A Gross Personal Story

Tags

aging, birthdays, colonoscopy, hallmark cards, health, humor, shoebox

When I was a humor editor at Hallmark Cards, one of my favorite birthday cards was the one shown above, picturing an old man regaling his grandson with the tale of his very first colonoscopy. The inside of the card reads something like, “Welcome to the gross personal story years.” It’s a Shoebox card, so it doesn’t really matter what the inside says. The funny stuff is all on the cover. A very talented Hallmark writer named Russ Ediger created the card.

I gave this card to numerous friends celebrating birthdays. I felt the sentiment matched my dark sense of humor. It was my little way of saying, “You’re getting older, pal.”

Today, the joke was on me. I went in this morning for my very first colonoscopy, after fasting and drinking my bowel prep kit for the past 24 hours. The good news is the procedure went well. The doctor said I don’t have to do it again for at least five years, which is fine by me. Maybe by then, they will have done something about the flavor of the bowel prep kit.

So it’s the last day of February. It’s overcast and 20 degrees. There is more snow in the forecast. I’ve just turned 43 and I’ve had my first colonoscopy.

Welcome to the gross personal story years.

Simply the Vest

Tags

american flag, apparel, olympics, ralph lauren, red white and blue, sochi, united states, vest, winter olympics

One of my best friends from college won’t stop teasing me about at brief time in the 1990s when I used to wear a Cosby Show-inspired sweater that featured the American flag. The issue reared its ugly head again recently when the U.S. Winter Olympics Team walked into the opening ceremonies wearing hideous American flag sweaters designed by Ralph Lauren.

My friend, as a joke, decided to send me a patriotic sequin vest for my birthday and, I suppose, for me to wear during the Olympics. Here I am in my new vest:

I am a pretty good sport about my taste in clothes. However, I was a little insulted when the manufacturer of the sequin vest sent me another vest exactly like it a few days later:

I am guessing this was an inventory error on the part of the sequin vest company. Should I return it, or “pay it forward” by giving my extra vest to another friend who needs a boost in patriotic spirit? Or should I keep them both, secure in knowing that I have a back-up in case my first vest wears out or is ruined?

Bedtime Stories Your Child Won’t Forget, Part 1

Tags

academy awards, bedtime stories, children's books, humor, jack nicholson, louise fletcher, movies, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, satire

Meet Randle Patrick McMurphy.
His friends call him R.P., for short.
R.P. is one lazy guy.
He’s so lazy, in fact, that one day
he decides he’s not going to chop wood
in the work camp anymore.

So R.P. starts acting silly all the time.
He is so good at acting silly that the people
in charge of him can’t stand
being around him anymore.
They send R.P. to a really big hospital
where he can get his sillies out.
R.P. is delighted.
At last, he doesn’t have to work anymore.

R.P. makes lots of friends among the men
at the hospital, and they play lots of games.
His best friend is a really tall Native American
named Chief.
Chief doesn’t talk, which may be why R.P.
likes him so much.

This pleasant-looking lady is Nurse Ratched.
She is in charge of R.P. and his friends
at the hospital.
Nurse Ratched makes R.P. and his friends
talk about their feelings.
Sometimes she makes them feel guilty
for being in the hospital.
Sometimes pleasant-looking people
aren’t really so pleasant, after all.

R.P. and his friends have some good times.
One day, they play basketball.
Another day, they go on a fishing trip.
Another day, they invite some girls to the hospital.
Nurse Ratched doesn’t like this.
She thinks the men are being lazy, like R.P.

Nurse Ratched gets very upset with R.P.
His silly adventures make her job hard.
She has a doctor do an operation on him
that will get the sillies out.
In fact, it does more than that.

When R.P. returns to his friends at the hospital,
he is not very much fun anymore.
Nurse Ratched is pleased.
This is what happens, she thinks,
when boys won’t stop being so silly.

 

Photos courtesy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

A Few Words About Ice

Tags

2002, atlanta, ice storm, kansas city, Super Bowl, winter

Fears of widespread power outages came to fruition as the ice and snow storm that forecasters have been warning about for days pounded metro Atlanta and the northern half of the state.

More than 168,000 Georgia Power customers had lost electricity by 1 p.m., with service already being restored to some 48,000 of those customers. At 4 p.m., Georgia Power reported about 131,000 customers currently without power.

– The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (or AJC.com, or whatever else they’re calling it these days)

My home state of Georgia is getting slugged with its second winter storm in three weeks, and this one looks to be even worse than the last. Ice storms are unusual even in the frigid Midwest. I remember the last big ice storm we had in Kansas City, and I hope the one this week in Atlanta doesn’t have the same resounding effects as the one we endured.

It was late January 2002. My wife and I had been married for five months, and were still getting used to living together. Then, The Storm happened, starting innocently enough on a Tuesday morning with a little sleet and ice, nothing to get too excited about. Except that it kept coming down, all through the day and into the night, until the tree branches outside our home sagged painfully low, each limb perfectly encased in a full inch of crystal.

We woke up the next morning without power. The house was freezing, and the bathroom filled up with steam when we turned on the hot water. The streets were pretty slick, but my wife and I went to work. When we got home, there was still no power. It was still freezing, and the branches that sagged under the weight of all that accumulated ice were starting to snap. We huddled together under all the blankets we could pile on the bed that night, listening to the occasional cracks of branches collapsing all through our neighborhood. Then, a loud pop and a white flash right outside our window. A tree branch had hit a transformer, turning it into a sparkler from the Fourth of July. A few minutes later, we heard another blast. Then another one. The whole town was falling apart.

Long story short, we went without power for seven long days and nights. Our neighborhood looked like a war zone: power lines sagging almost to the ground, tree branches scattered everywhere. Utility workers and tree trimmers were disbursed throughout the city, and many workers came from out-of-town to help clean up and restore the power grid. When one of their trucks came through our area, my neighbors and I gathered around, peppering the poor workers with questions about when the streets would be cleared, when the power would be restored.

After three nights without light and heat, my wife and I stayed at a friend’s apartment across town. Then we got a nice, warm hotel room and watched Tom Brady and New England upset the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl (warning: beware of hotels that will price-gouge you during an ice storm). Then, we spent a night at a relative’s place. Finally, the power returned on a Tuesday. It was perhaps the happiest day for my wife and I since we came back from our honeymoon.

The storm lasted only 24 hours, but left its mark on our city for years to come. Thousands of trees collapsed or had to be cut down. Our leafy neighborhood looked almost bare the following spring, so many of its stately oaks were nothing more than foot-high stumps. It’s been 12 years since that ice storm. Unfortunately, it seems we are past due for another one.

What a Game

Tags

1980, hockey, lake placid, miracle on ice, olympics, president carter, russia, team u.s.a., u.s.s.r., winter olympics

My first vivid sports memory came while riding in the back of my friend’s Oldsmobile station wagon on the way to the Skate Inn on a Saturday morning.

“Did you see that game last night?” my friend asked.

“What game?” I replied.

“The hockey game, dummy,” he said. “We beat the Russians.”

“It was incredible,” his mom chimed in from the front seat. “It was the most amazing game I’ve ever seen.”

“Everyone was screaming, ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’”

“Really?” I said, feeling misinformed. Hockey wasn’t something people talked much about in LaGrange, Georgia. “The Russians, huh?”

I had a vague notion that the Olympics were going on because my dad had taken over our television set, demanding the channel be switched to ABC all week long during primetime hours. One night, we watched some guy in a skin-tight yellow suit named Eric Heiden skate around in circles, and it was pretty boring. I remember being very disappointed about having to miss The Dukes of Hazzard on Friday night, and I probably ended up retreating to my Star Wars figures and army soldiers in the playroom. Somehow, I missed the news that we beat the Russians.

Circling the rink of the Skate Inn while the speakers played Blondie and Michael Jackson, I thought about the Russians and what beating them meant. I was in 3rd grade, so my only understanding of Russia was this big, wide expanse of pink across Europe and Asia that was called the “Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.” The Russians, my teacher told us, were not our friends. Their people were very poor, and had to wait in long lines for basic things like toilet paper. Yet their military was very powerful. They had just taken over some place called Afghanistan, and the President had gone on television and was very upset about it. The President went on TV a lot in those days, usually to talk about how we needed to save more energy. It was horrible because he was on all the channels, and you just had to wait him out—like waiting for a storm to pass before you could go outside to play—until he was done speaking and Happy Days could come back on.

It would take a while for me to realize the gravity of beating the Russians at that particular time in history with an amateur U.S. hockey team that was not expected to win anything. They would make the cover of the Sports Illustrated magazine that my dad read every week, then there was an awards-show television special about the team that my babysitter gushed over, and then there was the inevitable made-for-TV movie. It was such a momentous culmination of sports, politics and a fairy tale ending that I could almost convince myself, years later, that I had actually seen the game (or the replay of the game, since the original broadcast was tape-delayed for a primetime audience).

I didn’t see it, though. If it had taken place two years later, when I was into sports big-time, I would have been all over it. In 2010, the U.S. hockey team took Team Canada to overtime before losing the Gold Medal. That was an exciting game. Even if the Americans had won, however, it couldn’t have compared with The Miracle On Ice, the one I missed.

“Did you watch the game last night?” another friend asked me over Cokes at the Skate Inn. “My dad jumped so high, he almost put a hole in the ceiling!”

“Yeah,” I said, looking down at my skates. “What a game.”

Awww, Aren’t They Sweet?

Tags

advertising, budweiser, media, review, Super Bowl

The popularity of last night’s Budweiser commercial only proves what members of the media and advertisers have known for a long time: that cuddly puppies always sell. Team one up with Clydesdale horses, and you have what equates to marketing gold. Just forget the inconvenient fact that this ad has nothing at all to do with drinking beer.