride while they go get lunch – there’s no FastPasses left, but the wait for a single person is only 30 minutes (as opposed to 130 minutes for a group), and that gives them time to go eat in the restaurant in Mexico (which I do not want to go to) while I wait.

“It’s worth half an hour,” my father says. When we used to go when I was a kid I thought my Dad was something of a wuss when it came to rides, but after a) aging 15 years since my last trip, and b) riding Mission Space a few days before that and wishing afterwards that Poseidon would impale me on his trident and end my misery, my views on rides have gotten a lot closer to his. So on his advice I get in line for Test Track. This is actually going to be the only line I will have waited in the entire trip, so before they go to lunch I fish my iPod out of my bag.

Apparently the volume on my iPod is far too loud, since a few minutes later while I’m standing in line, a little girl in front of me who might have been 10 or 11 pokes me in the arm. I reach into my pocket to pause the iPod and say, “yes?”

She says, “are you listening to Miley Cyrus?”

“No,” I say, far too quickly to fool anyone over the age of 13.

She actually looks at me with suspicion – her brow furrows and she squints at me – and says, “it sure SOUNDS like Miley Cyrus.”

“No, no, no,” I again say way too quickly, giving a laugh that, again, only a child of this age wouldn’t recognize as pathetically fake. I reach into my pocket to pull out the iPod and surreptitiously hit the “Track Forward” button as many times as I can before pulling it out. “It’s…” I look at the screen to see what’s come up. “Motorhead.”

Fuck.

“What’s Motorhead?” the little girl asks.

FUCK!

“It’s, er…” How to explain this to a ten-year-old girl? “Well, they’re a band.”

“Oh,” she says. She pauses for a moment. “Do they listen to Miley Cyrus? They sound a lot like her.”

I say, “I doubt very much that they do.”

“Are you SURE you weren’t listening to Miley Cyrus?” she asks me again, clearly not sold on the idea.

“Nope,” I say. “Motorhead, baby!”

Weakly, I put up the horns.

The doors to the ride mercifully open at this point – the wait ended up being more like three minutes, though the longest three minutes of my life – and that disappointed voice in the back of my brain says, “you have sunk to a new low.”

JLK

Do I detect the distinct aroma of burning pants?

You ever see the promotional postcard that the TPC at Sawgrass sends out about how awesome their course is? The one that claims that 120,000 (that’s one hundred and twenty THOUSAND) balls a year are lost to the water at 17?

I saw that and instantly said “there is no goddamn way that’s true.”

Then I set out to PROVE that there’s no goddamn way it’s true.

To prove this, let’s do some neato-nifty Fermi math.

Now, let’s start off with some theoretical assumptions to maximize the number of balls that can possibly be whacked into the water on 17. First, we will assume that it never rains. In Florida this is admittedly extraordinarily unlikely, but that’s math for you. Secondly, we will assume that every professional golfer on earth is stricken with swine flu and thus there is no Players’ Championship in our rain-free year, so that we can thirdly assume the course is constantly in use by the maximum number of players at all possible times. Setting aside for the moment the possibility of people playing glow golf – which, while fun, I do not recommend in a state with alligators – the question of what constitutes people playing at all possible times becomes one of daylight.

So how much daylight are we talking about?

The TPC at Sawgrass is just past 30 degrees north Latitude.

The good folks at the University of Nebraska provide us with a very useful “Hours of Daylight by latitude” app.

A little Excel magic tells us that Ponte Vedra Beach gets, at a rough estimate, approximately 4,467 hours of daylight a year.

Going off the claim from the TPC that 120,000 golf balls go into the drink per year, we can calculate that for that number of balls to go in the water, 27 people per hour need to tee off at 17 and put their shot right into the drink. That’s once every 2.23 minutes.

So, under optimal conditions, for this postcard to be accurate someone has to put a ball in the water at 17 every 133 seconds for an entire year.

Given that our optimal conditions are completely, ridiculously, hilariously impossible, my conclusion is:

Fuck you and your lying-ass postcards, TPC at Sawgrass.

JLK

REPOST: Only you beneath the moon or under the sun.

It’s Valentine’s Day again, and in what I’m sure is a surprise to no one, my official position is this:

Bemused indifference.

I… wait, “bemused indifference?” What? That’s not right. This is supposed to say -

CUT! Cut! Cut. What’s the problem?

My script is wrong.

What’s the problem with it?

It says that my official position on Valentine’s Day is “bemused indifference.” That’s wrong. It’s supposed to say “fuck Valentine’s Day.” It’s said that for years.

Yes, well, it USED to say that. That was on the blue pages, the OLD pages. If you would ever deign to attend a production meeting you would know that the pages you have there, the PINK pages, are a new revision.

The pink pages.

Straight from the writers’ room.

And they think…

They’re much happier with this.

They think I can SELL this?

They, and indeed all of us, have supreme confidence in your abilities.

All right, I’ll see what I can do… we’re still rolling? We can edit in?

Yes, yes, yes, whenever you’re ready.

All right.

So, my official position is this: bemused indifference. And though it may not be readily apparent from the start, this is a positive step.

Don’t get me wrong. Valentine’s Day is still pretty horrible. The holiday itself hasn’t changed any. It’s still a twin-chambered pressure cooker of scorn and fear. The fact that Americans willingly subject themselves to this sort of thing does not engender tons of faith in the future of the species. Valentine’s Day is the crazy girl in high school who started smoking cigarettes and cutting herself because she read Thomas Hobbes and completely missed the point. It is ritualized self-immolation. Valentine’s Day is the closest thing you can find to organized sadism on a societal level.

The thing of it is, though, I don’t care. And I don’t mean that in some sort of apathetic slacker way. I still find Valentine’s Day pretty distasteful; when I say “I don’t care” I just mean I don’t take it personally any more. The burning, roiling anger I used to feel every February 14 is just… it’s just gone. I don’t know where it went, precisely, but good fucking riddance. I won’t miss it.

I realized not too long ago that I have finally gotten to a point where… how to put this… where, for lack of a better term, I am finally where I’m supposed to be. I’m not talking about my job or school or my 401(k) or whatever. That stuff is outside, ephemeral, meaningless… it’s all bullshit. None of that matters. I’m talking about (points to head) up here and (points to chest) in here.  I sit here at this keyboard and think and work and generally dwell in the bizarre little world I’ve constructed in my head over the years, and for the first time since I can remember it’s actually pleasant.

All the terrible things I’ve carried around for years and years and years, at some point I just let them go. This is not to say that they’re forgotten – I don’t think I could forget them if I wanted to – but the grip they had on me is finally broken. It took more than ten years but for the first time my brain isn’t addled by booze or pills or cigarettes or emotional baggage.

It’s like…

The last time we visited my father’s Uncle Al in Florida before he died, back when I was in high school, he had just had cataract surgery a few weeks before we got there. After we arrived and my mother asked him about his surgery his eyes widened in a giant smile and he threw his hands up in the air and started shouting (he is, remember, one of my father’s relatives): “good GOD, Teresa, it’s like night and day! NIGHT AND DAY! I might as well have been blind, Teresa! BLIND! I drive around and it’s a whole new world! A WHOLE NEW WORLD, by God!”

It’s like that.

I know why, of all days, I used to get so terribly angry every Valentine’s Day, and it’s not as though I have since pulled a Sam Beckett and set things right. The difference now is that instead of wounds that reopen every year, those memories are old scars anymore. Scars I can deal with. I have, in a strictly literal and non-emo sense, more than my share. A scar is just a reminder, and a painless one at that.

The piece I used to repost every February 14 had a line in it: “That’s the lesson I learned from Valentine’s Day, what happens when you keep making the same mistakes over and over again.” I read it now and kick myself a little over the fact that I never grasped what is in retrospect a fairly obvious irony; that getting so viciously angry every Valentine’s Day was precisely that, making the same mistake over and over again. I look back, not just at Valentine’s Day but at so many things that I spent so many years and so much effort being so mad about, and I wonder how I couldn’t see what a terrible, terrible waste it all was.

One of the things I do find myself especially reminded of on this Valentine’s Day is an old girlfriend. For however much we cared about each other – which was quite a bit – her and I were far too different to ever really go the distance. She was a harsh realist and I was an artist at the height of my hypersensitive-artiste phase: it was never going to work. (I’m still an artist, just not so hypersensitive about it anymore.) A little while after we broke up we were talking and she asked if I regretted anything about the relationship and everything that came after.

I told her, “I wish I could show you the world I see.” Had I been a little older and a lot wiser I would have realized that is, of course, all anyone wishes for, to find someone else who will look at the world in the way they do and say, “yeah, I can go with that.” Sometimes they’ll say they can. Sometimes they’ll say they can’t. Sometimes they’ll say can and not mean it. Sometimes they’ll say they can’t and not mean it. Figuring out which is one of the few truly universal human experiences; as Death once said, “everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out.”

(Just for the record, the world I see is a fucking doozy.  Compared to the dreary plane of existence most people dwell on, and the horrifically dreary realm of bills and rent and car payments and work and nothing else that old girlfriend lived in, my world is a neverending Sambuca-fueled Technicolor nightmare. It is at a bare minimum about ten thousand times more interesting than your world.)

And – this is the hard part, I know – sometimes it’s going to work, and sometimes it’s not. In fact, most of the time it’s not, and when it doesn’t it is going to hurt like nothing else in life ever has or ever will. You live with the pain and the misery for a while, and even though it seems like it will never end eventually you move past it and keep going. The problem – and this is what I did for years and years – comes when you don’t move past it, when you keep it close and hot. You do that your pain becomes the splinter from the Witch-King’s blade, slowly poisoning you as it inexorably moves toward your heart. It’s so easy to fall into that trap, to mire yourself in sadness for so long that it becomes comfortable and even desirable, but I am telling you right now: it’s not worth it. That wound takes so much more time and effort to heal than it does to cause. Trust me. I know of what I speak. I know better than anyone should have to. Don’t do it.

It took me a decade to learn something from my mistakes. Don’t take that long. Life is so much better once you do.

Why wait?

JLK

Fear is for the long night, when the snows fall one hundred feet deep.

Snow is here again, and this time, in what I am absolutely sure is a surprise to absolutely no one, my official position is:

Fuck snow.

You said you were going to try and be less profane.

I never said that.

Well, you thought about trying to be less profane.

I never thought that!

Would it kill you to give it a go?

Oh, fine.

So, snow is here again and… er… snow… is really… bad. Yeah. Snow is really bad.

I have mellowed out considerably in recent years. Eminent proof of that is, Love Actually style, all around us. No, I’m not exactly the happy-go-lucky type. I do not go googly-eyed at puppies and kittens and mermaids and rainbows. I will never be described as “perky” or “bubbly,” thank the Emperor of Man. But I am a significantly more positive person than before. The items on the List Of Things I Hate, which were essentially everything in the universe save rolled up aces, Farscape and Cafe Esperanto orange juice, have for the most part been shifted onto the List Things I Merely Dislike or the List Of Things I Am Somewhat Ambivalent About. There is now, even, a List Of Things I Love, which is large and growing.

The List Of Things I Hate has been reduced to a barren, uninhabited wasteland. Well, near-uninhabited, as there is one thing still on it, one thing that I will always hate, now and forever, until the entropic heat death of the universe:

Snow.

Oh, how I hate it.

Snow wasn’t ALWAYS really bad. Back when I was a kid and it snowed 2 or 3 inches maybe once or twice a year snow was great. You got a tiny bit of snow, you got a day off from school, everything was fantastic. Snow was awesome. Hooray snow.

Then came the winter of 1994.

March of 1993 had brought with it the so-called “Storm of the Century.” That was bad. That was mondo-bad. But it was one, isolated event. In the winter of my junior year of high school we got pounded again and again and again and again and again. The first was an ice storm in January. And this wasn’t “oh, hm, some parts of things are a little icy.” Oh hells no.

I’ve spoken to people who were not here for it about this ice storm, and they don’t believe me when I describe what it was like. It’s hard to blame them. I was here for it and I could hardly believe it myself. What hit us in January of 1994 wasn’t an ice storm like we think of today, where we get sleet for a few hours and the roads are slick overnight until the salt trucks get through. Through some strange meteorological alchemy we had honest to goodness freezing rain – liquid water in the sky that turns to ice when it hits the ground – for two days, and the temperature never got out of the 20s for four solid days after that.

The entire world was encased in an inch of ice.

It was on everything – roads, sidewalks, cars, fences, powerlines, EVERYTHING. The whole world preserved in freezing, clear amber. Schools were closed for an entire week, Monday to Friday. You couldn’t drive to work or to get groceries. Hell, you couldn’t walk out your own front door. Your front steps were a skating rink. You couldn’t salt your sidewalk because rock salt is useless against a solid inch of ice. To go anywhere, just to get out of your house, you had to go outside in the sub-zero temperatures and CUT the ice off your sidewalk. People were out there, banging on these massive ice sheets with the sharp end of plastic shovels, trying to break it up into huge pieces you would pick up with your hands and toss onto your lawn, which was also under a giant sheet of inch-thick ice. My dad found some kind of flat spade thing in our basement, basically a 5-inch wide metal chisel attached to a broomstick. Working in shifts during daylight hours it took my father and I two full days to clear all our sidewalk, just standing out there smacking this thing onto the ice over and over and over again.

Now, here’s the funny thing about this storm, for me: school was closed for an entire week. But, and here’s the funny part, I had actually missed the entire week of school BEFORE that. I had pneumonia. To this day I have a tiny scar in my lung from it. I don’t remember how I got pneumonia, but I missed a whole week of school for it, Monday to Friday. I missed that week, and then school was closed the entire next, so when I got back the Monday after the ice had subsided, I got a ton of “who are you?” jokes.

(Ah, the wit of high school students.)

Then, a week and a half later, it happened AGAIN.

It wasn’t as bad the second time – the ice was much thinner and as I recall we only missed two days of school – but two ice storms in as many weeks was pushing the boundaries of good taste. Again me and my dad had to chop and hack our sidewalks clear. Again we had to go down to my grandmother’s – who also lived on a corner – and chop HER sidewalk clear. It’s backbreaking work. I’ve broken up concrete with a sledgehammer, and that wasn’t as awful as trying to clear these sidewalks of ice.

Then, in February, we got hit again. Snow, this time, but enough to grind everything to a halt and make you have to dig out your parking space, all that crap. Then AGAIN this happened later in February. More snow, more digging.

Finally, in March, during what was supposed to be “Spring Break,” we got another blizzard that dropped 18 inches of snow on the city. When I had to go to crew practice and, with my teammates, shovel more than 5,000 cubic feet of snow into the Schuylkill River I finally said, “okay, I have had it up to here, fuck this snow thing.”

Hey, what happened to…?

That was a direct quote.

Oh, sorry, continue.

It was like a drug user finally ODing – yeah, heroin is nice and all, but that one time you overdo it and end up in the hospital you never want to even look at the stuff again. When I was a kid and you got a little bit of snow and a day or two off from school it was great. When you’re older and ice (which is just overachieving snow) keeps you stuck in your house for two weeks at a time, and makes you miss so much school you have to add a week on to the end of the year, snow sucks. When you then have to spend a day of your spring break, which was already kind of ruined by having crew practice to begin with, pushing more than TWENTY-FIVE TONS of snow off a dock into a river, it becomes the worst thing in the world.

A year and a half later I would find myself taking my freshman year of college at Lehigh University, where there was snow on the ground every day from November 8 to Easter Sunday. After dinner on Easter – which in 1996 was on April 7, thank you very much – I drove back to school in near blizzard conditions.

That prolonged exposure to snow, which I was already very much not a fan of, basically turned me into a bit of a crazy person on the subject.

Many years later, herniating a disc in my back while shoveling snow was basically the end of the fight, and I lost. Though I am willing to admit defeat I’m certainly not about to call snow a “worthy opponent” – I am a complex lifeform with the ability to peform calculus in my head and recite the entire screenplay of The Big Lebowski from memory, and snow is frozen water – and while the few amusing things that came out of my back injury provided a nice laugh, and thanks to said back injury I have a lifetime pass on shoveling the sidewalk, it’s tough to look at snow anymore and feel anything other than an intense, burning anger. Snow is the only thing that still gets me that way anymore, and while a total Zen-like oneness with everything in the universe might be pretty neat, I’ll settle for being a mostly happy person who really hates snow.

The problem, you see, is that even with my lifetime shoveling pass, when we are set upon by the White Death there is still one task I still have to perform on my own: cleaning off my car. And today, I think, might have been the worst car-cleaning snow day in history.

The trouble was the amount of snow we got. There was too much for me to just turn my car on, jack up the defroster, and let it idle for half an hour to melt everything on the car. Conversely, there wasn’t ENOUGH snow that I needed to dig out a path to and from my parking space, but just pushing all the snow off my car onto the snow in front of my car would create enough snow to make that necessary. You can’t push the snow into the street, and pushing it onto an already-shoveled sidewalk is just stupid.

The solution, then, was to push the snow off my car in such a way that it landed either a) in between my car and the ridge of snow in the street pushed up by passing cars, or b)  on the spot of lawn between my sidewalk and the curb. Which, as you might guess, was ALREADY holding up the snow from the sidewalk, and thus was pretty deep. I was going to have to clear the snow off my car in an extraordinarily precise way, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but pushing large swaths of snow off a car isn’t exactly spinal surgery. Pinpoint accuracy is harder than you think.

Also, by the time I went out to clean off my car, the wind had picked up to approximately 900 miles per hour. This caused snow to blow pretty much everywhere, an effect which is most similar to having someone jab a thousand tiny needles into your face every second. The wind also makes removing the snow off the car far more interesting than it really needs to be – it’s bad enough when you’re trying to push the snow off in such a way that it lands in a target area the size of a small shoe. Try that when large portions of what you push off immediately blow directly into your face the second they leave the car.

Fun, no?

The final, crushing indignity came with the actual cleaning implement itself. I was standing on the sidewalk, staring at my car, formulating a plan of attack for how to remove the snow, when I thought, “wait, I don’t have a snow brush in my car anymore. Drat.” (That’s not an edit, I actually thought “drat.”)

I went back inside to get the brush my father had used to clear off his car several hours earlier. I quickly realized this was a fool’s errand. The brush was nowhere to be found. My father, in what we will call his “infinite wisdom” in deference to filial propriety, after cleaning off HIS car decided, while looking directly at the two snow-covered cars his family members owned, that his best course of action was to take the snow-clearing brush, toss it into his already-clear car, and drive away.

After searching in vain for the snow brush I went back outside. I stood on the sidewalk, staring at my car, snow blowing all around me, freezing, and said to myself, “what the hell am I going to use to clear off this stupid car? Where’s a wampa when I need one?”

I had a brainstorm.

A terrible brainstorm, as it turned out, since my brainstorm meant that cleaning off my car would be an ordeal far longer than it would have been normally had my father not been a careless jackass, but a brainstorm nonetheless.

This is why, if you were driving down Crispin Street this afternoon – and I can’t imagine why you would have been, but in an infinite universe anything is possible – you would have come across a man shivering in a leather coat, muttering “fucking snow” over and over again, clearing off a 2006 Cobalt with a dustbrush.

God I hate snow.

JLK