I Don’t Like Kim Kardashian No More

Dear Kim,

I used to like you.  I don’t no more.

I used to think that among the family whose names all cutely start with “K,” you were the one with some fundamental level of decency.  But I was wrong.  I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re just another one of those think-I’m-privileged few who can’t see the forest for the money.  After seventy two days of marriage, you’ve filed for divorce.  In this age of arguing over the sanctity of marriage, as gays, who truly love each other, fight for their moral right to a partnership and just to be accepted under “all men are created equal,” you’ve filed for divorce after seventy two measly days!

I can’t think of anything more vulgar.

You see, Kim, I met my wife thirty one years ago – three months before you were even born.  We started out in an empty 600 square foot apartment wondering how we would pay the $300 a month rent.  We worked full-time jobs, the kind with a boss and expectations and “don’t be late.”  Jobs, like every other normal family in this world, from which we could actually get fired.  Jobs we were expected to show up for every single day, and all the while, I attended school – also full time.

My wife and I, like all us normal people down here, struggle for every single dime we’ve ever made.  We wonder some years if we can afford a vacation.  We fight the crowds on tax-free day to save a few bucks to buy a $100 calculator for our kids’ education, in hopes that they won’t have to work as hard as we do.  We use coupons.  We buy hamburger meat when its on sale.  We turn down the thermostat.

With our friends and neighbors down here among us normal people, we all wonder if we will have enough money to retire some day.  We feel pain for the Jones’ family and the Johnson’s next door.  In this faltering economy, they got laid off.  They’ll have to burn their retirement to feed their kids.  It was a marital decision, and it caused a lot of fighting, but they worked through it.

For us peons, Kim, marriage is a life-changing decision that we don’t take lightly.  We can’t.  For us, it costs too damn much when it goes bad.

And that is where the difference lay: the difference between us forgotten people down here, and you spoiled, hold-your-breath-and-stomp-your-feet brats up there in the limelight.  When those of us down here consider marriage, we think long and hard.  We ask ourselves, “Are we really in love?”  We sit in quiet rooms, and we ponder that question and examine our emotions.  We discuss jobs and children and religion and politics.  We agree, before we get married, where we will live.  We know, before we go to the courthouse, if she will change her name or not.  For us, we actually mean our vows and we honestly work toward “till death do [we] part.”

But you, Kim, you viewed marriage as a party and a purchase.  You spent more money on the ceremony than we normal people will make in an entire lifetime.  It was televised, for Christ’s sakes! as if it held some world-wide significance.  What a joke.

It was all for fun, just another pretentious, Kardashian, look-at-me promenade.  You never really considered the term, “marriage,” and you never stopped thinking about money and appearances long enough to ponder the important questions.  Now you realize that the guy you married is actually a whole other person with thoughts and opinions that may not agree with yours.  That’s inconvenient; that’s unacceptable!  So you’ll simply return him like you do a sweater, although I would guess you have a personal assistant who does that for you.

Kim, us married people down here are fighting to keep our marriages alive, so that together we might keep a roof over our heads and food on the table.  You’re worried that Kris won’t make $10 million this year, so while you hurry to your next appearance, you’ll pull out your cell phone, call Mama, and ask her to call a lawyer and have him make the marriage go away.

Those of us down here are struggling to eat, and you tossed several million dollars on a worthless party and called it a marriage.

I’m feeling sick to my stomach again.

You and your kind are so far buried in the filth of pretension and the vulgar display of wealth that I pity you.  You are imprisoned in self-importance, and you present an image to kids that tramples everything that’s worthwhile in life.

You know, maybe you should see Dr. Phil.  Maybe he can help you grow up.  You’ll never know love until you grow up.

I thought I liked you, Kim Kardashian.

I don’t no more.

Dear Jennifer (Lopez)

 

Dear Jennifer (Lopez):

(I put your last name in parenthesis because the regular people won’t know who I’m talking to, since they’re not celebrities like you and me.)

I understand that you have just gone through a difficult breakup with that Marv guy.  You must be feeling terribly distraught.  He’s a jerk!

Poor thing you are!  Bless your heart!

There’s no need for you to go through this alone.  I just happen to have some extra time on my calendar, so if you need a shoulder, my email address is on the right.

ON THE RIGHT! —–>

You can have your people contact my people, although sometimes – just to be nice and all – I’ll answer email myself.  Fans like that.

Lots of people will think that I have ulterior motives behind this sincere gesture of kindness.  They’ll say, “Dave, you’re just trying to get close to Jennifer (Lopez) because you got a thing for las mujeres Latinas and nice butts.”  Butt that’s not true!  I don’t even know if you have a nice butt!  If there are pictures on the Internet of your nice butt, I don’t even know that!

I’m just a compassionate, fellow-celebrity guy extending an offer of comfort and understanding and sympathy and…you know, if you need me to travel with you or anything.  But I’ll have to stay in a separate room, of course.  (We’ll talk about this more in email, okay?)

You don’t have to go through this alone.  I’m here for YOU, Jen (Jennifer Lopez).  God bless your fine, Latin, well-shaped, smooth, sensuous, little butt body heart!

My email address is on the right.

ON THE RIGHT! —->

New (Unscientific) Study on Cell Phone Habits

I downloaded a new app the other day.  With this new app, whenever I dial a number the app turns on the microphone on the recipient’s phone as soon as their phone starts ringing.  That means I can hear everything on the other end BEFORE the other person answers their phone.  I’ve heard people singing in the car, watching TV, keying at a computer…I can even hear their phone ringing because of MY call!  But because of this I’ve learned something:

Did you know that for 99% of the population, just before they answer a call they say, “Ah, shit.  What’s this jackass want?”

Surviving The Ride Home

A few days ago, I had to take my car to the shop.  Joni followed me to the stealership, and after I dropped off my car, she drove us home.

Actually, she doesn’t technically drive when she’s behind the wheel of a car; she multitasks.  Driving is a distraction.  As we made our way home, she worked on several tasks, and the first thing on her to-do list was sorting coupons.

“Wow!  A dollar off Tide detergent!”  She said, holding up the coupon with pride.  “Hey.  Was that a red light back there?”

Wide-eyed and terrified, I had just watched us zip through flashes of metal like a high-speed tuna through a school of sardines.  We were traveling faster than a Lear jet when we missed three cars and a Mac truck by one coat of paint.  Somewhere back there were the sounds of screeching tires and busting glass.

But she didn’t give me time to answer, although I hesitated to say anything until I finished screaming, and she put her coupons aside and called work.

She talked on her cell about test environments and data libraries.  She spread out computer printouts and calendars.  She took notes and made conference calls.  The car trailed the tail of a comet while she nonchalantly alternated between work efforts and personal tasks.  She ate a yogurt, brushed her hair, checked email, and tried on outfits.  We were traveling faster than a sabot round fired from an Abrams tank, and she turned to me.

“Hmm,” she asked, “Does this blouse go with this skirt?”

She only took a look out the windshield about every other mile or so.  She didn’t see the crowd of homeless people at the bus stop that screamed in terror while they ran for dear life and jumped into a ditch.  We missed a metal shopping cart full of aluminum cans by one coat of zinc plating.

Joni kept her knee on the steering wheel, to give the impression of actually steering, and she kept her foot on the gas.

You see, Joni doesn’t use a gas pedal like you and I.  She never gives it some gas.  For her it’s more like a toggle switch.  It’s either full on or full off, and if there’s nothing in front of her, then there’s no reason to toggle-off the fuel line.

Eventually we reached speeds that Einstein theorized were not possible, at which point we hit a dip in the road and were launched into the air.  We cleared the skyscrapers in downtown Charlotte, passed an SR-71 out of Langley, and entered what NASA calls, LEO, otherwise known as Low Earth Orbit.  While we floated in micro gravity, I waved at the astronauts in the Space Station and wondered why I had sat idly by and allowed Joni to purchase a high-performance car.

Joni, now preoccupied with work tasks, said, “Dadburnit!  My call just dropped.”

I didn’t pay her too much attention, because as we passed the Hubble Space Telescope I was frantically pushing buttons on the navigation system to try to get a re-entry vector.  The female navigation voice calmly instructed us to, “Do a U-turn.”

Okay, so I exaggerated a little.

Soon, Joni was back on a conference call, her foot was still on the gas, and although we were moving too fast to see anything, we were constantly hearing the sound of screeching tires and busting glass.  We passed a cop with radar, but his readout didn’t show a number.  It only said, “No Way!”

We arrived home, and I got out of the car, fell to my knees, and threw up.  Joni patted me on the back and asked, “Are you catching the flu, sweetie?”

A few seconds later the sound of us arriving home arrived home.  It ran over, fell on its knees next to me, and threw up.

Off in the distance I could hear sirens wailing and women and children crying, and above the trees I could see smoke rising.  CNN helicopters were passing overhead and President Obama was on TV urging calm on the streets.  I took a few Valiums and drank a bottle of whiskey.  That helped, but I don’t need it anymore.  The psychologist says I’m better now and eventually the nightmares will go away.

Discovery Channel called, and they want to profile my ride home on one of their shows.  It’s called, I Shouldn’t Be Alive.

I guess fame just follows me everywhere.

Unless Joni’s driving.

Nothing follows that.

IFIM1UR12

I was doing some Christmas shopping today and fighting with far more traffic than I expected.  Some woman cut right in front of me in a parking lot and I cussed her out appropriately.  After she got in front of me I noticed her license plate read: IFIM1UR12.

The translation: If I’m One You’re One Too.

I guess that makes me a stupid bitch.

Christmas Trees and Gasoline

It was the New Year’s holiday, 1970.  I was ten years old.  Drew, Phillip, and I decided to collect discarded Christmas trees to make a fort.  Drew was eleven and Phillip was about eight and it was a lot of work, but small as we were, we were always a determined group of delinquents.

So, for the next few days we dragged Christmas trees to the Baker’s backyard until we had a pile of trees that was about one-quarter the size of the Baker’s house.  It wasn’t until then that Mr. Baker noticed, and he calmly told us, “Goddammit!  I want every one of those Goddamn trees out of my Goddamn backyard before I get home from work tomorrow!  Goddammit!”  The extra “Goddammit” was strange because he wasn’t even Catholic.

Well, we certainly didn’t want to have to drag all those trees back to people’s houses, so after careful consideration, we devised a solution that we felt confident was efficient, simple to execute, and provided the greatest probability of minimizing superfluous man-hours.

“Let’s burn’em!”

Have you ever seen a Christmas tree burn?  Let me tell you, NASA could save a lot of money on Shuttle launches with Christmas trees.  Forget Morton-Thiokol.  Just shove a bunch of Christmas trees up a solid rocket booster, lite that sucker, and run away.  165,000 pounds of shuttle will streak a trail to Mars faster than you can say, “fire extinguisher!”

And it has a fresh pine scent too.

Well, we didn’t know all that.  We saw green trees, and we thought they would need a little help burning.  So we poured gasoline, kerosene, turpentine, charcoal lighter, paint thinner, naptha, rubbing alcohol, witch hazel, castor oil, and an old can of left over Benjamin Moore exterior paint, all over those trees.

Phillip poured the castor oil on the trees so he wouldn’t have to take a teaspoon of it anymore when he got in trouble.  For instance, he once tied a rope from the bumper of his Mama’s Dodge Dart to their Crepe Myrtle tree to make a tightrope.  When Mrs. Baker left for work the next morning it tore the bumper off her car.  She didn’t even notice anything was different until she went grocery shopping Saturday morning.  Bless her heart.

Anyway, Drew and I, being the older, and therefore more intelligent, members of the tree disposal crew, we noted the smell of fumes saturating the air from a good 30 feet away.  Ants on the ground were scampering away carrying little suitcases, and geese flying south rerouted through Alabama.  In the oak trees across the street, squirrels had lined up, and they were busily chatting with each other and laughing and eating popcorn and wearing really dark sunglasses.

Clearly something big was up, and it made Drew and me a little suspicious.  So Drew smiled kindly and said, “Phillip.  You’re my special brother.  I’m gonna let you light the fire.”  Then he handed Phillip the matches and ran behind a tree.

Phillip stood about ten feet from the equivalent of 300 tons of TNT, and as soon as the match head even thought about touching the side of the match box – BOOOOOM!

Sensors went off at NORAD; Russian spy satellites detected a nuclear detonation; and the Keck Observatory noted the birth of a new star.

For the residents of Savannah, they saw a mushroom cloud that signaled the beginning of Armageddon.  Air raid sirens went off, panic set in, and citizens gathered their children and sped to fallout shelters with a bucket of drinking water and a couple of cans of baked beans.

But I was there at ground zero looking at Phillip, who stood silhouetted against the raging supernova we had created.  He was holding a crooked, little stick of charcoal that used to be a match, and he had smoke rising from a small amount of remaining hair.  He also had a really, really, really good tan.

I also saw smoke boiling off the nearby pecan tree from radiant heat, and it didn’t take but a few seconds before it burst into flames too.  So now, in addition to the thermonuclear meltdown, the grass was on fire, the pecan tree was on fire, and if somebody didn’t do something soon, the Baker’s house would be on fire.

Mr. Murphy lived next door to the Bakers.  He used to sit on his side porch and watch us boys find various ways to curiously disassemble the Bakers house, cars, and other forms of property.  I reckon he enjoyed it, because we used to hear him laugh a lot.

On the other hand, he didn’t know there was an arrow stuck in his porch roof.  He probably wouldn’t have laughed about that.  It was green and white, just like the ones Drew bought at the Kmart.

Anyway, Mr. Murphy might have been enjoying our tree disposal operation, but he called the fire department nonetheless.  Good thing, because Mrs. Baker didn’t know anything was even happening until she saw a hook-and-ladder truck pull into her driveway.  Hell, by then NORAD had already scrambled jets.  Bless her heart.

The fire trucks parked in the same place they did the last time there were at the Baker’s house.

The last time?  Well, what happened was this…

You see, Mr. Baker had an old, antique hand-pumped fire extinguisher.  When you pumped the handle a stream of water would shoot about 30 feet.  One day, Drew and Phillip and I filled it with gasoline, and we used it to write our names in fire in the grass in their backyard.  Mr. Baker always used it to put down flames when he was grilling steaks.

Boy!  I’ve never seen a man get so pissed off in my life!  He was still pissed off when the fire trucks arrived.  They parked in their regular spots, and they said hello to us boys as they ran past with fire extinguishers.

I don’t know why, but Drew and Phillip and I knew a lot of the emergency services people.  I guess we were just popular.

Anyway, the firemen put out our napalm run of Christmas trees and everybody went home.  For the next few days, people strolled by to see the results of our little mishap, and one of the neighbors took a picture.  You can see it here at this link:  The Little Charred Spot

The Magnolia Leaf

My essay, “The Magnolia Leaf,” is now published in the 2010 edition of The Chrysalis Reader, titled, Bridges, Paths between Worlds.

The Bridges edition examines the things in life, whether they be thoughts, or places, or everyday items, that somehow bridge the gap and take us across those divides we would otherwise never cross.  Culture, religion, geography, even life and death create divisions that human nature causes us to avoid, but oftentimes, in the most innocuous moments, the smallest thing can bridge those divides.  For me, that smallest thing was the magnolia leaf.

I feel honored, and downright damn lucky, to be published alongside the works of Linda Pastan, Robert Bly, and Errol Miller.

There is more to life than work and play.  Each essay and poem in this book provocatively pulls that realization from the lost depths of the mind and brings it into thought.  A poem one night before bed, an essay the next, this book is well suited for a nightstand.

http://www.amazon.com/Bridges-between-Worlds-CHRYSALIS-READERS/dp/0877852421/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1285939398&sr=8-1

Trip to Walmart

On Saturday, I went to the Walmart with Joni and Luke.  When we got there, of course the first thing we had to do was to get ourselves a shopping cart, so we got in line and waited out turn.  The people in front of us got their cart, and we stepped up for our attempt.

I held the line of carts while Luke tried to pull the last one off.  No luck.  So then I tried to yank the last cart off while Luke held the line.  Still no luck.  So Joni and Luke pulled together while I held the line of carts.  None of that was working, so I shook the last one up and down, and back and forth, and yanked and pulled, and I put my foot up against the second cart and pulled on the first, and well, before long, there I was with a welder’s shield and a cutting torch.

The Walmart worker man who goes and gets all the shopping carts out of the parking lot stood there and watched us, you know, just in case we needed help.  But we didn’t, because after about 45 minutes we got one loose.  He saw us leaving the cart area and he told us to have a nice day.

They’re nice.

When we walked away the lady in line behind us stepped up to get her cart, but she was prepared.  She had brought a hydraulic jack.  There were people in line behind her with pry bars and axle grease and one guy had one-hundred feet of steel cable and a Bobcat.

As we headed into the store, a pretty girl with black hair came walking by wearing some tight, tight, desert-storm, camouflage britches.  She went stepping right by me in four-inch heels, and the tiniest little tank top you ever did see.  I just shook my head, thinking, “tacky, tacky, tacky.”

She went into Health and Beauty and got some shampoo, and then she walked over to Stationary and picked out a greeting card.  After that she went back out to the main aisle, walked past Sporting Goods, where some kids were playing baseball, past Toys, through Hardware and the light bulbs, and then all the way over to Bed and Bath, where she looked at sheets: floral sheets, white sheets, cotton sheets, satin sheets, thread count, this brand, that brand…“Oh for the love of Pete!” I thought, “Would ya just pick one already?”

Eventually she decided she didn’t need any sheets, and she walked to the main aisle in the back, stopped and looked both ways for bike riders, and then cut through the napkins and paper towels and stopped at the toilet tissue.  I got embarrassed to see her looking at a private item like that, so while she looked at Charmin, I looked at the Glad bags.  She got her tissue, and then headed over to the Kitchen section, where my cell phone rang.

“Where are you?”  Joni asked.

“I’m over at the pots and pans.”

“You just bought another pot!”

I rolled my eyes.  “Joni,” I said, “Gourmet meals require gourmet tools.  Do you think Wolfman Puck cooks in just anything?”

I tell you what.  If there is one thing that gripes my ass it’s when people can’t appreciate real talent.

So, I left the camouflage girl and went to meet up with Joni and Luke.  On my way, I decided to cruise through Electronics.  There was a boy there playing the Xbox demo game, Tiger Woods PGA Tour.  He’s always on the game.  If you get there at like 9:00 AM, he’ll already be on the game.  If you get there at like 8:00 AM, he’ll be on the game.  He needs to get a life.

His name is Andy.  He’s twelve.  I don’t know him.

Anyway, I walked up and he said, “Hey David.”

“Hey Andy.”

“I just beat your high score,” he bragged.

I looked up at the monitor.  “Nuh, uh!”

“Yeah!  Uh, huh!  Read it and weep!”

He was just about to tee off so I put my hand on the controller. “Stop.” He said, pushing my hand away, but as soon as he tried again I put my hand up there again.  “Stop!”  Then he pushed me and I pushed him and then the Walmart lady that gets your game out of the locked cabinet walked up.  So, I started whistling and pretending like I was looking at the games.

She’s a black lady.  Her name is Wanda.  I don’t know her, either.

She walked by and said, “How you doin, David?”

“Hey Wanda.”

“You see Andy done beat your high score?”

“Nuh, uh!”  I was going to argue about it but my phone rang.  It was Joni again.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the umm…”

“You’re not on that game, are you?”

“Nooo.  That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, we’re done,” she said.  “Let’s go.”

There’s a little secret I know about the Walmart.  Right behind the video game cabinets are the book racks, and there’s a space between the racks where you can reach the power cord to the Xbox.  If you unplug it, the game goes down and it loses all the high scores.

Hey.  I don’t look for this sort of stuff.  Andy showed it to me.

Anyway, I was reaching down there, right up against the book rack, when I noticed high heels, partially covered by camouflage pants that went up to a tiny, little tank top with the pretty girl with black hair.  She was standing there watching me.  I felt my face turn red, so I grabbed a book and held it up.  “I’m just buying a book,” I smiled.

The book had a shirtless man on the cover.  It was called, “Her Secret Cowboy.”

Come to think of it, he had on a cowboy hat, too.

The pretty girl rolled her eyes and then pushed her cart on down the aisle.

I reached in and unplugged the game and heard Andy on the other side, “Ah man!  That jerk!”  I took off running down the bread aisle and caught up with Joni and Luke at the register.

“I was just walking through making sure we didn’t forget anything,” I said as I reached them.

Joni looked into the cart.  “That’s everything on the list.”

“I feel like we’re forgetting something.”

“Nope,” she said, looking over the list, “that’s everything.”

We stood there, waiting in the checkout line, with nothing to say.  I could see all the ladies perusing clothes in the Women’s section, and a thought occurred to me.  “Hey,” I asked turning to Joni, “do you like camouflage britches?”

The Header Picture

I got an email asking about the header picture you see up there at the top of this blog.

The silhouette closest to the camera is my good friend, David (see my blog post: You’re Ordering a Damn Hamburger).  The further silhouette is my brother Tim.  I am the photographer.

The picture was taken as we fought our way back to the tent during a winter storm on Long’s Peak in Colorado in 1999.  Little did we know at that time, that we would spend the next few days trapped in the tent at about 12, 300 feet.  Winds in Estes Park were measured at 70 mph, so up where we were on the tundra, the winds certainly exceeded 100 mph.  Luckily, I had a North Face, VE-25 tent designed for that kind of abuse.  But during the storm, we were convinced it was going to shred.  That would have been a very bad thing, since daytime highs were about 16 degrees Fahrenheit.

Climbing was an obsession for me, and David and I have lived adventures and close calls I’ll never forget.  But my knees just can’t take the punishment anymore.  I miss climbing like a long, lost love.

Oh well, such is life…

I’ll leave you with one more picture.  That’s me eating frozen cookies on the hike into Long’s Peak.  That is Long’s in the background.

30 Years and Counting

The Humphries

On Wednesday, Joni and I celebrated our 26^th wedding anniversary.  We dated for four years before we got married.  So, as of Wednesday, we’ve been together for 30 years.  It’s been a wonderful, stupendous, fulfilling marriage.  Joni and I started with nothing, and we’ve built a strong family; we’ve built careers; we’ve battled the challenges of autism and diabetes.

Something like this you’ve got to celebrate, so I bought a 4-quart saucepan.  Paid damn near fifteen dollars for it at the Walmart.

Yeah, for Joni and me it’s been a celebration of love, and quite frankly, she just gushes about being married to me.  I don’t like to talk about it too much.  It’s not right for me to brag on myself, but on Wednesday night as she and I lay down to go to sleep in the dim light, I looked at her and softly said, “It’s thirty years and counting, darling.”

“Believe me,” she said, with her voice cracking, “I’m counting every single day.”

Love like that just gets you all choked up right there in your throat.  Like when Jack died in Titanic, and Rose watched him slip under the waves and then Charlene Dion started singing and everything.  I mean, Rose loved him and that other guy was all mean and stuff, but she still lost Jack anyway and Charlene was singing and …ah man, now I’ve got to go get a tissue.

Oh, by the way, our microwave died the other day.  I took the cover off to see if it was truly a goner and not just a blown diode or something.

Yeah.  I know about diodes and stuff such as that.  *sniff*

Anyway, I had to step away for a minute.  I told Joni, “Make sure the boys stay away from the microwave.  I’ve got the cover off and it can knock the fool out of ya.”

Joni asked, “Can it knock the fool out of you?”

Pfft!  Not a chance.  I had to remind her that I worked my way through engineering school as what you might call “qualified service personnel.”  Lucky for her!  We’ve got a whole guest bedroom, two closets, and a shed absolutely jammed packed with things just waiting to be fixed!  Eat your heart out people!

Yep.  I reckon I’m a pretty good catch for thirty years of marriage – if I say so myself.  I’m pretty much a jack-of-all trades.  I can handle just about anything.  That kitchen fire I started?  Put it out myself, thank you.

And that’s what I do.  I suppose that’s why I’ve been married for 26 years.  And plus, I’m always doing little surprises for Joni.  In fact, I’m going to build us a garden today.  I’ve got to clear some brush and cut down the great, big oak tree up next to the house.  I can’t wait for Joni to get home.  Boy!  Is she in for a big surprise!

Hey, does YouTube have videos on how to use a chainsaw?